Surprised nobody here mentioned Mode Analytics. Unlike Looker or Tableau, it requires users to know SQL. That said: if you're an org where the business people know SQL or are willing to learn--Mode is clean, simple, and super powerful. My company had a great experience with this. Our COO was super proficient with Excel. I showed him basic SQL, he loves it and has learned quickly. The jump from Excel power user to SQL…
Not the same level, Tableau is super strong in visualization, Looker is about Data Modeling, the new language is not that hard, but the most valuable thing is data model and explore
We're going through the process of getting a BI solution. There are many players and Tableau doesn't fair well against them. I can see them holding on to existing customers because switching is hard, but they absolutely have a lot of competition for new sales.
Would you share the ones you found worthwhile? Our business wants PowerBI, but the sys admin side sounds like a pain : it seems we need: 1) a consultant to setup the visualisations 2) either a vm running windows server or create a db on azure to update manually because powerbi doesn't allow aws databases 3) the api automation capabilities are unclear says the expert (eg: create a new dashboard for a new customer ? Up…
1) nope, it's a 100% self service tool, no outside assistance needed.
2) PowerBI uses AWS just fine, you may need a gateway depending on how you expose your AWS DB for external access, but that'd be true of any tool connecting to it.
3) why an expert? Here's the API spec, it's not hiding ...
Just exited a company the was competitive to Tableau and Looker. The BI space is insanely competitive, the lock in is very deep, and there are a thousand small players swimming in the wake of Tableau, Looker, PowerBI, and a few other "owners" of the category.
Looker doesn't threaten Tableau. It doesn't need to--at least for now. The space is growing at a crazy rate.
Would you share the ones you found worthwhile? Our business wants PowerBI, but the sys admin side sounds like a pain : it seems we need: 1) a consultant to setup the visualisations 2) either a vm running windows server or create a db on azure to update manually because powerbi doesn't allow aws databases 3) the api automation capabilities are unclear says the expert (eg: create a new dashboard for a new customer ? Up…
> 2) either a vm running windows server or create a db on azure to update manually because powerbi doesn't allow aws databases I believe this is a misunderstanding. You can totally connect to AWS databases with PowerBI, assuming your AWS database is routable. You can't set up the connection through the web interface, but you can use PowerBI Desktop to set up virtually any database that has an ODBC driver as a source[…
Yes exactly, so the only way to have a non public database is to run a Windows vm on AWS, I would rather avoid that, especially because we need one vm per customer.
Thanks for the detailed write up!
Would you share the ones you found worthwhile? Our business wants PowerBI, but the sys admin side sounds like a pain : it seems we need: 1) a consultant to setup the visualisations 2) either a vm running windows server or create a db on azure to update manually because powerbi doesn't allow aws databases 3) the api automation capabilities are unclear says the expert (eg: create a new dashboard for a new customer ? Up…
1) nope, it's a 100% self service tool, no outside assistance needed. 2) PowerBI uses AWS just fine, you may need a gateway depending on how you expose your AWS DB for external access, but that'd be true of any tool connecting to it. 3) why an expert? Here's the API spec, it's not hiding ... https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/power-bi/
Many thanks for the API link, the expert was completely unclear on what may be possible on the automation side (full api configuration without using a mouse).
Would you share the ones you found worthwhile? Our business wants PowerBI, but the sys admin side sounds like a pain : it seems we need: 1) a consultant to setup the visualisations 2) either a vm running windows server or create a db on azure to update manually because powerbi doesn't allow aws databases 3) the api automation capabilities are unclear says the expert (eg: create a new dashboard for a new customer ? Up…
I'm currently helping a large company with their transition from Tableau/SAP/Excel to Power BI. The adoption has been extremely painless and business users are very comfortable creating reports and discovering new ways to represent their data. In response to your points above... 1) A consultant is not required to set up visualisations. With minimal training (a few hours) most users understand the fundamentals and are…
Our business users already hired the consultant and I'm trying to make sense of his answers, but he does seem to be knowledgeable only on using a mouse.
We want to create a template dashboard of visualisations, which would be duplicated for each of our customers, each one having its own data source and workspace. New customer creation should be automated through API calls and we would prefer centralize our resources on AWS. That's it.
The consultant has been so fuzzy that it seemed utterly complex to set-up, but by reading all the answers things are starting to make sense. Redshift would be great, thanks for the pointer!
"it will take significant stagnation on Tableua's part" As a former customer of Tableau, it feels like this has already happened right? I worked at a company where many teams used it, and there were zero defenders of Tableua when it came time to decide whether to renew...it's a mess, especially on Mac.
Is there an alternative on Mac? Any tool that has a purely web based design UI is not limited to an OS, so the alternatives would have to supply a native Mac design tool as Tableau does.
We are working on a cross-platform solution at Chartly. We are still early but can already create dashboards more quickly than what I've seen Tableau do. See https://chart.ly/ for details! :-)
There is lots of opportunity still to innovate in this space. We are focusing on making it super easy to create great looking charts and dashboards really easily at Chartly [1].
Personally I am surprised by lots of the "state of the art" options out there where the result is EITHER ugly or HARD TO USE.
We still have a ways to go, but you can create good looking, interactive dashboards with our platform very easily.
Not really a threat. this article is mostly about Looker, which is a very different product with a significantly higher entry level price tag. Tableau on the other hand is part of the curriculum in many information science programs in colleges, and is significantly embedded in the enterprise sector. it will take significant stagnation on Tableua's part or a black swan type of event to dislodge them any time soon.
We're going through the process of getting a BI solution. There are many players and Tableau doesn't fair well against them. I can see them holding on to existing customers because switching is hard, but they absolutely have a lot of competition for new sales.
Hello Tensor! Will you like to review what our team has built at Holistics (www.holistics.io)? We are listed in the Gartner FrontRunner Quadrant for Business Intelligence Oct 2018.
Love to get your feedback on how you find us relative to the tools you are currently evaluating! Send me a note at v(@@)holistics.io or our team at hello(@@)holistics.io]!
The version control and pull request design is exactly why I've selected Looker. LookML enables the power of the explore functionality as well. Looker's visualizations, however, are very weak when compared to the competition. It's been their weakness for years now, and they've really failed to address it. One aspect of Looker that I've also generally enjoyed is their on-boarding and support processes. They do a super…
I agree that their viz is weak. I comfort myself by saying that this is the easy part and they'll surely fix it eventually ...still waiting after two years.