I’ve been wanting to have some sort of site monitor tool for a while. One that will tell me who’s visiting the site and when and some other bits and pieces about their visit. Over the last 3 weeks I’ve been trying two out – Delineate and Mint. The most obvious difference is that Delineate is free (for the moment – it is in beta) and Mint costs $30.
Delineate is accessed remotely from your webspace. The information is presented clearly and with a lot of depth. For example you can see all the visitors to your site, the browser and OS they used and which specific page they visited. The site also makes good use of Google Maps to try and map their location. A nice feature is the last 100 visitors to your site mapped – good to see it really is a world wide web. If you wonder why they visit you can also see the search terms used to find your site. I really like this app although I’m not so sure about accessing another web app remotely – would prefer to host and see the stats local to my site.
Mint falls into that category. Once you’ve paid your $30 you download the app and install on your host site. One limitation is that the $30 only covers one domain name – if you mange other sites and want to use Mint it’s $30 per site – pretty steep. Once installed and configured the beauty of the website really hits home. Fast and configurable the layout will adapt to whatever browser size you use as long as it’s not IE – Mint doesn’t like IE at all. Out the box Mint has as much information as Delineate. However Mint is expandable via the Pepper API. This allows other dev’s to code small add-ons to Mint, for example Outclicks which monitors outgoing clicks from your site and XXX Strong Mint which displays visitors IP address. Nice.
Although costing $30, Mint wins hands down. I love it’s expandability and the fact that it’s hosted locally. I’m also surprised by some of the results so far. 74% of visitors are still using IE. Most shocking 66% are using a res less than 1280×1024. Nevermind – get Mint – thoroughly recommended. If your not fussed about expandability and hosting remotely then save $30 and go for Delineate instead.