When shopping for a business intelligence (BI) software, the variety of options and differences can easily make your head spin. To begin unraveling the mystery, ask yourself, “What are the key components I’m looking for in a BI platform?” Is simplicity and accessibility important? Are built-in dashboards and ad hoc reporting a necessity? There’s a lot to choose from and it can be overwhelming. Especially when there’s a ton of comparisons online about each of them, how do you know what’s right for your business?
Tech Stacks for Business Intelligence: Tableau, Fivetran, Looker, and Snowflake
There are several well-known combos out there, yet there aren’t major functionality differences between them. One common tech stack for BI is combining Fivetran, Looker, and Snowflake. If you’ve been out shopping around lately, then you’ve probably read about them. By combining these platforms & solutions you can store, analyze, and present your data in various forms. While all BI tools have their strengths and weaknesses, a key factor in usability is how well the tools connect to your existing systems. This could involve purchasing other software, having more team members, etc, so should be looked into across all parts of a tech stack before making any decisions.
All-in-One Leads
The other option is an all-in-one solution, where the data storage, analysis, visualization tools, and more are built as one. With Domo, you get a user-friendly all-in-one complete integrated platform. This means, unlike some other BI platforms that provide best-in-class software, like Tableau or Fivetran, you don’t need added tools to get the interactive visual exploration you’re looking for.
What people may not realize until later is that to get a best-in-class software to run as an all-in-one, you need to buy additional technology for data storage, visualizations, integration, etc. You can count on Domo’s all-in-one platform to collect, clean, and combine data from all your systems and presents it in detailed visualizations for business analysis that are simple to understand for record-time data-driven decisions.
Real-Time Predictive Analysis Decisions
Integration is key to forecasting correctly and making proactive decisions. Best-in-class BI data stacks, like Fivetran, are sometimes difficult to integrate with other systems and that’s when businesses find out they can’t bring all their data together without manual intervention. Manual intervention breeds errors and bad data and with that you can’t make real-time predictive analytic decisions.
Predictive analytic decisions are made possible with Domo because it seamlessly brings all your data together. This lets you shift your decision-making towards the smarter predictive decision model rather than the sometimes-reckless reactive decision model. This is especially true when you don’t have all the data available to you at your fingertips. Predictive analysis can be hugely beneficial to an organization by forecasting and charting a path that improves operational efficiency down the road. According to Markets and Markets, the market for predictive analytics is expected to nearly triple in size to $28 billion by 2026. Companies are noticing the growth and realizing the importance of this type of analysis and are wanting in on the action in the easiest way possible.
Intuitive Design
Intuitiveness is key when it comes to BI tech stacks. You want everyone to feel comfortable using the software so you can count on your people to make time sensitive decisions. Building your own tech stack with solutions like Looker requires coding to develop data models. With Domo, it’s not just limited to your computer programmers or developers. Someone like your accounting clerk can easily pull up the data visualizations and get the same information. This is all because Domo is an easy-to-use, intuitive, and clean platform.
Additionally, because it’s all-in-one, you don’t need to farm out the different steps either. Some platforms require different people for different steps, like a data warehouse person for Snowflake, and then a visualization person for Looker. With an all-in-one solution, just one person is needed to gather the data, filter the data, and combine the data in a way that tells a rich story. This allows you to do away with some of the other clunkier BI software platforms that slow the turnaround time of turning complex numbers into clear and concise data flow visualizations.
The Price is Right
Where it gets more confusing for some, is when it comes to costing out the different BI options (hint: it’s like working with a checkbook that won’t balance). About $3,000 per year is the average cost of a business intelligence software license, but that’s not including implementation costs. Keep in mind also, that the base price of a BI software largely depends on the number of users, the plan you select, any additional technology, cost of training, manpower, etc. This is what can make calculating total cost murky.
In our experience, the best-in-breed solutions can appear more cost-effective because each piece has a lower cost compared to an all-in-one. However, once all the numbers of the multiple solutions & implementations needed to build the full tech stack are added up, we find the all-in-one to not only be on par price-wise, but also offer a lot more functionality & benefit for the same price. Also, when a company is looking at the ROI of a tech stack, which it needs to in the long term, an all-in-one solution like Domo also provides all the long-term intangible benefits like increased trust and improved customer satisfaction.
Domo’s powerful platform is like the Mercedes Benz when it comes to BI software. The other data stacks might be comparable on the surface, but looking deeper, the features Domo offers are hands down the winner in terms of customer experience and product capabilities. Not only that but users can access data insights right from their phone or tablet 24/7. Security also isn’t a concern because Domo’s Trust Program provides some of the most robust security features around. You can ensure all your data, including client data, is kept confidential and secure wherever it’s accessed.
Clearly we’re a little biased, but that comes from experience, not salesmanship. Our Domo experts love seeing the impact great executive analytics can bring to a company, like how SOLJETS closes over 98% of its sales because of data insights or how Pathways is no longer spending 20% of their time gathering data. We’re happy to help guide you on your BI journey so that you feel confident in your ability to build your future business today. Get in touch to start an unbiased conversation on what’s the right strategy for you.
