Having looked at a lot of these things, here's the criteria I use to evaluate these kinds of services -
1/ How easy is it to get data in?
2/ Is my data safe?
3/ How easy is authoring?
4/ Does it support pivots?
5/ Can I model joins?
6/ Does it support dashboard-wide filters?
7/ Does it support complex time comparisons?
If a service checks those boxes, it's actually ready to get deployed. In the case of Google Data Studio:
1 - Seems standard. 2 - Doesn't use SSL, major red flag. 3 - [EDIT] seems decent, see demo in reply. 4 - Can't tell from the website or examples, red flag. 5 - [EDIT] it cant, see reply 6 - Many examples of this in the gallery. 7 - No examples, red flag.
I'd rate this as pretty mediocre. The people building these products tend to overrate flashiness of dashboards and lose focus on the actual workflow of analysts and those they are helping support. Most of the things I see in the gallery examples are great eye candy but mostly worthless for actually managing a business week-to-week.
Maybe it's different in other companies but I feel that an effective dashboard tells me:
- How I did (last week, trailing 30 days, QTD, YTD)
- ... relative to how I did before (vs comp time period)
- ... relative to my goals
- And a breakout of the drivers of that performance.
Pie charts of demographic breakdowns or measures from some arbitrary date range just aren't useful tools. They're something you look at once and then never revisit.
There are so many alternative ways to achieve the same goal for free or very low cost that unless Google has some secret sauce the product will probably be dead in a few years causing headaches for anyone relying on them.
Obviously if you make thousands and thousands of products, then a couple will eventually have to be dropped. Can you even name me 5 big products they've ended which had a huge impact.
- https://medium.com/google-cloud/showing-off-the-new-free-goo...
Feature wise Data Studio has improved a lot since that day, and will continue to do so.
(but just try it out, it's free https://datastudio.google.com/)
They have been saying this is a top requested feature and it is coming for ~2 years. Its a serious limitation.
All Google products use SSL anyway.
I'm relatively new to this field and I found the value of the solution is how it can connect various business workflows instead of just focused on building dashboards.
For example: typical BI tools only focused on Visualizations (most mentioned here only support that and a bit of "Insight"). This alone is not enough because business activities around BI would require forecasting/predictive and planning (and potentially Risk Assessment).
Disclaimer: I work for a business-unit that develop Analytics solution that covered those business activities (https://www.sapanalytics.cloud/product/).
Both are open source and in my opinion can fill about 80% of dashboards and ad hoc analysis for a small to medium company. The other 20 % your company must be rich enough to buy Tableau or rich enough to build its own solution.
There's a new generation of these tools that started web-first. They don't have all the bells and whistles but the learning curve is way lower. So far none have truly stand ahead of the rest but there are some promising ones. But because you almost always need a dev-in-the-loop, almost every company needing a tool like this starts with a DIY open source solution.
It depends on the requirements like 1. requirements for having a self host version or acceptance of having cloud offering 2. data connector requirements (not all products will have native connectors to all data sources) 3. data blending requirements (not all products will have data blending capabilities to the same tune) 4. data size requirements (some support data in MBs, some can support data in PB's) 5. Programming knowledge requirements (some may have only non technical users using the product, some may have technical users who need finer control) 6. Visualisation options 7. Various Reproting options (some may have pdf export option, while some others may not have this) ....and the list is really long
There are a large number of parameters in deciding to choose a BI/Reporting solution
One can probably pickup a particular requirement and evaluate the best in class for that requirement. There is no one solution which excels in every single field.
Tableau has been the leader in the market for long.
And the list of offerings is endless From traditional Tableau, Looker, Sisense, Qlikview to modern POwerBi, Domo, Tableau online, Data Studio, Bime analytics
From open source solutions like redash.io, airbnb superset, pendaho, jasperreports to closed source solutions like crystal reports...
From simple tools like cyfe , to extremely complex ones
From generic solutions to industry specific solutions like Baremetrics (For stripe analysis), and my own ReportDash (for marketing reports)
We've worked with both small, medium to big tech unicorns. I built the product during my role as data engineer at previous tech startup's employer (we got acquired), so we understood well what are the features desired by SME/startup.
Most of what you are saying is unsubstantiated.
It does use SSL (just like all Google products). Where did you gather that it wasn't using it? And what do you mean by "complex time comparisons"? There are examples of time series comparisons in the demos.
You're welcome to your opinion.
> 1/ How easy is it to get data in? Seems standard.
It supports a MySQL adapter and a PostgreSQL adapter and then a bunch of Google property adapaters. This is standard.
> 2/ Is my data safe? Doesn't use SSL, major red flag.
The PostgreSQL adapter doesnt use SSL (https://support.google.com/datastudio/answer/7288010?hl=en&r...). This is a showstopper.
> 3/ How easy is authoring? [EDIT] seems decent, see demo in reply.
