How does this compare with Google datastudio and other saas dashboard tools?
Tableau and others are more like native apps that have a separate overpriced "shareable" option but there are already plenty of saas tools.
Launch HN: Explo (YC W20) – Customer-facing dashboards and reports
51–60 of 66 posts
Re: Launch HN: Explo (YC W20) – Customer-facing dashboards and reports
#52Regarding the SQL builder - Is it a visual editor that allows me to explore my database and create queries?
Also curious to know how you would differentiate your offering from say retool or other low-code builders which also support multiple databases and have chart components?
I am assuming that with screen rights, a company can expose a dashboard built using retool to their customers as well.
Re: Launch HN: Explo (YC W20) – Customer-facing dashboards and reports
#53Hi Explo team. Congrats on the launch! My previous company and my new company both provide insights as a service, so customer facing dashboards are the core product, and therefore this is very interesting to me. A few questions for the team: 1. I see that startups pay $500/month. How do you compare that to Metabase which is $85/month (or $385 if you remove the Metabase attribution)? 2. Do you, or do you plan to, offe…
Would love to understand this more. pklee.hackernews@gmail.com
Great - will reach out!
Re: Launch HN: Explo (YC W20) – Customer-facing dashboards and reports
#54Regarding the SQL builder - Is it a visual editor that allows me to explore my database and create queries? Also curious to know how you would differentiate your offering from say retool or other low-code builders which also support multiple databases and have chart components? I am assuming that with screen rights, a company can expose a dashboard built using retool to their customers as well.
Hey! You can use Explo to explore your database and visualize data, but it requires using SQL to initially access to data so it is not completely visual.
Retool is a great example of a tool that we feel is adjacent to us but different specifically because it is not built to be customer facing. You can expose a retool dashboard but it isn't built to be embedded natively into your web app and there is no way to customize the styles to fit your app.
Additionally, our charts, visualizations, and data representations are much more catered to application dashboards - whereas retool has generic charting components in a more raw form.
Re: Launch HN: Explo (YC W20) – Customer-facing dashboards and reports
#55Dope. Although I think your pricing is high, but so is looker and tableau... --- What would be cool is dynamic dashboards that are launched via QR codes. I am specifically thinking about the cannabis industry: A few years ago, I was making cannabis labels - which are regulated as to what information you must have on the label, and what I did was a QR code that went to a bit.ly link that then directed to the lab resul…
This is a really cool use case! Especially with for environmental and ethical conscious brands. We sort of do the same thing with QR codes in a factory at the moment where we trace production batches, stock management and R&D test data to link the label factory items back to the MRP data and dashboards. This was implemented using Lowdefy [0] - interestingly we also started Lowdefy out of the need for customer facing…
Wow the QR code resurgence is real! I'm curious why you chose to support data sources such as Mongo and google sheets first as oppose to others I saw that were coming soon (Postgres, MySQL, etc) and challenges you experienced building out the connections. Looks like we support a completely different set of databases.
And is your data pulled directly from your MRP system or loaded into another database first?
And we'll definitely be adding more examples and videos creating and embedding dashboards in Explo.
Re: Launch HN: Explo (YC W20) – Customer-facing dashboards and reports
#56How does this compare with Google datastudio and other saas dashboard tools? Tableau and others are more like native apps that have a separate overpriced "shareable" option but there are already plenty of saas tools.
Explo is different from the other SAAS tools as it's designed specifically for external use cases, so our platform is built with features such as security, flexible design, responsiveness, and version control as first class principles.
Re: Launch HN: Explo (YC W20) – Customer-facing dashboards and reports
#57This looks great! We're extensive users of retool but while it's great for internal tools, the pricing and auth model don't really work for external tools. So this definitely fills that gap.
We literally just started our big partner dashboards project so I'm sending this over to the engineer working on it now.
One feature that's important to us is the ability to download tables as CSV. Sometimes those tables will be really large, so we'd want to paginate them but still allow the customer to download all the data in their csv. Is that something you can/will support?
Re: Launch HN: Explo (YC W20) – Customer-facing dashboards and reports
#58This looks great! We're extensive users of retool but while it's great for internal tools, the pricing and auth model don't really work for external tools. So this definitely fills that gap. We literally just started our big partner dashboards project so I'm sending this over to the engineer working on it now. One feature that's important to us is the ability to download tables as CSV. Sometimes those tables will be…
We're fans of Retool, but definitely agree the requirements for internal and external use cases are quite different.
We already support CSV downloads from tables, so no worries there. We're excited to chat with your engineer and give them an in depth tour of Explo. Please have them reach out to founders@ or sign up for a demo on our landing page!
Re: Launch HN: Explo (YC W20) – Customer-facing dashboards and reports
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi, thanks for the thoughts and glad to hear this could be useful for you! Startups and smaller companies we work with are paying $500/month (pretty cheap for replacing months of engineering working and maintenance). Our pricing then goes up from there depending on number of end customer groups. We work with our clients on how the pricing scales up since some customers have very few end customer groups with tons of u…
Thank you for your response. I work in big corp. I think it is much easier for us to make something ourselves then to go through sales cycle/approvals to get us to use this. Having said that, I look forward seeing what you will do in next year or two.
“I think it is much easier for us to make something ourselves”
says every developer until burning 100x cost/resources/time building a lesser version of the same thing that has to be now documented, supported and maintained.
From what I know (especially for big corps) $6k annual contract value ($500p/m) can usually be put on a credit card without triggering any lengthy enterprise 6-18 months sales cycles.
Re: Launch HN: Explo (YC W20) – Customer-facing dashboards and reports
#60This looks great! We're extensive users of retool but while it's great for internal tools, the pricing and auth model don't really work for external tools. So this definitely fills that gap. We literally just started our big partner dashboards project so I'm sending this over to the engineer working on it now. One feature that's important to us is the ability to download tables as CSV. Sometimes those tables will be…
Not to jump in here, but have you tried tools like https://github.com/Budibase/budibase that would allow you to build both internal and external tools.