Altair SLC (formerly the WPS industrial analytics platform, acquired by Altair in late 2021) is designed for data science and heavyweight data processing with the languages of SAS and R. Best known for its SAS language compiler, the software includes advanced graphical user interfaces, robust, high-performance data processing and production-ready application frameworks.
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Looker Studio
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Looker Studio is a data visualization platform that transforms data into meaningful presentations and dashboards with customized reporting tools.
WPS Analytics allowed our company's business users to keep using their existing programs while getting similar results with much less learning time. It's a great accomplishment when software for business users is changed—excellent relationships with providers and other salespeople. As a SAS user, I needed an interpreter for the SAS language, and WPS has more packages and a lower price than any other company I could find, so I decided to go with it.
Does great at open canvas editing and letting you fully customize without the need for a grid. It is democratizing self-service no-code analytics. You do not need to be a data or analytics engineer to get started, and you can go very far based on how intuitive and straightforward the UI is. Some of the biggest challenges with Looker Studio relate to user management/security, embedding options, and issue support. For a long time, every user needed to have a Gmail to invite them to view a dashboard via login, not sure if that has been improved yet. You can let any user view without logging in, but that is not always recommended due to security reasons. In terms of embedding, you can only iframe dashboards. More sophisticated BI tools let you embed elements via API or Javascript. Iframing dashboards also make drill downs and dashboard to dashboard navigation tricky/near impossible. There is also no ability to contact Google for support when bugs or outages happen. They point everyone to the Data Studio community. There is some ability to get in contact with Google if you have an enterprise-level contract with Google Cloud, but the path for support is very ad hoc and not always fruitful.
Currently, I barely encounter challenges when using WPS Analytics although I don't use it on a daily basis. There's no functionality or feature that needs more improvement.
It is the simplest and least expensive way for us to automate our reporting at this time. I like the ability to customize literally everything about each report, and the ability to send out reports automatically in emails. The only issue we have been having recently is a technical glitch in the automatic email report. Sadly, there is almost no support for this tool from Google, but is also free, so that is important to take into consideration
Google Data Studio has a clean interface that follows a lot of UX best practices. It is fairly easy to pick up the first time you use it, and there is a lot of documentation on line to help troubleshoot, if needed
I give it a lower support rating because it seems like our Dev team hasn't gotten the support they need to set up our database to connect. Seems like we hit a roadblock and the project got put on pause for dev. That sucks for me because it is harder to get the dev team to focus on it if they don't get the help they need to set it up.
I use a lot of data discovery and visualization tools at workstations to help me gain deep insights into data. WPS Analytics doesn't vary much from all the DVD tools that I have listed, I always go for the best.
Google Data Studio provides a great feature set considering its price point, especially when compared to commercial options from Microsoft and Tableau. While it may not be as versatile when it comes to working with and developing complex datasets, there is enough charm in its simple, easy-to-use UI to allow not-so-complex analytics to be conducted without having to hire a data analyst.
