Free Web Log Analysers and Web Statistics

Web stats scripts and web log analyzers to give you useful analysis of your site's visitors

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Free Web Analytics, Statistics and Web Log Analyzers

Web log analysers (or "log analyzers" if you use American English) allow you to generate useful statistics about your website and your visitors from your raw web logs. Typically, they will present the web statistics in a graphical or tabular form - organising related data together to make it easier to get a picture of your site's performance. For example, you can use the statistics to understand how your visitors arrive at your site: which search engine sent them? Which keywords did they use to search? What browsers did they use? Or the generated report can be used to examine the traffic flow through your site - which are the entry pages? Which are your exit pages? It allows the web designer or webmaster the opportunity to fix problems with his/her site and understand the target audience. In my opinion, if you have access to raw logs (as most, if not all, commercial web hosts provide), web log analysers and web statistics (or web stats) programs are far more useful than web counter scripts and remotely hosted web counters.

Free Web Statistics / Stats and Web Log Analyzers

Analog CE: Analog CE is a fork (ie, derivation) of the now-defunct Analog log analyzer (see listing elsewhere on this page). It has been updated to detect newer operating systems and browsers, as well as to apply bug fixes. Precompiled versions are available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (Debian). The source code is also available under the GNU General Public License.
GoAccess: GoAccess is a real-time web log analyzer with statistics that can be viewed in a browser or in a terminal window (for those so-inclined). It shows number of hits, visitors, bandwidth, application response time, metrics per virtual host, list of user-agents per host, etc. It handles a wide variety of web log formats, such as Apache, Nginx, etc, and you can also define your own custom log format string. The software is open source, and works on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Windows, and OS X.
AWStats Advanced Web Statistics: AWStats is a web server log analyzer that generates graphical statistics from your web logs. It can be run as a CGI script or from the command line to create the web stats. It has a large number of features, including the ability to count unique visitors, most popular page, domains/countries of visitors, rush hours, browsers, operating system used, robot visits, search engines, keywords used in search engines, HTTP errors (eg 404 File Not Found errors), etc. It can analyse Apache native combined log files, IIS log files, WebStar native log files, and personalised log formats. The program is actually a Perl script, and perhaps because of this, is rather slow. You can use this offline on your logs (such as on your own computer); it does not need to be run on your web server. You need to have a Perl interpreter installed, though.
Matomo Open Analytics Platform (formerly Piwik): [Update: to get the free version, you need to click the "Download Matamo for free" button.] Matomo (formerly called Piwik) is a web analytics software comprising JavaScript and PHP scripts which provides you with real time web statistics on your site's visitors. Information provided include their operating system, browsers, browser plugins, country, languages, internet providers, engagement (that is, return visits, frequency, visit duration, number of pages viewed, etc), number of visitors by hours of the day, entry and exit pages, searches performed on your site search, referrers, search engines, campaign tracking, conversions, clicks of outbound links on your site, etc. While the software normally tracks visitors using JavaScript, it can also import your server logs. You will need to have both PHP and MySQL (What is MySQL?) support on your web server.
Webalizer Xtended: Webalizer Xtended is a modified version of Webalizer. It has more detailed 404 statistics, a supposedly more reliable country traffic statistics using Geolizer, user definable customizations of table and chart colours, large logfile processing, IPv6 support, etc.
W3Perl - Free Logfile Analyzer: W3Perl is a set of Perl scripts that can analyse your log files for IIS or Apache, FTP, Squid, mail, etc. It produces HTML and PDF reports that can be sent by email. It supports sessions (length of time visitors spend on your site), RSS stats, referrers, keywords used on search engines, list of error pages invoked, classifcation of your visitors by countries, browser stats, screen sizes, real-time statistics, etc. The software is free and licensed under the GNU GPL.
Logrep - Log File Extraction and Reporting System: Logrep analyses and presents the data obtained from your various logs (including web logs, mail logs, event logs, intrusion logs, syslog files, etc) and generates statistics for your system. The reports are generated in an HTML page. The program supports Apache, Snort, Squid, Postfix, Sendmail, syslog, ipchains, iptables, NT event logs, Firewall-1, wtmp, xferlog, Oracle listener and Pix. It uses a client/server model (with secure SSH communication between client and server) and works under Linux and Windows. The source is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Webalizer Web Server Log File Analyzer: Written in C, this web log analyzer purports to be fast. Because it is integrated in a popular "control panel" used by many web hosts, it can be found on a number of commercial web hosts. Being free, it is also used by some free web hosting companies. It is popular with a number of people (I am not one of them) and provides a wide variety of reports. It appears to lack the facility to generate exhaustive reports like one of the other log analyzers listed on this page, but if you only want to take a look at say, the "top 250" (or whatever) of all the sites that referred visitors to your site, and not all of them, you'll be fine.
ktmatu Relax: Relax is a specialized web server log analysis program focusing on referrer information. It is useful for analyzing things like which search engine keywords brought you traffic? Which external website URL visitor brought you visitors. It is released under the GNU General Public License.
http-analyze: A Log Analyzer for Web Servers: [Update: http-analyze appears to have been discontinued.] The free version of this log analyzer is for non-commercial (private/educational) use only, and lags behind the commercial version by a few versions. Binaries are available for Irix, Solaris, Linux, System V 4.0 (i386), and Windows NT. It has numerous features and is installed by a number of commercial web hosts. I find that it is good for collating information, but lacks sufficient analysis of that information. For example, it will give you the list of all 404 errors. But it does not tell you the referring page that generated those 404 errors. (Okay, I know. Few, if any, log analyzers at the time of this writing do this anyway.)
Analog Log File Analyser: [Update: Analog appears to have been discontinued. See the listing for Analog CE elsewhere on this page for a current version of the source maintained by a third-party.] This is a popular free log analyser that is used on a number of web hosts, both free web hosts and commercial web hosting companies (probably because it's free). It appears to lack the facility to generate exhaustive reports like one of the other log analyzers listed on this page, but if you only want to take a look at say, the "top 30" (or whatever) of all the sites that referred visitors to your site, and not all of them, you'll be fine.

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Free Web Statistics and Web Log Analyzers