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I really need a great data explorer/dashboard for my postgres-based systems. I was going to use shiny but this looks really nice -- I hope the docs can be buil

I really need a great data explorer/dashboard for my postgres-based systems. I was going to use shiny but this looks really nice -- I hope the docs can be built out very soon. Can anyone comment on other competing products? In the commercial space, I like Looker but its too pricey.

jonbishop 11y ago
Hey! I run marketing for Periscope Data, a data explorer/dashboard product. We have a lot of customers using postgres and get compared to Looker a lot. We focus on optimizing for the analyst whereas tools like Looker focus on business users. We have a lot of features for business users, but chart creation is all SQL based. Our site is here: https://www.periscopedata.com/ https://www.periscopedata.com/ and if you have any questions, shoot me an email at jon@periscopedata.com.
- Rapzid 11y ago
  Do you have a self-hosted option? What's your pricing?
  - ngould 11y ago
    Word on the street is Periscope costs $1000/mo for unlimited users, up to 1B rows.
- qaq 11y ago
  +1 Having some upfront pricing info would be great
javiercr 11y ago
Take a look to http://www.metabase.com/ http://www.metabase.com/ (open source, made by Expa, Uber's co-founder incubator).
- dacort 11y ago
  Second this recommendation. Very easy to get up and running - may not be able to handle some complex use cases, but for the basics it's fantastic.
  - rufugee 11y ago
    It must have come very far in the past few months then...based on my experimentation, it was far from being ready for production use if you needed anything beyond the most basic of SQL queries. That said, I'm rooting for it (and now, caravel). We use Pentaho, and it's....meh. A lot of moving parts, a big learning curve, and a user experience that's just ok. I'm hoping Metabase (and now Caravel) will both succeed...the open source BI space could really use an influx of simpler, beautiful tools. A side note: I love that Caravel is written in Python. Metabase switched from Python to Clojure, and I personally believe that to be a barrier to entry for contributing. I've started down the Clojure path a number of times only to stop because I see it as something which would be difficult to impose on my team...Lisp is just so different from what most enterprisey development teams are used to. Python, on the other hand, is easier to justify. I've found things I wanted to help fix in Metabase, but having to learn idiomatic Clojure just to submit a patch is a turn-off.
    - salsakran 11y ago
      Hey, Sameer from the Metabase team. If you don't mind, I'd love to hear why you felt we were far from being ready for production. Our main challenge has trading off ease of installation and use with the inevitable feature creep that causes the lots of moving parts and learning curve you find meh about Pentaho. You're right in that we've focused on making the most basic of sql queries (via our non-sql tool) usable by anyone in the company on their own vs essentially producing an analytics SDK like Pentaho/Jaspersoft. On the language front, we made a conscious decision to optimize for ease of installation and low maintenance overhead. While I agree, it's made contributing less accessible, it's been amazing how porting has made Metabase more stable and easier to install. We run a bunch of instances for people, and our ops footprint has been silly small.
palmeida 11y ago
Take a look at http://www.viurdata.com http://www.viurdata.com Simple to use product, with transparent pricing and you can use drag & drop or add your own SQL Queries. Disclaimer: I am one of the founders.
dwmintz 11y ago
Really depends on your needs. There are lots of options out there that are happy to talk to Postgres, but each has different strengths and weaknesses. If all you need is a way to basically share and visualize the output of SQL queries and everyone who's using the tool can write SQL well, then look at Periscope or Mode. If you're ok pulling the data out of Postgres into memory locally and mostly care about manipulation and beautiful dataviz, then look at Tableau. If you're mostly interested in more data sciency/ML stuff, then Shiny or something else that's R-based is a good option. If you're interested in being able to embed your business logic into the tool so that non-SQL folks can build their own queries and everybody's relying on the same data definitions, that's where Looker (disclosure: where I work) excels.

jonbishop 11y ago

Hey! I run marketing for Periscope Data, a data explorer/dashboard product. We have a lot of customers using postgres and get compared to Looker a lot. We focus on optimizing for the analyst whereas tools like Looker focus on business users. We have a lot of features for business users, but chart creation is all SQL based. Our site is here: https://www.periscopedata.com/ https://www.periscopedata.com/ and if you have any questions, shoot me an email at jon@periscopedata.com.

Rapzid 11y ago
Do you have a self-hosted option? What's your pricing?
- ngould 11y ago
  Word on the street is Periscope costs $1000/mo for unlimited users, up to 1B rows.
qaq 11y ago
+1 Having some upfront pricing info would be great

javiercr 11y ago

Take a look to http://www.metabase.com/ http://www.metabase.com/ (open source, made by Expa, Uber's co-founder incubator).

dacort 11y ago
Second this recommendation. Very easy to get up and running - may not be able to handle some complex use cases, but for the basics it's fantastic.
- rufugee 11y ago
  It must have come very far in the past few months then...based on my experimentation, it was far from being ready for production use if you needed anything beyond the most basic of SQL queries. That said, I'm rooting for it (and now, caravel). We use Pentaho, and it's....meh. A lot of moving parts, a big learning curve, and a user experience that's just ok. I'm hoping Metabase (and now Caravel) will both succeed...the open source BI space could really use an influx of simpler, beautiful tools. A side note: I love that Caravel is written in Python. Metabase switched from Python to Clojure, and I personally believe that to be a barrier to entry for contributing. I've started down the Clojure path a number of times only to stop because I see it as something which would be difficult to impose on my team...Lisp is just so different from what most enterprisey development teams are used to. Python, on the other hand, is easier to justify. I've found things I wanted to help fix in Metabase, but having to learn idiomatic Clojure just to submit a patch is a turn-off.
  - salsakran 11y ago
    Hey, Sameer from the Metabase team. If you don't mind, I'd love to hear why you felt we were far from being ready for production. Our main challenge has trading off ease of installation and use with the inevitable feature creep that causes the lots of moving parts and learning curve you find meh about Pentaho. You're right in that we've focused on making the most basic of sql queries (via our non-sql tool) usable by anyone in the company on their own vs essentially producing an analytics SDK like Pentaho/Jaspersoft. On the language front, we made a conscious decision to optimize for ease of installation and low maintenance overhead. While I agree, it's made contributing less accessible, it's been amazing how porting has made Metabase more stable and easier to install. We run a bunch of instances for people, and our ops footprint has been silly small.

palmeida 11y ago

Take a look at http://www.viurdata.com http://www.viurdata.com Simple to use product, with transparent pricing and you can use drag & drop or add your own SQL Queries. Disclaimer: I am one of the founders.

dwmintz 11y ago

Really depends on your needs. There are lots of options out there that are happy to talk to Postgres, but each has different strengths and weaknesses. If all you need is a way to basically share and visualize the output of SQL queries and everyone who's using the tool can write SQL well, then look at Periscope or Mode. If you're ok pulling the data out of Postgres into memory locally and mostly care about manipulation and beautiful dataviz, then look at Tableau. If you're mostly interested in more data sciency/ML stuff, then Shiny or something else that's R-based is a good option. If you're interested in being able to embed your business logic into the tool so that non-SQL folks can build their own queries and everybody's relying on the same data definitions, that's where Looker (disclosure: where I work) excels.