BrightGauge vs. OpenText Magellan

Any data-driven business that requires metrics and performance benchmarks, that need to drill into data for analysis, should use Bright Gauge. If you don't require data that can be displayed in a meaningful way, and that's not important to your business, then this product is probably not for you; otherwise, it's great.

If you do not have a large budget and are a large organization, I would steer clear of Actuate. If you are looking to do very complex washboarding, I would not use them. Your developers have to be very skilled to work with this. Plan to bring in consultants if necessary to help your process. Adhoc reporting is weak. If your pricing is user based and you expand, this could be very expensive.

• Near real-time data in dashboards is a game changer for decision making
• Easy of setup of gauges, dashboards and reports makes the product versatile
• Automated scheduled reporting increases visibility and reduces workload.

• The report outputs can vary across different types such as HTML, PDF, and Excel
• Their open source offering is very sufficient
• There are great boards and blogs for developers and engineers to expand and use their features.
• The people from the company that I've worked with are professional and courteous.

• Support quality has decreased since BrightGauge was acquired by Continuum then ConnectWise.
• It would be helpful to be able to change multiple similar gauges at one time, as opposed to individually.
• Reporting system could be improved. At the moment, I am not comfortable scheduling reports to be sent to customers.

• The documentation on all the available features, but most importantly on the scripting side, can be improved
• The standard look & feel of some basic options, like parameter selection or sorting and filtering, looks dated and can't be customized
• The server portal needs to provide better tools
• More integration is needed with other OpenText products

I am no longer working for the company that was using Actuate but I believe they would continue to use it because the stitching costs would be to high. It would require a complete rewrite of the reports and the never version of Actuate (BIRT) even required an almost complete report rewrite

Usability is BrightGauge's strength. Granting the ability of virtually any user to be able to create a dashboard is incredibly valuable. If an organization very simple and straight forward reporting needs then BrightGauge is a perfect fit for them. Connecting to the dataset we used was very quick and easy and I imagine it would be the same for any major data source you would like to pull from.

It is quite intuitive to use. It is fit specifically for doing sentiment, emotion, and intention analysis as well as text classification and text summarization. I would have given 10 if it is fit for the purpose of doing image processing and analysis as well. There is a huge market to analyze video and image data.

We did not need to use BrightGauge's support for the entire time that we used it. Best support is always the one that isn't needed because nothing breaks.

Always there on the front and backend for us and the client.

We looked very briefly at Solar Winds, but due to Connectwise the reporting was not very accurate and was conflicted.

It is vastly superior to these in many ways, for complex reporting it is a much more sophisticated solution. Visualizations are very good. Javascript extensibility is very powerful, others don't support this or as well. Pentaho and MS are both OLAP oriented. Pentaho is moving more toward big data, which was not our primary focus. Others are stuck in the Crystal Reports Band metaphor.

• ROI can be difficult to measure specifically on a tool like this, but quicker, easier access to information is key.
• Decrease workload and time in creation of reports has definitely created an ROI.

• Actuate can handle 50 to 60 sub reports inside a report very well.
• Dynamically creating the datasource, chart, graph, reports are the main advantages. We can do any level of drilling, and can create a performance matrix dashboard efficiently.