As I mentioned in previous posts, I am still fighting with SmarterStats. I started to look at other log analyzers and came across this wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_analytics_software
This page has a list of many many many log analyzers. The weird thing is that SmarterStats is not present on the list, and is one of the more complete packages. Many of the other “paid” services rely on Javascript, which in my opinion can lead to very inaccurate results.
I looked at some of the “free” packages, and some of them actually look rather polished, but none of them seem to offer any deep data-mining features… just a baisc overview, which may be all you need depending on your site.
One thing I found interesting is that you can still get Urchin as a locally hosted solution. The price is steep ($3000), but you can process 1,000 sites. They even have a fully-functioning version for 30 days. It’s too bad that they don’t have a scalable pricing model, as SmarterTools does, because Urchin is probably THE BEST log analyzer, bar none. I’m going to install the free trial and see if version 6 is as good as I remember.
If you compare the pricing of Urchin with SmarterStats, you can see that SmarterStats Enterprise is exactly HALF the price for 1,000 sites. I’m not sure if Urchin can pull logs from other servers like SS Enterprise does, in which case Urchin would go up against SS Pro, which is $900… an even greater bargain.
Still, SmarterStats is an extremely good value for what you get, and is way beyond the capabilities of the “free” or “cheap” log analyzers. I just wish they’d fix the importing issue… it’s a pain. From my experience, SmarterStats is on top of technical issues like white on rice, although they can’t seem to nail down the whole log-importing-stopping thing. I will probably upgrade my license to 4.0… but I’m still checking out the other options from the wiki list.
