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I have always been a fan of AWstats statistics software for websites. Stats are very important to know if you run a website, no matter what size. If you have a very small website you can find out where your visitors are coming from and therefore use that information to gain more visitors. If you have a larger website you can determine your popular files, pages and also find out where you visitors live. These stats can help you get valuable advertisers or help you sell your website or domain name. What stats software should you use, you ask? Well there are so many to choose from and each performs a core function but each has different strong points. Today I will look at two, one paid and one free/open source.Mint is a great for several reasons. It has an amazingly slick CSS design with some very cool AJAX features. People are free to create add-ons, which are called “Peppers?. These peppers serve many purposes including mapping where each visitor is from and RSS feed information. I have yet to purchase a license, because I am too cheap. If somebody is willing purchase a license for me I would greatly appreciate it. Although I have not used it on my own website I have played around with several demonstrations.I am going to start with the design aspect of Mint. Mint is without a doubt the most visually pleasing stat software available today. Not only does Mint use pure CSS but it has AJAX features which scroll and automatically update data. Since it uses CSS and is very clean you can view your stats faster and on more devices such as cell phones, blackberries, and of course your computer.The second I will look at is AWstat’s. You can turn on an option to have a button to update your stats. This is different from the automatically updating Mint. It has a very simple design and even uses CSS. There are very few images so it loads lightning fast. Besides the simplicity it is awfully ugly. It looks like a 1990’s website. The only upside is that it is open source so you could create a theme. Because it is open source you could essentially change the makeup and add some AJAX and it would surpass Mint in functionality.The overall function of Mint is very good but the default version is lacking compared to AWstats. Mint shows the visits, referrals, pages, and searches by default. You can of course download some pepper to add functionality but for a basic user that could become a pain. In the long run the default data displayed by Awstats surpasses Mint, but with Peppers you could have better functionality.How much do these cost? Mint costs $30 for a one time license fee, and Awstats is completely free. Installation is a lot easier for Mint than Awstats. Awstats is very complicated to install. Once of the easiest ways to install it involved using SSH to connect to the server. This is far beyond the ability of a regular computer user.I suggest Mint for anybody with a website. Check them out at www.haveamint.com. If you want to sponsor this website you could purchase a Mint license for 5tags.com.Tags: mint, awstats, haveamint, aw, stats, statistics