WLE clones?

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General Vershner
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I've been trawling around the web looking for a log analyser, and I've come across several that appear to be almost identical to Weblog Expert.

- Nihuo Web Log Analyzer - http://www.loganalyzer.net/
- AlterWind Log Analyzer - http://www.alterwind.com/
- eSoftys eWebLog Analyzer - http://www.esoftys.com/index.html

The sample reports and screenshots look far look close for it to be just chance. What's going on here? Who is actually the original?
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Michael
We prefer not to make public comments on our competitors, so we also prefer not to comment this issue. However, I'd like to note that the first version of WebLog Expert (with program interface and report design very similar to the current ones) was released earlier than the first versions of all these programs.
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General Vershner
Thanks for your response, but please understand that this leaves me in a difficult position as a potential customer, as I have no way of determining which of these products is genuine or what the actual situation is.

Is this an open source project that several companies are selling? Are you all the same company selling under different brands? Or has the source code been stolen? Or is it just the interface that's been copied?
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Michael
These products are created by different companies and have different source code. However, they have certain similarities in interface and functionality. Some similarities may have appeared because all these products are from the same software class (desktop log analyzers that create static HTML reports) so they all need to implement some core functionality, including basic reports. Other similarities may have appeared because good interface decisions are sometimes copied.

However, it's not correct to say that WebLog Expert and other software products you mentioned are identical. There are a lot of differences in functionality and interface. E.g. WebLog Expert have features like click overlay reports, PDF reports, custom reports and dynamic HTML reports that aren't available in any other product you mentioned.

BTW two of these products haven't been updated for a long time. That is important as old versions of log analyzers cannot recognize new browsers, operating systems, browsers and search engines.

So in this case I recommend you just to download all these products and check which one works better in your case.