Google Analytics vs Snowplow

Overview

Google Analytics

Stacks128.5K

Followers50.7K

Votes5.1K

Snowplow

Stacks132

Followers174

Votes35

GitHub Stars7.0K

Forks1.2K

Google Analytics vs Snowplow: What are the differences?

Introduction

Google Analytics and Snowplow are popular web analytics tools that help businesses track and analyze website data. While both tools offer valuable insights, they have key differences in terms of data ownership, flexibility, data schema, data processing, real-time analytics, and cost.

Data Ownership: One major difference between Google Analytics and Snowplow is data ownership. With Google Analytics, data is stored on Google's servers, and Google has access to this data. In contrast, Snowplow allows for complete data ownership, as it can be hosted on the organization's own servers, providing more control and privacy over the data.
Flexibility: Snowplow provides greater flexibility compared to Google Analytics. While Google Analytics offers a standardized set of features and reports, Snowplow allows custom event tracking and data collection. This means that businesses can track specific events and metrics that are unique to their website or business goals, providing more tailored and granular insights.
Data Schema: Google Analytics has a predefined data schema, which determines the types of data that can be collected and analyzed. On the other hand, Snowplow has a flexible and customizable data schema, allowing businesses to define their own data structure and capture any data points they require. This flexibility in data schema enables businesses to have a more comprehensive and specialized understanding of their website and customer behavior.
Data Processing: Google Analytics uses server-side data processing, where data is processed on Google's servers. This can result in a slight delay in data availability. In contrast, Snowplow offers real-time data processing, allowing businesses to access up-to-the-minute data insights. This real-time processing capability can be particularly helpful for time-sensitive analytics and marketing campaigns.
Real-time Analytics: While both Google Analytics and Snowplow offer real-time analytics, the level of real-time data analysis capabilities differs. Google Analytics provides real-time reporting on metrics such as active users, pageviews, and conversions. Snowplow, on the other hand, offers real-time data streaming and analysis, allowing businesses to take immediate actions based on real-time insights, such as triggering personalized content or notifications.
Cost: Another significant difference between Google Analytics and Snowplow is the cost. Google Analytics offers a free version that caters to the needs of most small to medium-sized businesses. However, larger enterprises may opt for Google Analytics 360, a premium version with advanced features and support that requires a significant financial investment. On the other hand, Snowplow has a more flexible pricing structure, allowing businesses to choose the level of support and customization they require, potentially resulting in lower costs for some organizations.

In summary, Google Analytics and Snowplow differ in terms of data ownership, flexibility, data schema, data processing capabilities, real-time analytics, and cost.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Detailed Comparison

Google Analytics	Snowplow
Google Analytics lets you measure your advertising ROI as well as track your Flash, video, and social networking sites and applications.	Snowplow is a real-time event data pipeline that lets you track, contextualize, validate and model your customers’ behaviour across your entire digital estate.
Analysis Tools- Google Analytics is built on a powerful, easy to use, reporting platform, so you can decide what data you want to view and customize your reports, with just a few clicks.;Content Analytics- Content reports help you understand which parts of your website are performing well, which pages are most popular so you can create a better experience for your customers.;Social Analytics- The web is a social place and Google Analytics measures success of your social media programs. You can analyze how visitors interact with sharing features on your site (like the Google +1 button) and engage with your content across social platforms.;Mobile Analytics- Google Analytics helps you measure the impact of mobile on your business. Additionally, if you build mobile apps Google Analytics offers Software Development Kits for iOS and Android so you can measure how people use your app.;Conversion Analytics- Find out how many customers you're attracting, how much you're selling and how users are engaging with your site with Google Analytics' range of analysis features.;Advertising Analytics- Make the most of your advertising by learning how well your social, mobile, search and display ads are working. Link your website activity to your marketing campaigns to get the complete picture and improve your advertising performance.	Track rich events from your websites, mobile apps, server-side systems, third party systems and any type of connected device, so that you have a record of what happened, when, and to whom;Load your data into your data warehouse of choice to power sophisticated analytics;Process your data including validating, enriching and modeling it;Your data is available in real-time via Amazon Kinesis, Google Pub/Sub and BigQuery to power real-time applications and reports;Your data pipeline is running in your cloud environment giving you full ownership and control of your data
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 7.0K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 1.2K
Stacks 128.5K	Stacks 132
Followers 50.7K	Followers 174
Votes 5.1K	Votes 35
Pros & Cons
Pros 1483 Free 927 Easy setup 891 Data visualization 698 Real-time stats 406 Comprehensive feature set Cons 11 Confusing UX/UI 8 Super complex 6 Very hard to build out funnels 4 Poor web performance metrics 3 Very easy to confuse the user of the analytics	Pros 7 Can track any type of digital event 5 First-party tracking 5 Data quality 4 Completely open source 4 Real-time streams
Integrations
Mad Mimi Hipmob Visual Website Optimizer Squarespace ClickTale CloudFlare Segment Optimizely FreshDesk SnapEngage	Elasticsearch Microsoft Azure Amazon S3 PostgreSQL Amazon Redshift AzureDataStudio Google Cloud Storage Kafka Google BigQuery Apache Spark

What are some alternatives to Google Analytics, Snowplow?

