Ask HN: Why is there no good business dashboard creation tool? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is there no good business dashboard creation tool?

6 pointshajrice8 comments

I've tried Geckoboard, and a couple hosted options aswell. They all seem to be rather simple, but are too much work if you want it to display and work your way.

What (hosted/open source) tool do you use for your business dashboard?

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I think there are a variety of vendor front-end tools that are basically fine. Pentaho, whatever Corda is these days, even the YC start-up chart.io

Then you have all the enterprise-y stuff, Crystal, Oracle's Warehouse Builder, Business Objects, blah, blah, blah.

After a long time, I have kind of come around to the idea that lots of dashboard/BI value is really provided by the implementor, who both intuits what would be valuable to, you know, the business and that it is a "high touch" service. So online providers of just the dashboard designer/data integration are limited in what they can do in a cool, automatic fashion.

You might try Pentaho, particularly if you have db servers in-house. They have a free, community open source edition.

I suppose this space of hosted business dashboards is fairly new (2-3 years?) and services will improve. Last time I checked, Geckoboard wasn't allowing tables and arbitrary HTML. I also played with ducksboard and leftronic. Each of them have some strengths and some weaknesses. GB doesn't store your data while ducksboard does, GB is cheaper than other dashboards, leftronic has better maps than others etc.

Does anyone know of a dashboard that I can host myself?

Diego from Ducksboard here

May I ask you about your specific needs to host it yourself?

We are thinking about selling ducksboard as an OVA, but we want to understand better the needs first.

Thx! :)

If you've got a Microsoft stack at your business, the Microsoft BI system is actually pretty good. I've seen some fantastic graphs come out of it. My only problem is data resolution, and that it's high touch to create the dashboards.

QlikView. It's not free generally, but they have free desktop Personal Edition.

What are your data sources?

Mostly from the database, created by the application. Other than that, Mixpanel and perhaps Stripe, Google Analytics.

How do you look at your database metrics now? I'm building something for my Rails app, which I'll be happy to share.

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