You can see Felipe's demo here and make your own assessment. https://medium.com/google-cloud/showing-off-the-new-free-goo...
> 4/ Does it support pivots? Can't tell from the website or examples, red flag.
If you find an example I'd love to see it. My expectation at a bare minimum is a table view with a dimension down the left, a dimension across the top, and a measure in the cells. I looked through all the examples and did not see a clear example of a pivot.
> 5/ Can I model joins? [EDIT] it cant, see reply
It can't. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15446616
> 6/ Does it support dashboard-wide filters? Many examples of this in the gallery
Most of the examples in the gallery use this feature.
> 7/ Does it support complex time comparisons? No examples, red flag.
Here's a couple very basic examples of what I'm talking about.
- Plug an TY date range into the dashboard filter. Get a view that shows you TY performance in that range vs LY
- Filter the dashboard using calendar dates, display using fiscal dates.
The rest is written from my personal experiences. If your experiences are different, I'm open to hearing about it. Feel free to email me if you'd prefer.
Yours is a great list. Have saved it instantly! Thank You for that.
That being said, I've used GDS for a few months now, and it has a lot of mid-market potential, since it pulls data from Google Analytics, Adwords, & Youtube out of the box, and, is completely free.
I say "mid-tier" because, for large-scale but relatively simple use-cases (I work on a v. large e-commerce site for a large multi-national, some scale but not the most complex setup I've worked with). While you're "in the ecosystem", you're abstracted from a number of complex issues, like data quality, ingestion jobs, ETL, normalization, etc. HUGE deal for a lot of folks transitioning "into the big leagues".
Commercial-off-the-shelf solutions for a lot of the products companies use are supported by the big ETL startups (Fivetran, Alooma, Stitch Data) to BigQuery.
I think their long term goal is to get these mid-tier folks in and standardized on BigQuery. In the future this may become more competitive with Redshift.
It makes sense. They own the bottom tier. Every team gets started these days by getting good at Google Analytics. Then they outgrow it, and move "out of the ecosystem". Eventually, they may be able to build out an ecosystem around BigQuery for data scientists and data science teams, but filling that gap could make them a ton of money.
UX isn't quite where I would like it, but it's getting better. Some small details make the interface confusing, but that's par the course in this domain.
1/ Getting data in is fine, but you're using BQ. Personal preference that is not my favorite tool.
2/ To my knowledge Google Cloud offers the same guarantees and promises as AWS
3/ Authoring is very easy. Perhaps too easy (I would say this is probably one of the best mid-range tools for data vis. I wouldn't say it wins on a feature-by-feature comparison to PowerBI or Tableau).
4/ Partial (limited extent, but w/o writing SQL)
5/ Partial, but not to the extent you would want in a paid tool in this category. Again, no SQL (this is probably a win for some folks, and a minus for others)
6/ Yes. Although it's more like Filters on a whole dashboard or multiple pages of reports in a project.
7/ I've done custom binning, trailing time periods, pretty much everything I would do on a routine basis for data exploration. However, there's no SQL chart authoring, so I wouldn't be surprised if there's something I'm missing here.
---
Bottom line, if you're mid-tier it's a great free tool to try, especially if you're just a data scientist looking to do something fancy for a Marketing team with Marketing data, who hasn't really been exposed to rigorous analysis in the past. You could easily do the type of exploration to make good decisions about building an attribution model, for example.
Would meet the needs of 99% of companies I've consulted for, if it wasn't for BQ vs. Redshift.
A lot of my perspective comes from living in a post-GA world. I can see there being value for companies who are reliant on GA and Adwords data for their day-to-day operations - and to be honest, that's probably a lot of people. For someone who isn't as reliant on GA data or already has it in a data warehouse, I can't quite see the justification to use this specific tool. I'll definitely keep an eye on it.
- We are both ETL + BI, we help you get data into your DW easily (CSV Upload, DB Sync, etc)
- Support for dashboard-wide filters, model joins, pivots
For complex time comparison (last week, QTD, YTD) we have metrics spreadsheets: https://docs.holistics.io/metrics/
I'm no Tableau fan at all, but the fact that it's a native app removes this doubt at least.
Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not on Cloud.
Zoomdata is a good alternative, but pricey and not mature enough I feel.
PowerBI is getting surprisingly good, and if you're a Microsoft or R shop it can be a really nice fit for the price. I've thrown a few 50GB+ CSVs at it. It's basically Excel on steroids. If you're dealing with some data stores (like mongo, elasticsearch) then PowerBI isn't viable natively.
Interesting to note that zoomdata and tableau use spark under the covers iirc.
Its got its share of flaws and issues, but for the price I think it beats everything else on the market - especially for existing Office365 customers.
Maybe it is better to use Python Pandas or R interactively to know more about your data.