Mixpanel

Mixpanel helps companies build better products through data. With our powerful, self-serve product analytics solution, teams can easily analyze how and why people engage, convert, and retain to improve their user experience.

Keen

Keen is a powerful set of API's that allow you to stream, store, query, and visualize event-based data. Customer-facing metrics bring SaaS products to the next level with acquiring, engaging, and retaining customers.

Piwik

Matomo (formerly Piwik) is a full-featured PHP MySQL software program that you download and install on your own webserver. At the end of the five-minute installation process, you will be given a JavaScript code.

Clicky

Clicky Web Analytics gives bloggers and smaller web sites a more personal understanding of their visitors. Clicky has various features that helps stand it apart from the competition specifically Spy and RSS feeds that allow web site owners to get live information about their visitors.

Plausible

It is a lightweight and open-source website analytics tool. It doesn’t use cookies and is fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA and PECR.

Databricks

Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, from the original creators of Apache Spark™, unifies data science and engineering across the Machine Learning lifecycle from data preparation to experimentation and deployment of ML applications.

userTrack

userTrack is now called UXWizz. Get access to better insights, a faster dashboard and increase user privacy. It provides detailed visitor insights without relying on third-parties.

Quickmetrics

It is a service for collecting, analyzing and visualizing custom metrics. It can be used to track anything from signups to server response times. Sending events is super simple.

Matomo

It is a web analytics platform designed to give you the conclusive insights with our complete range of features. You can also evaluate the full user-experience of your visitor’s behaviour with its Conversion Optimization features, including Heatmaps, Sessions Recordings, Funnels, Goals, Form Analytics and A/B Testing.

Maze

Maze empowers product and marketing teams to test anything from prototypes to copy, or round up user feedback—all in one place. Rapidly collect user insights across teams and create better user experiences, together.

Related Comparisons

Google Analytics vs Snowplow: What are the differences?

Introduction

Data Ownership: One major difference between Google Analytics and Snowplow is data ownership. With Google Analytics, data is stored on Google's servers, and Google has access to this data. In contrast, Snowplow allows for complete data ownership, as it can be hosted on the organization's own servers, providing more control and privacy over the data.
Flexibility: Snowplow provides greater flexibility compared to Google Analytics. While Google Analytics offers a standardized set of features and reports, Snowplow allows custom event tracking and data collection. This means that businesses can track specific events and metrics that are unique to their website or business goals, providing more tailored and granular insights.
Data Schema: Google Analytics has a predefined data schema, which determines the types of data that can be collected and analyzed. On the other hand, Snowplow has a flexible and customizable data schema, allowing businesses to define their own data structure and capture any data points they require. This flexibility in data schema enables businesses to have a more comprehensive and specialized understanding of their website and customer behavior.
Data Processing: Google Analytics uses server-side data processing, where data is processed on Google's servers. This can result in a slight delay in data availability. In contrast, Snowplow offers real-time data processing, allowing businesses to access up-to-the-minute data insights. This real-time processing capability can be particularly helpful for time-sensitive analytics and marketing campaigns.
Real-time Analytics: While both Google Analytics and Snowplow offer real-time analytics, the level of real-time data analysis capabilities differs. Google Analytics provides real-time reporting on metrics such as active users, pageviews, and conversions. Snowplow, on the other hand, offers real-time data streaming and analysis, allowing businesses to take immediate actions based on real-time insights, such as triggering personalized content or notifications.
Cost: Another significant difference between Google Analytics and Snowplow is the cost. Google Analytics offers a free version that caters to the needs of most small to medium-sized businesses. However, larger enterprises may opt for Google Analytics 360, a premium version with advanced features and support that requires a significant financial investment. On the other hand, Snowplow has a more flexible pricing structure, allowing businesses to choose the level of support and customization they require, potentially resulting in lower costs for some organizations.

In summary, Google Analytics and Snowplow differ in terms of data ownership, flexibility, data schema, data processing capabilities, real-time analytics, and cost.

Google Analytics vs Snowplow

Overview

Google Analytics vs Snowplow: What are the differences?