Show HN: Build auto-updating dashboards in a spreadsheet
equals.app
equals.app
My co-founder and I started Equals to build the data tool we always wished we had as part of the early Intercom team. We found no matter which new BI tool we adopted, we’d ultimately end up back in a spreadsheet. Yet, we’d then come back to the BI tool for easy access to live data.
So - Equals is a spreadsheet with live data. Equals has native connections to databases, data warehouses, and other data sources. You can write SQL directly in the spreadsheet to pull in data from your database, or you can write Python/Javascript to pull data from any API. We launched the core Equals product about a year ago.
Today we’re launching Dashboards. With Dashboards you can hook in multiple data sources at once and build charts and tables that auto-expand. As your data updates, so does your spreadsheet and dashboard. We believe this is the simplest and most flexible tool for founders to stay on top of their business.
We’re still super early and so would love to hear your feedback on the product.
Ben
We do have a few enterprise customers who were satisfied with our security after digging in. We're SOC 2 Type II, etc.
Edit: Just had time to go through the site, SSO would be important for enterprise.
Are these dashboards able to be used with any UI elements to filter down certain criteria? Say your dashboard chart shows all widgets, but you want to see certain widgets rather than all. I'd love to enable my team, who would ideally be viewers, to have a dropdown selection or something similar, to then filter the chart by what they need to see.
One of the Tableau features I like is the ability to export the data that was used to calculate the dashboard. Plus with the filtering capabilities it allows my team to get out what they might need to then use as needed. Anything like that available in Equals? I really dig the Hubspot integration because Hubspot integration with Tableau is a real pain in the ass.
In terms of exporting the data, you can export to a CSV but typically you don't need to do this step to debug something. The biggest difference from Tableau is we are actually a full featured spreadsheet. You can do any investigation you want to do within Equals itself. When we want to go deeper on some dashboard we tend to make a copy of the document in Equals and dig in from there.
Do you offer any discounts for non-profits?
1. I want to add GA as a datasource but I'm stuck on unique page views and can't seem to change anything outside of the date range
2. The help center article on GA has a broken link: https://help.equals.app/en/articles/6584898-add-a-google-ana...
3. The UX is a bit unclear and the upgrade path isn't straightforwardly accessible for a free user in the workflow.
I'm glad you launched and I'm looking forward to using it. Hit me up if you need more feedback.
GA datasource is most primitive today, only supports unique pageviews. An expanded one is being built currently, will be out in a few weeks.
Could you share a bit more on #3?
I'd suggest removing GA from the site as a feature or calling out the current limitations more clearly. While I could go get data out of BigQuery, that's more of a lift and the ease of using this to import GA for clients is a major draw.
Thanks for the quick response and I'm looking forward to using it more.
I loaded in around 100k rows and performance was fantastic.
I think the only feature so far I haven't found is whether there is a way to join tables together in the app. With SFDC particularly it doesn't seem to have an option to write the SOQL query directly, and I can't access relationships with the field builder, so I have no easy way to do a client side join (apart from a ton of VLOOKUPs which is not ideal)
I do love how calculated columns stay even after I re-query the source data, that and the auto-expanding are killer features.
Super exciting product, very polished, I can't wait to see where it goes.
PS. $18/mo for the pro version with scheduled queries is an absolute steal
Joins are coming very very soon. Stay tuned.
I've just given it another go with Airbyte Cloud and I think some of the issues I had have been fixed (I remember back when I tested it was pretty clunky to select tables to sync with hundreds of custom tables) because I didn't have any major problems.
One thing that is a showstopper that is probably very specific to my use case is it doesn't allow you to filter tables before syncing, my client has offices worldwide but I mostly work within a couple regions so some of the tables I want to sync I would like to put a filter on as they have a "Market" custom field for the country.
I can of course just sync everything and then filter on the destination but as a consultant I'm wary to sync data that I have no business working with, plus it would increase the data size of the sync massively.
Overall I do love airbyte though! it's a great tool, and I use it for other data sources, just didn't work for me in this specific case
EDIT: I just noticed I was unnnecessarily harsh in the parent comment, I was more thinking about other tools that have very basic SFDC integration (only standard tables, no custom tables/fields) – airbyte's integration is overall good, it just didn't work for my specific usecase
Separately how does the SQL querying work? Do you just pass the query along on the connection to an external database or are you running a query engine on the data that's available to the app?
Today we have a cap of 200k rows per sheet – this is a level where we feel performance is acceptable. We actually just doubled the limit from 100k and we have a plan to get to 1M rows by EOY. Definitely some meaty performance work here but it's tractable.
For SQL querying, you set up a connection to your SQL database in Equals and then we pass queries to your database. Query results are copied into the spreadsheet where you can use full spreadsheet formulas, pivots, etc. against it.
I'd be interested in that product if I can figure out how to bring the data from a self-hosted MSSQL database into it somehow, and refresh it regularly without too much trouble. Perhaps I could whitelist IP addresses in our firewall to allow the site to connect to the database.
Another problem is about sharing the dashboard; we are a Ms365 business. Could we re-use those logins to log into shared Dashboards? I'm mostly concerned about the ease of viewing those Dashboards from the end-users' POV (our internal employees).
Unfortunately we don't support signing in with MS365 accounts. But we do allow you to turn on "auto-join from my domain" so anyone with a verified email at your domain can automatically join your Equals account.
One of my big features this quarter is to get deep into dashboarding/reporting for my own saas and I am incredibly impressed with your UI/UX.
Shameless plug here: take a look at our https://www.seektable.com, especially if you're interested in pivot tables (and affordable pricing, of course!).
Few differences I'd call out:
- If you have summary tables with formulas we'll auto-extend those tables as we see new periods in your data. e.g. If you have "revenue by month" calculated using SUMIFs on top of charge data and we see a new month, we'll copy your formulas down/across.
- Any charts based off those tables will also update. Sheets doesn't do either of these things.
- Finally, people who've switched from Sheets have found our query UX to have much tighter iteration loops by being more deeply integrated into the product.
I'm using a JavaScript interface to JDBC. It's left to the developer to find this scripting system (GAS), stitch the pieces together, figure out where the Google vs JDBC docs connect, etc. Getting auto-complete and syncing in my IDE was a lot of work and research. Google has their own sync tool which is basically a git work-a-like that you have to use in tandem with git.
It's powerful but there's nothing friendly about it.
What is does have is -- all the users already know Google Sheets. So they have this big system they already know that they can use with the data my code populates. That includes all the export features Google Sheets has. Buy in from management is easy, since it's a platform everyone knows and we're already paying for it.
You have to weigh your tradeoffs.
- NocoDB
- Baserow
- Rowy
Same with scraping data from LinkedIn or anywhere, really.
I'm using Chrome 110.0.5481.100 (Official Build) (x86_64) and macOS 10.15.7
First, we have a generous free tier. The free tier includes all but two features, 3 editors, and unlimited viewers.
Beyond that, the main difference is that Equals is a full-featured spreadsheet. You have full Excel/Sheets compatible formulas, pivot tables, formatting, etc. Along with connections to all SQL databases and SaaS tools like Salesforce and Hubspot.
Today's launch adds the ability to build auto-updating dashboards on top of our spreadsheet – but, for example, should you want to do a deep dive on an anomaly on a dashboard, you can do that right in the same tool. Something that gets tricky after a certain point of complexity in tools like data studio.
This is working beautifully for BI applications in my company within our existing GSuite environments.