Tableau Software Threatened? Rival Growing at 70% Just Raised $103M
forbes.com
forbes.com
First, Looker has two layers. The dashboard layer gives you tables, charts and filters. The explore layer allows you to go in and build your own pivot tables off the same underlying models. No other BI tool has built an explore layer that’s as successful in practice as Looker’s.
Second, the underlying model of both layers is written in code and under version control. This probably makes sense to most HN readers but in the BI world this is very contrarian. If you ask most business users who make BI purchasing decisions, version control and pull requests are the last thing they’ll ask for. But it turns out it’s exactly what you need to maintain a complex BI deployment.
Looker's visualizations, however, are very weak when compared to the competition. It's been their weakness for years now, and they've really failed to address it.
One aspect of Looker that I've also generally enjoyed is their on-boarding and support processes. They do a superb job at this and I feel like they should be a model for startups selling into B2B.
However Tableau has absolutely screwed up their evolution into a cloud-based service. The current single-user desktop software with client/server design is painful and archaic, and the Tableau cloud is just a hosted server run on undersized hardware. They are losing a lot of business renewals because of this, even if the consultancy and enterprise deals will keep going for awhile.
Have you tried looked at Tibco Spotfire? I'd say it's a very good match. I find it much more intuitive than Tableau.
I keep hearing that this is Tableau's big selling point. And yet, as exactly the kind of "non-technical" user coming from the world of Excel, it has been astounding to me just how user-unfriendly Tableau is.
Want to create a line chart? No clear way of doing it other than messing around with Tableau's implementation of pivot tables, randomly dropping metrics and dimensions into boxes until it resembles a chart.
Want to not guess blindly and follow Tableau's tutorials? Prepare to sign in on every single video tutorial page. Opened multiple tabs? You'll have to sign in on each one. Refreshing the page won't do anything.
I have no idea how they compete with something like PowerBI.
PowerBI has no Mac app and supports less data sources, with all the same frustrations of client/server design.
PowerBI feels so Microsoftish, I'm really on the market for something else
1) You have this problem regardless
2) Huh? Why not just the cloud version? Are you trying to report directly on a productive transactional database for a software app? See #3 about source of data.
3) Depends on your source data. I build a dashboard for sales in with data from SalesForce in like 2 hours.
The adoption has been extremely painless and business users are very comfortable creating reports and discovering new ways to represent their data.
In response to your points above... 1) A consultant is not required to set up visualisations. With minimal training (a few hours) most users understand the fundamentals and are ready to go.
2) We use AWS Redshift. You have the option to import data into Power BI or do a direct query from the cloud platform to Redshift with odbc.
3) what are you trying to do with the API? To automate reports you normally set up a gateway connection to your data source and schedule the refresh in powerbi cloud. No API required normally.
It also can use office 365 or Azure AD for single sign on, making sys admin activities a breeze.
Send me a message if you want to discuss anything specific and I'd be happy to help you out.
I believe this is a misunderstanding. You can totally connect to AWS databases with PowerBI, assuming your AWS database is routable. You can't set up the connection through the web interface, but you can use PowerBI Desktop to set up virtually any database that has an ODBC driver as a source[1]. And once you publish it to the Azure-hosted PowerBI instance, it'll use that connection string to connect directly to the data source and automatically update/refresh like any other data source.
As for a VM running Windows Server - that's the option if your AWS database isn't routable by the Azure-hosted PowerBI service. You install a gateway for PowerBI to hop through, and configure all of the data sources within that gateway. That way your internal AWS databases are not publicly routable, and you can lock down and centralize the connection between PowerBI and AWS via that gateway box[2]. Data Gateway is a Windows-only application at the moment, so that part is a pain. But it's a relatively minor pain in the grand scheme of BI implementations.
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/desktop-connect-to...
[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-gateway-ge...
