Piwik Pro Tag Manager vs. Google Tag Manager
Management Summary
Is your company switching from Piwik Pro to GTM—or vice versa? There are many factors to consider when choosing the right tag management system. While pricing and legal considerations often take center stage, the day-to-day workflow within the system also plays a key role in determining your teams’ efficiency.
How do these tools differ in terms of dataLayer compatibility, server-side tracking, or integration with other systems? And what are their pros and cons when it comes to troubleshooting or version control? We’ll show you what to keep in mind when switching and how the two tag managers differ in practice.
dataLayer Compatibility – Differences in Configuration
Both GTM and Piwik can read the dataLayer, and Piwik offers built-in support for the dataLayer in the Google Analytics format. If you’re using a custom dataLayer, you’ll need to make some additional configurations in both tag managers.
Networking – Standalone Solution vs. Integrated System
Google Tag Manager is a standalone product, even though it was designed to work well with GA4 and Google Cloud. Piwik Pro is not a standalone tag manager. It also includes modules for analytics, consent management (CMP), and customer data (CDP). This results in a slightly different user experience: Tag management is simply a module integrated into a larger tracking product where everything is interconnected from the start.
Server-Side Tracking – Availability and Best Practices for Migration
Server-side tracking is available in Piwik on the Enterprise plan. If you’re on the Business plan, you can send your Piwik analytics requests via a first-party endpoint, but you cannot perform server-side tagging.
If you’re migrating from an existing Google Tag Manager configuration that uses server-side tracking, one option is to keep your server-side Google Tag Manager container. There is a tag template that can create an event data object from a Piwik hit when you send it to sGTM. Note that the reason for your migration to Piwik may be of a legal nature. Therefore, check with your legal department to see if retaining sGTM is approved from their perspective.
Troubleshooting – The Benefits of Tag-Based Debugging
One area where Piwik Pro offers advantages over GTM is tag-based troubleshooting. Sometimes, debugging a tag in GTM can be very time-consuming because you have to keep clicking back and forth.
- In Piwik, you can either view the events and see which tags were triggered for different events.
- Or you can switch to the “Tags” tab to view all tags and the events that triggered them.
- You can even search and sort on both tabs to filter the display by click events or a specific tag or tag category.
Version Control – GTM Workspaces vs. Piwik Snapshots
This is perhaps the biggest change when switching tag managers, whether you’re switching from GTM to Piwik or from Piwik to GTM. In this case, Piwik Pro lacks a feature that is very useful in GTM: workspaces.
While GTM has workspaces that let you work on different tasks in different branches of the code, changes in Piwik are organized chronologically. You can save a point in time as a “snapshot,” but when you publish, all changes made by anyone in the entire container go live.
Variables and Navigation – Day-to-Day Work in the User Interface
Now let’s move on to the technical details of day-to-day work in tag management. Just like GTM, Piwik Pro is based on tags, triggers, and variables. If you switch from GTM to Piwik Pro, you’ll miss the seamless navigation between these elements. However, the functionality is the same, so you’ll just have to get used to it.
Piwik recently introduced dynamic variable naming. Now, if you want to change a variable’s name, it will automatically be updated in the variable references within the tags. Previously, this was somewhat of a challenge and led to incorrect tracking if a variable was renamed without careful consideration. In addition, a trigger for trigger groups was recently added. Piwik Pro is actively updating its tag manager. Bugs are continuously being fixed and features added—at a faster pace than with GTM.
Both Piwik and GTM have built-in variables as well as the ability to use custom JavaScript variables, which allow you to create exactly what you need if the built-in options aren’t sufficient.
Conclusion – Which tag manager is right for your setup?
Each tag manager has its own structure. If you’re more familiar with one than the other, you’ll quickly get used to the features of the new user interface. The two tag managers have similar features and work the same way in many respects, but they both have their pros and cons.
| Piwik Pro Tag Manager | Google Tag Manager (GTM) | |
|---|---|---|
| dataLayer Compatibility | Native GA support; custom setups require adjustments | Standard readout; custom setups require adjustments |
| Networking | All-in-One Suite (integrated as a module in Analytics, CMP, and CDP) | Standalone solution; however, it integrates seamlessly with GA4 and Cloud |
| Server-Side Tracking | Included (in the Enterprise plan) | Via your own sGTM container (can also be used with Piwik Hits) |
| Troubleshooting | Tag-based, intuitive, with very clear filtering and search options | Event-driven, often requiring more clicks during debugging |
| Version Control | Chronological Snapshots (all changes go live simultaneously) | Sophisticated workspaces (allow for parallel work on the code) |
| Variables & Navigation | Dynamic variable renaming, trigger groups, fast updates | Seamless and well-established navigation between tags, triggers, and variables |
