Grow

Puntos a favor

What separates Grow from the other players in the SaaS BI reporting software space is three fold.

1) Price. I had a call with DOMO and actually laughed when they told me what their platform would cost me each month. Grow is affordable for small agencies, startups and small to mid sized companies - especially when you factor in the ROI it generates.

2) Ease of use. We looked at MSBI but it's complexities - especially around Google Analytics made getting our reporting up and running extremely expensive. Grow makes connecting data sources super easy. I was up and running with basic reporting the day I signed up.

3) Data scientists. In my experience with SaaS software, their onboarding calls can be a big time waster, simply because the people performing the onboarding, are not experts in the field but rather lower level employees who were trained to follow a predetermined onboarding process. My onboarding at Grow was presented by a real data scientist! Not only did he provide excellent training on the software, he made suggestions on how to tweak my reporting needs to show greater value to my clients.

The combination of these three elements come together seamlessly to create a truly viable alternative to Microsoft BI, DOMO and Tableau. Watch out big guys! Here comes GROW!

Puntos en contra

Surely I could find something bad to say right? Not really! I guess if forced I would say that they need to be easier to find on the web. I would have started using Grow months ago - had I known it was out there. So, get those marketing guys to work! Hey - I'm a marketing guy - put me to work!

Puntos a favor

The two biggest pros for utilizing Grow for our data visualization/dashboard needs is the ability to operate at scale and the accessibility and usability to employees with various technical abilities.
The general requirements of our firm included 200+ dashboards for both clients and internal use that provided extensive user permission options, did not require all users/architects to be extensively skilled at coding languages, and still provided the customization capabilities of higher dollar platforms.
Grow was a perfect solution to all of these challenges. Their transformation “apps” within their builder allow users with limited SQL knowledge to apply all manipulations needed to datasets. Their user permissions, with unlimited users model, allows for a scalable system that handles all internal and external requirements. Their new data explorer functionality empowers end users to further manipulate and analyze data. All this at a competitive price point made Grow a perfect solution for our business.

Puntos en contra

The two biggest one to utilizing Grow as our data visualization tool are its lack of true BI capabilities and some of the technical challenges we’ve faced. Though neither is enough to sway us from a “definitely recommend” stance, both are worth noting.
When compared to more expensive solutions built around BI (think Tableau or Looker), Grow lacks BI capabilities. The new data explorer functionality helps significantly close this gap, but it still is up to the architect and end-user to provide the “analysis” component. If your team lacks the ability to translate data into action, Grow doesn’t have BI/AI/etc capabilities like other platforms to bridge that gap.
Additionally, while Grow performs reasonably well, it’s not without its technical challenges. Being a smaller company than the titans of the visualization space, technical challenges stretch out longer than they seemingly should. Additionally, though their business model/pricing makes it incredibly scalable, large volumes of data sources (not necessarily a large data source; simply having many different sources connected at once) can lead to slower loading/building that can hamper my team’s efficiency.
Again, neither of these are deal breakers by any means, but are worth noting.

Puntos a favor

Their UI is awesome. I love the overall look and feel for the entire system. Graphs look updated, clean, and they are fairly easy to customize. Making the dashboards look good is fairly simple.

Puntos en contra

Not data warehousing the data is an issue. Long load times really get me frustrated with the software. It seems to take a minute to edit a metric, load a new metric, or even sometime update a metric. Updating a dashboard can take 2 minutes at times.
Drilling down and looking into the data is very underwhelming. Dashboard filters don't exist so you're stuck loading filters only to individual metrics, not the whole dashboard.
Email triggers that send reports on a set schedule are limited to only 7 am MT on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule.
Time zone offsets have been the death of me in the system. They use SQLite to format the data coming in but their out-of-the-box data filtering overrides all SQLite filters. It's been super frustrating trying to get the data we want.

Puntos a favor

Grow is great for creating dashboards to summarize information from various resources, other databases, spreadsheets etc. It's helpful to summarize and edit the data to help people visualize the information.

Puntos en contra

You need to have a good grasp of computer programming to fully take advantage of all the features Grow has to offer. Its not for the most novice users.

Puntos a favor

Can do almost anything with patience and logic, no need to distract developers to assist with complicated data queries. Customer support is outstanding, always taking the time to properly understand and help address anything you throw at them - very solution-focused.

Puntos en contra

Can be a bit buggy at times, especially after big releases, requiring more attention than I would like towards "fixing" metrics that were previously working fine. Can also be very slow with large data sets, some of which are just too big for it to handle.