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Clicky is a Web site analytics service, similar to Google Analytics. In essence, both let you measure traffic to your own Web sites. Given that Google Analytics is free while Clicky charges up to $10 a month, and that Google Analytics is run by, well, Google, you’d think that there’d be no contest: Everyone should be using Google Analytics, right?

Not so fast. I’ve been putting both services through their paces over the past few weeks and it’s clear that, in many cases, Clicky is far better. In fact, I must admit that I’ve become addicted to Clicky.

How does an upstart fee-driven service beat a “give it away for free” giant like Google, you ask? Here’s how: First, Clicky provides a much more usable interface for accessing your analytics. That’s a surprise, given that Google is known for its usually sparse and simple interfaces. Yet, somehow Google managed to completely clutter Google Analytics. Finding meaningful reports means navigating your way through all the nested sidebar links, and the graph at the top of each pages is often redundant. And if you’re not using Google’s AdSense for advertising, parts of the interface are simply useless and get in the way.

Clicky on the other hand has a very clean dashboard and simple tab-based navigation that lets you quickly access important stats about your sites’ visitors and what actions they took as a result of your content. A “Spy” feature lets you drill down on actions taken by a single IP address (though the feature could possible use a less creepy name.) And unlike Google Analytics, Clicky automatically tracks user downloads and clicks on outgoing links.

But what makes Clicky so addictive is that it offers real time analytics, as opposed to Google’s 24-hour delay. So you can pull up Clicky at any time and see how many people have already visited your site that day, roughly how many are on your site at that given moment, and how they’re reacting to content you published that morning. Try it, and you’ll likely find yourself checking Clicky several times a day. No more waiting around for Google or your logfile parser to crunch numbers and produce a final report.

To be fair, Google Analytics does have some features Clicky doesn’t — in particular, “goals”, which is the ability to track traffic through a particular “funnel”, or set of pages. (A note on Clicky’s site says those are in the works.) Likewise, Google Analytics’s integration with AdSense makes it a popular choice for people using AdSense. And finally, Clicky currently does not offer tracking for sites with more than 100,000 pageviews per day. (We imagine that will change as the company grows.) But if you don’t need those things at the moment and are looking for a simple, intuitive way to track and analyze your site’s traffic, Clicky is by far the better choice.