I have used both urchin and livestats and must say I am a little disappointed with both. Has anyone used other software or even services that provide better information, layout, etc?

Whad do you mean by better information and better layout?

I have used a previous version of livestats that I liked but a newer one that my host uses is just hard to navigate, graphs are loading everywhere, and it all around just is not easy to use (especially if you are one who moves and clicks very fast)

What about Urchin? I think the navigation is smooth and straight forward. We use that on our servers and none of our clients have complaint that is not friendly or provide not enough information

the urchin doesn't provide real time stats of who is on and where they are on the site. I like the real time stuff. Also, not sure if its just my host or not but the Urchin stats on my host are a day old....so yesterday's stats are viewable today....way too slow for me. I live in live internet time.

I prefer Webalizer. It is easy to navigate, and provides interesting graphical depictions of how your site has been doing over a 12 month period. Has all of the standard information about hits, location, referrers, visitors, and all that kind of stuff.

I use avstats

Urchin can be setup to run every 1 hour. I haven't heard about live web stats that will run in real time - this will be overkill for the host and is useless for most of the marketing analysis.

Webalizer is robust but not as user friendly as Urchin, and is not designed for shared hosting environment.

I have heard that there are companies that will provide this type of real time service for a monthly fee. In our business, this sort of thing is worth it. I don't mind paying for it.

How do you exactly use the information provided? I found useless any data for less than a day.

we have our own online reporting and statistical program but seeing things in real time is how we operate. Having webstats to compliment that is important. We look at referrals from ad campaigns, search engines, and other stats which are utitlized to make decisions. This can be done multiple times a day.