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Comment by kingo55 | Hacker News Reader

I've been a Snowplow user for nearly a decade. It's a bit of work to set up, but it's the best engineered of all those options.

Snowplow's JSON schema events and contexts give you complete flexibility to define a data model that suits your business. Combined with DBT and a BI tool, like Apache Superset, it's vastly more capable than Google Analytics. We have clients running Google Analytics 360 that can't do the stuff we're able to with Snowplow.

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I've also used Snowplow fairly heavily (several years ago). It's good for big stuff where you need lots of control and data customization, but it's significantly overkill if you just want basic analytics for your blog or small business website.

For sure... Bit overkill for that unless you're using Snowplow mini. A good rule of thumb to decide on Snowplow is whether you're considering GA 360.

What do you use to visualise the data you collect with Snowplow?

I think folks forget that a significant part of the value from GA is how it presents the data in an easy to understand manner for non technical users.

We use Superset and R markdown reports mostly.

It's quite common for us to rely on Snowplow as a source of truth, but use GA for quick exploration. Certain reports in GA are setup so nicely, like "navigation summary" and the more intuitive session definition for marketing. And while Snowplow is real time, there's no effective way to see the same reports as produced by GA.

Hi, Great to hear your views on Snowplow. Cheers, Eddie

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