In the beginning Power BI started out pretty weak compared to Tableau, but over a couple years they make huge investments and seem to even be ahead in some areas. For example, it used to be Tableau didn’t support 3rd party or custom visualization, although I haven’t checked recently if that’s changed.
So much development effort is being poured into many of these competitors, any useful comparators have to be pretty new.
[0]: https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/2172371/Q1%202017%20Gartner.p...
I hope Google realises this is a viscous cycle where people avoid signing up for their services, causing low usage, causing them to abandon it, causing lower usage, causing them to shut it down, causing people to avoid signing up for their services...
Also, this is a B2B product which is treated much more seriously than their standard consumer products.
I know of at least one website[1] dedicated to track whether or not Google had shut down products yet. I think the thing that started this meme was when Google shut down Reader[2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_s...
Personally, I've learned to treat SaaS products as throwaway by default. That is, if I can benefit from it short-term, like in 3 to 6 weeks, I may sign up. But I don't expect it to exist in 3 to 6 years, so I'm not going to invest much into using it.
[1](https://github.com/thenaturalist/awesome-business-intelligen...)
Gartner report on commercial BI/Analytics might be useful to you
PopSQL – Modern, collaborative SQL editor for your team | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15377339 (Oct 2017, 49 comments)
>ghh: Other solutions in the `write sql and share the graphs with your team`-space: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15377339
Franchise – An Open-Source SQL Notebook | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15303833 (Sep 2017, 63 comments)
With or without SSL, exposing your raw prod data to external services like these is a huge risk. Only ever share filtered and redacted data with external entities.
1. A dedicated read-only schema
2. A dedicated user, with only CONNECT to the read-only schema
3. A unique password
4. A dedicated read-only replica DB
you should be safe against pretty much everything.
I'd actually like to be corrected if I'm wrong - this is how I've built numerous externally-facing services.
At a previous job a new system was deployed to help the customer service team. I can't remember the details, but it was backed by this pretty meaty database so we could collect lots of data for later analysis. The etl processes was delayed for some reason so a couple of people were given 'temporary' access to the production db. Lo and behold, a week later the whole thing mysteriously grinds to a halt as an analyst left some huge query running in the background that locked up all the important tables until an admin can in and kicked them off.
Letting people run arbitrary workloads on a system you want to be stable is a bad idea.
I'm not very comfortable with giving Google access to our databases.
Obvious advantage of metabase is that it's all local.
Data Studio has a different set of strengths: It's the quickest way I can get an interactive viz published with 0 infrastructure needed. Just build your dashboard, add some controls, and publish it to your closest connections privately, or publicly to the whole world. It will scale without any resource allocation on your side.
(disclosure: I'm Felipe Hoffa and I work for Google Cloud https://twitter.com/felipehoffa)
(in a parallel thread, someone else mentions how they use re:dash and Data Studio https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15446296)
Metabase has a link to their repository in the first page of https://metabase.com/ Just based in this fact I would prefer Metabase.
How do they compare to generate high quality reports?
Frankly it has become table stakes to do that.
I do appreciate your reply though, maybe there are new or differentiated capabilities. Would be interesting to hear.
> I can get an interactive viz published with 0 infrastructure needed. Just build your dashboard, add some controls, and publish it
2. It's free, Plot.ly is $10,000 per year.
Plotly's pricing information is very confusing I must say.
I didn't find this out until yesterday, I've been out of the US and won't be back until almost November. Google didn't email Google Finance users, they just posted a blurb at the top of the portfolio pages mentioning that if you want to keep your data you should download it.
Feel free to reach out if you have further questions.
[1](https://github.com/thenaturalist/awesome-business-intelligen...)
Then they move everything to one of the big 3 clouds so they can use their whole suite of services...interesting.
- https://datastudio.google.com/org/aLzLLuH1QJC-2sBBmo7qdw/rep...
(the story behind: https://medium.com/@hoffa/the-most-famous-reddit-accounts-c9...)
If you use BigQuery and Tableau, you can hook those together, so there's not a ton of incentive to use Data Studio, too, unless it fits a need for sharing with a team.
I can't speak to other Data Studio uses.
We mostly use self-hosted Redash for day-to-day analytics for ad-hoc analytics questions.
Once you need something complicated, you will have to or spend decent amount of time preparing the data or back to coding.
selecting the language at the bottom of the page does nothing for me on iOS Chrome. Didn't try other browsers but guessing it's not iOS chrome specific. note my iOS is set to japanese
There is no way to display individual time series data points, but they are always aggregated, and minimum resolution is one hour.
You can have only 10 time series in a single visualization.
(Of course, I just may not know how to use this...)
From the looks, is it something like AWS's QuickSight?
I use Metabase, and will continue to use it.
Also in the process of setting up Luigi (created by Spotify team) to control dependencies and the ETL process prior to Metabase.
"Sorry, we couldn't find any success stories to match those filters."
