Tracking Discrepancies

I’m running a self-hosted WordPress installation of Matomo. I am experiencing discrepancies in user tracking, both regular visits and logged in UserIDs. We have a Membership / Closed site so we are tracking “Display Name” so we can track members’ activities throughout the site.

But I also have Woopra analytics installed and it too captures user tracking and the results are different. Over a 2 day period:

All Visits (Logged in + Visitors)
Matomo = 1279
Woopra = 1586
25% Diff

Unique UserIDs (logged in users)
Matomo: 119
Woopra: 164
37% Diff

I’ve downloaded UserID reports and analyzed them. I have found some anomalies between the two, such as missing users with very little time on the site (like under 1 minute) but not enough to justify 25-35% differences. (Analysis was difficult because Woopra spits out email address as the ID and Matomo spits out the usrname which sometimes don’t line up very much)

Even if I disregard visitors under 1 minute, there were only 6 of those out of the 164.

I analyzed the bottom 30 Woopra Visitors starting at the bottom in Time Spent ranging from 6.5 minutes logest down to 30 seconds shortest. Only 9 of the bottom 30 came across. But it’s not the absolute bottom 9. None of teh bottom 6 under 1 minute came across. 2 out of the 7 visitors between 2-3 minutes came across. So it’s not like it’s “all visitors under 5 minutes”

One note - this is a virtual conference/meeting website which many members will “sit” in the Live Stream page for some time (many over an hour) while doing nothing. I can see that affecting “activity” tracking, but it should not affect the basic site access - logging in, navigating around a bit, etc. all before plopping in the live page.

I did NOT have the “heartbeat” function enabled, but am going to try that moving forward. Most other settings are default out of the box.

Any insight why the big discrepancy?

Thanks