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Comment by Achshar | Hacker News Reader

Me and My team have been working on a Looker alternative for a couple of years. Hope this is the right time to give a pitch. We as a company love to assist our clients with a free consultation in understanding their data better. This will take you to the direct demo: https://demo.katoai.co/login?email=demo@katoai.co&password=k...

I can talk a lot about it if anyone is interested.

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Interesting, the Meltano people would love to discuss on collaborating on an open alternative to LookML, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20115400

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Looks like HN hugged it too hard. We have a limit of once every 3 seconds.

That looks pretty much like a dress-up of Superset, intended to hide that it's superset.

We do a bunch of stuff superset doesn't. Mostly related to filters and how they're implemented. We never mess with user's query. We only supply filters to it. Superset doesn't let users write optimized queries. We replaced superset for one of our largest clients and they are extremely happy with the move. This is pure js as well, nothing like superset tech stack wise.

What is the target market? Can small business use this? Looks pretty cool!

The target market is anyone who has any kind of data. CSV, mysql, etc. Basically Tableau but much cheaper and customisable.

We already have a few small business using Kato. They seem to enjoy that.

> Basically Tableau

You mean Mode/Periscope/Superset/Metabase. I don't see anything that put's Kato near Tableau's offerings like Server, Prep etc.

Yes we probably lie close to Superset and Mode than we do to Tableau but I believe the data transformations, access level (sharing) and deep integration put us apart from those. Tableau's quite bit more mature than we are but we already support self hosted service, OAuth based auth integration, sophisticated user access level based sharing for all resources (reports, connections, users, dashboards, visualizations, product features, etc). We don't cost an arm and a leg either.

> data transformations, access level (sharing) and deep integration put us apart from those

I couldn't find anything about these features on my first pass, though I do now see the "Cleanup" bit on the "Data Visualization" page. I would have really liked to see more about features/tools/strengths and less nebulous marketing promises.

That... would be the marketing team for you. We do spend quite a bit of our time adding stuff that I don't think I've seen anywhere else but is extremely useful for some of our biggest clients.

> I don't think I've seen anywhere else

Market that stuff! Blog posts, list of features, service comparison - anything. For example, I know that Tableau offers in-memory storage that can help improve performance by bring data in locally and not hitting the original source. Kato mentions something about "10x performance improvement", but there's zero explanation how this is accomplished.

We have 3 different levels of storages to avoid hitting remote. Redis cache for query, storing the results on our server and letting users edit the data as well and finally front end cache with service workers.

I think I'll start writing out the feature comparisons.

what makes Mode/Periscope/Superset/Metabase the same category to you? Is it that they have SQL editing as a main entrypoint?

Out of those I only have substantial experience working with Superset. We replaced Superset for one of our biggest client a few months ago. We built a ton of features in the process. My take was that they ended up meddling with the user's query which raised issues with SQL injection and performance. For example filters only going on the end of the query.

In Kato filters can be replaced anywhere. Plus we offer a ton of integration and data manipulation features. One of the biggest things that the client really liked over Superset is the ability to set up drilldowns where when you click on a bar chart on any graph you can see further details about that bar chart in a table, or any other graph. And this drilldown can go however many levels deep. We can link different reports from entirely different datasources with drilldown. I don't think that's available in any of those mentioned above and it completely changes the user experience.

For small business you can also check our https://www.seektable.com (primarily for data crunching / reporting)

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