Woopra vs. The Competition (Technically Speaking)
I would love to recruit some of our Wooprites to do a little testing if I could.
John P’s been running Woopra over on his blog along with a slew of other tracking scripts (don’t know why he hasn’t removed the others yet - we’ll give him a hard time!), and he’s been asking me why Woopra performs so much better than Google Analytics. This topic has come up in Forum discussion’s as well, and I thought I’d do a little more testing to try and verify a hypothesis.
In that discussion, it has been noted in reports from 3 separate people that Woopra is catching a much larger number of visitors than Google Analytics (please go add your results too). No one seems to know why though. So I did some research using the Firebug plugin along with FireFox to gather some real performance data on Woopra vs. Google Analytics, P-Metrics, and MyBlogLog - all of which are installed on John P’s blog.
Here is what I found:
If you look at the full size version of that image you’ll see that Firebug is reporting the following response times for the various scripts associated with the tracking:
| Woopra | 125ms for 3kb |
| Woopra | 62ms for 95b |
| 219 ms for 10 kb (75% slower than Woopra) | |
| 62ms for 35b (same as Woopra) | |
| PMetrics | 360ms for 4kb (188% slower than Woopra) |
| PMetrics | 125ms for 43b (100% slower than Woopra) |
| MyBlogLog | 250ms for 3kb (100% slower than Woopra) |
| MyBlogLog | 187ms for ? (200% slower than Woopra) |
In addition to this data, I manually downloaded the Woopra javascript and noted that its filesize is 7.7kb, and also the Google Analytics script which weighs in at a hefty 22.2kb. So, in addition to having 75% slower response time for the download request, the script is actually triple the size as well!
No wonder Woopra is so much faster and captures more visitors!
And by the way, I cleared my cache and repeated the test, and Google actually performed even worse (but I didn’t have the heart to use this data for the comparison). So this was not a one time event.
John’s server is located in the US, but these results should be similar for anyone, anywhere around the globe because of our distributed network. So I’d really appreciate it if anyone else could spend a few minutes doing some testing and either provide your results in the comments, or a link to a blog post with them. We’re very interested to see results from other people.
May 23rd, 2008 at 1:30 am
[…] folks, if you are using Woopra could you do me a favor and help us with some testing? Probably only take you 15 minutes, and we could use the […]
May 23rd, 2008 at 3:54 am
I use both Goog and PMetrics on my site currently. I rarely check my goog stats as of late, but do you think I’d have anything to worry about (removing it) since I’m an adsense publisher? Do they link your stats somehow with earnings, page-rank, etc?
I did like Pmetrics because of the “spy” mode, which shows me visitors as they read the site, and has rudimentary IP tracking (I can assign a name) but that’s time-consuming.
Once I do get approved by you guys, I’d be a bit afraid to remove all stat-tracking until Woopra lifts the 10k pageview limitation.. I get more than triple that, and growing… boo!
May 23rd, 2008 at 4:13 am
Just for the record it is probably worth mentioning that as far as I am aware, Performance Metrics (PMetrics) is simply GetClicky being punted under a different brand name.
GetClicky provide a white-label service for organisations wanting to punt it under their own brand.
May 23rd, 2008 at 9:07 am
[…] tracking tool and seems to catch more visitors Google Analytics does. On the Woopra blog there is a request for comparisons of loads times between Google Analytics and Woopra. Here are my […]
May 23rd, 2008 at 11:04 am
Must be nice to be able to play with this tool. Not sure why it’s going on 2 months sitting in “approval pending”…. why bother letting people into the beta if they can’t even use the tool?
May 23rd, 2008 at 2:04 pm
thats why a lot of google analytic users uses the ability to host the js script on their server with a cron job that catches the js script from google daily. But because of that case that`s something that is not needed with woopra - would be nice if we could do it with woopra js, too, but it`s sure not needed with an js file under 10kb, is it?
after all, woopra rocks - a project that really is great in beta already.
sorry for my english.
May 23rd, 2008 at 4:36 pm
I’d be happy to help. what can I do. I have google and woopra installed since woopra is offset by 5 hours, I can’t do a daily match with Google
May 23rd, 2008 at 5:00 pm
My comparisons have been added to the thread.
whoever that was that said Google wins is dumb or works for them and is worried about his job.
May 23rd, 2008 at 6:21 pm
Might the perceived quickness of your own application have something to do with your physical proximity to your servers? Aren’t both you and your servers in Texas?
May 23rd, 2008 at 6:48 pm
@hoboken411 - Google has promised that removing their Analytics will have no effect on AdWords earnings. So you could remove it if you want. Or you could just be lazy like me and leave it installed along with all the others. I get about 20-25k page views a day on my blog and no one has ever complained.
@shawn - I know it probably seems like 2 months… but you’ve actually only been waiting since 4/21. (We only launched the private beta 53 days ago.
) Nonetheless, I just approved you. So hopefully it will have been worth the wait.
