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Tools like this are awesome, I wish I had a good reason to play with them. Dumb question - what makes this project better / worse than competing BI / data viz

Tools like this are awesome, I wish I had a good reason to play with them. Dumb question - what makes this project better / worse than competing BI / data viz tools like Jupyter notebook, Tableau, and MS Power BI with Excel?

hestefisk 5y ago
Compared to Tableau — cost.
- danielvaughn 5y ago
  Was about to say the same. Last year I went through a huge industry comparison exercise for my former company. Spent 6 months evaluating BI tooling. Every option out there is ridiculously expensive. Looker quoted us at $1M/year, though they were using the sticker shock strategy to get us around a $200K/year price point. I came away with the impression that BI is simply not accessible outside of enterprise level orgs. So I love seeing tools like this come into the market. You should also check out https://cube.dev https://cube.dev - they're much less out-of-the-box, but super flexible for developers.
benjaminwootton 5y ago
A lot of these tools are similar. They allow you l to query relational databases, run joins and group bys, and then display the results as either data tables or charts. To varying degrees, they hide or expose the fact that they are just building SQL queries under the hood. Notebook based analysis is more programmatic. I could for instance pull in a query, apply statistical functions, build an ML model, perform logic, call APIs etc. I think both have a place in many organisations, but the programmatic side is where there is more potential. Yet another dashboard is a bit uninspiring nowadays.
- code_biologist 5y ago
  To add a contrary voice, I completely disagree. Data accessibility, organization and access to analyst time remain the biggest hurdles to corporate data literacy. No business user is going to write notebook code, on the other hand I've seen some great exploration, analysis, and dashboarding work done by business users with the right self-serve setup in Looker. dbt + Metabase or Superset seems like a great cheaper / more open alternative stack. From what I've seen, ML and programmatic stuff is flashy, but enabling business users to easily get tables and bar charts is how you get everyone making more sound decisions.

hestefisk 5y ago

Compared to Tableau — cost.

danielvaughn 5y ago
Was about to say the same. Last year I went through a huge industry comparison exercise for my former company. Spent 6 months evaluating BI tooling. Every option out there is ridiculously expensive. Looker quoted us at $1M/year, though they were using the sticker shock strategy to get us around a $200K/year price point. I came away with the impression that BI is simply not accessible outside of enterprise level orgs. So I love seeing tools like this come into the market. You should also check out https://cube.dev https://cube.dev - they're much less out-of-the-box, but super flexible for developers.

benjaminwootton 5y ago

A lot of these tools are similar. They allow you l to query relational databases, run joins and group bys, and then display the results as either data tables or charts. To varying degrees, they hide or expose the fact that they are just building SQL queries under the hood. Notebook based analysis is more programmatic. I could for instance pull in a query, apply statistical functions, build an ML model, perform logic, call APIs etc. I think both have a place in many organisations, but the programmatic side is where there is more potential. Yet another dashboard is a bit uninspiring nowadays.

code_biologist 5y ago
To add a contrary voice, I completely disagree. Data accessibility, organization and access to analyst time remain the biggest hurdles to corporate data literacy. No business user is going to write notebook code, on the other hand I've seen some great exploration, analysis, and dashboarding work done by business users with the right self-serve setup in Looker. dbt + Metabase or Superset seems like a great cheaper / more open alternative stack. From what I've seen, ML and programmatic stuff is flashy, but enabling business users to easily get tables and bar charts is how you get everyone making more sound decisions.