Traffic stats are a subset of all possible analytics you can gather about a website.
But even if all you want are traffic stats, a client-side analytics package is still a better way to gather that information.
Google Analytics--and similar client-side analytics packages--supplanted server-side log analysis for a reason. It's much easier to implement, and gives you much more accurate counts of real people visiting your site, as opposed to spiders, bots, scripts, and other automated traffic that doesn't matter.
But even if all you want are traffic stats, a client-side analytics package is still a better way to gather that information.
Google Analytics--and similar client-side analytics packages--supplanted server-side log analysis for a reason. It's much easier to implement, and gives you much more accurate counts of real people visiting your site, as opposed to spiders, bots, scripts, and other automated traffic that doesn't matter.