@cyberlarson - I understand that it’s not really possible to do a direct comparison from a day to day perspective of your stats because of the offset. But if you were to do a 5 day comparison anyway, we should be able to see if the aggregate number of visitors counted over that period differs by much. In that period of time the days don’t really matter much.
Also, if you have the Firebug installed, it would be very interesting to see what kind of latency times you are seeing to download the scripts.
@Bill - Actually no. My personal blog is still hosted at 1and1.com (but we are moving it to LT soon, I promise!
) so it’s not even in Texas. But more importantly, Woopra’s stats are served through a content distribution network of servers in over 45 places around the world. So, the script comes to you from whereever the closest point to YOU is. So everyone should have similar results no matter where they are.
John P.
May 24th, 2008 at 8:41 am
Is there a way to upload a screenshot of my firebug results?
May 24th, 2008 at 8:52 am
Five day average is 3909 visits per google and 4878 visits per Woopra. About 3 months ago google’s numbers dropped radically, I’ve always thought it was to lower the clickthrough for google ads.
May 24th, 2008 at 11:24 am
How long did you guys wait for your site to get approved?
May 24th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
shawn Said:
“Must be nice to be able to play with this tool. Not sure why it’s going on 2 months sitting in “approval pending”…. why bother letting people into the beta if they can’t even use the tool?”
I totatlly agree with you Shawn. im in same stuation with you rightnow. and I think I lost my excitement.
May 24th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
Maybe some of us Wooprites could do some of the testing if we actually had access. Rapidly approaching a three week wait.
May 24th, 2008 at 6:17 pm
Woopra for the last week is reporting 824 uv’s and Google Analytics 379.. A major difference their. I am inclined to agree with woopras stats at this point though.
1571 page views according to woopra, and 725 according to Google Analytics.
I have had both running since I was activated for beta, and the stats are skewed like this all the way across the board. Comparing to my server stats, it appears for some reason google analytics is not reporting correctly.
Hope that helps
May 24th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
I’d love to compare Woopra to Mint, which I use now. I don’t know about the others, but Google Analytics isn’t real-time, so the comparison seems a little less apt. *waiting for that approval*
May 24th, 2008 at 10:02 pm
I’m curious how Woopra compares with Firestats. Maybe next month, I’ll have my answer and access.
May 24th, 2008 at 10:59 pm
I have Google, Microsoft Analytics and Woopra running on my site. Probably not too many MS analytics people out there right now for comparison.
You can go to my site - http://www.virtualbirdseye.com and run some tests, it might be a few days before I can post anything up…
VBE
May 26th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
My site: http://www.relatip.com
number of visitors in 5 days:
Google: 215 - Woopra 207 (i believe the difference is due to time diff)
Loading times (my server located in Israel):
Woopra: 3KB in 594ms, 126b in 453ms
Google: 10KB in 188ms, 35b in 178ms
I guess that google CDN for countries outside the US is faster.
Still I believe I will keep with WOOPRA as it is far better in several aspects.
Saar.
May 26th, 2008 at 9:31 pm
I currently use Google Analytics and it is good because it monitors all my blogs. PMetrics free service only monitors 3 and only 1000 page views. StatCounter only has a log of 500 entries so no good either.
What restrictions are on woopra free edition - when / if I get approved can I add muliple sites or do I only get approval for one site and need to apply again and again (hope that is not the case)?
cheers from Australia.
May 27th, 2008 at 4:28 am
I have actually stop using analytics because sometimes the load time is soo high! and since im running a photo site people tends to move on really quickly and GA missing them sometimes. When i analyze the webserver log files i can see that GA has missed a couple of users.
Im currently using feedburner which is much, much faster (yes yes google bought them … … .)
Alot of the customers i program for is looking at episerver solution because of the built in live tracking, so woopra could be a good alternative to it. im really looking forward to trying it out.
May 29th, 2008 at 1:32 am
Hmm same here, I’ve noticed a lot of discrepancy between GA and feedburner stats. And I know for a fact that neither is doing a good job at reporting referers. Cant wait for woopra to shine some light into the matter. I’ll be patient, rock on guys!
May 30th, 2008 at 8:14 am
I’d be happy to help but my site is still pending approval and has been for some time.
May 30th, 2008 at 10:26 am
[…] gut, Woopra selbst ist, wie man hier nachlesen kann, schon mal sehr flott, was vor allem an der geringen Größe des Javascripts-Files von Woopra […]
June 2nd, 2008 at 4:59 am
Hi
Has any of you guys included Indextools in your tests? Or what about the danish Netminers?
Still waitin approval as well, now soon waiting for a month (since the 8. of april)
June 2nd, 2008 at 6:10 pm
Server location : Italy
Woopra 3 KB 172 ms
GA 10 KB 235 ms
June 2nd, 2008 at 11:02 pm
woopra isn’t even working for me right now
June 16th, 2008 at 7:37 pm
People block google analytics ;-).