On that note, you don't have to use the official data gateway application. It certainly has a lot of ancillary benefits, but isn't critical. You can just as effectively create a bastion linux host and use ssh to remote forward the connection to AWS database[1]. I've done that plenty of times in the past, to access databases like Redshift and Dynamo that were within non-public VPCs. Easier to manage and cheaper to run per client, if that's a hard requirement.
You could also use something like QuickSight, if you're purely AWS. But I'd only recommend that if you expect to allocate a large amount of development resources for support. PowerBI is a lot more user friendly for business users to be self-sufficient, and sometimes it's less of a hassle to deal with the up-front complexity of that than to deal with the non-stop application support needs of business users.
[1] https://www.ssh.com/ssh/tunneling/example#sec-Remote-Forward...
2) PowerBI uses AWS just fine, you may need a gateway depending on how you expose your AWS DB for external access, but that'd be true of any tool connecting to it.
3) why an expert? Here's the API spec, it's not hiding ...
Here's a customer case study we've just published recently: https://www.holistics.io/customers/floship-ecommerce-fulfill...
Love to get your feedback on how you find us relative to the tools you are currently evaluating! Send me a note at v(@@)holistics.io or our team at hello(@@)holistics.io]!
As a former customer of Tableau, it feels like this has already happened right? I worked at a company where many teams used it, and there were zero defenders of Tableua when it came time to decide whether to renew...it's a mess, especially on Mac.
Any tool that has a purely web based design UI is not limited to an OS, so the alternatives would have to supply a native Mac design tool as Tableau does.
Does anyone else think Forbes should do more to separate volunteer content from editorially directed and reviewed journalistic content? Or is this just a moot point since folks don't trust "Forbes" as a brand?
It feels like, to me, someone saying "I went to Stanford" in a conversation because they walked on the campus. Just because Forbes hosts the content doesn't mean it's at the same quality as a true Forbes spawned story.
Since the Forbes.com front page appears to now be almost 3/4 contributors, I guess it's working for them. Still feels wrong.
That's the stage I've been in for a while now. Forbes.com now has the same value to me as Huffington Post or Inc.com. It's a content mill with no clear brand voice that anyone can write for.
Looker raises 103 million in a series E to compete in enterprise BI.
Like what does that actually mean? For all we know they went from $100k to $170k in revenue while raising $100 million dollars. It could either be very impressive or just lame click bait to inflate a company they invested way too much money in.
Not just the content. I went on the page and a huge 3/4 page banner scrolled my view, then another popped into the side, then Forbes had a pop over asking for my email.
Yikes!
'...Looker is trying to become cash flow positive -- and its revenues are growing faster than its headcount. "We have visibility to cash flow break even over the next couple of years. We plateaued in spending. We now have 600 employees and expect to add 200 in 2019. We are seeing our cash burn rate decline," he explained.'
Looker doesn't threaten Tableau. It doesn't need to--at least for now. The space is growing at a crazy rate.
Unlike Looker or Tableau, it requires users to know SQL.
That said: if you're an org where the business people know SQL or are willing to learn--Mode is clean, simple, and super powerful.
My company had a great experience with this. Our COO was super proficient with Excel. I showed him basic SQL, he loves it and has learned quickly. The jump from Excel power user to SQL user is totally doable, and probably most people making custom reports are already at least in the former category!
Additionally, a few of us have substantial Pandas experience: Mode makes it trivial to go from SQL to a Jupyter like notebook w Pandas, Matplotlib, seaborn etc all already there--no need for Python version or dependency hell. Zero devops at any layer below the raw datastore (MySQL / Redshift / etc).
It's really nice. You write code purely against open standards--SQL, pandas etc. Looker uses a proprietary query language, LookML. I am not tempted to go learn it.
[2017](https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/gartner-positions-m...)
[2018](https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/gartner-recognizes-...)
Personally I am surprised by lots of the "state of the art" options out there where the result is EITHER ugly or HARD TO USE.
We still have a ways to go, but you can create good looking, interactive dashboards with our platform very easily.
Here is an example of a dashboard with NFL data: https://chart.ly/dashboards/nfl-stats-dashboard
[1] https://chart.ly