ClicData vs. Longview Analytics (arcplan)

We used ClicData dashboards in a somewhat unorthodox way: we used "Indicators", or icons within tables to represent data, and the results looked great. The ability to integrate 3rd party HTML into dashboards was valuable (although Clic Data correctly warns that response time may suffer). The ability to start small and release dashboards incrementally suited our needs very well. We also valued the responsive account team getting us quickly pointed in the right direction.

Incentivized

It is very suitable for complete corporate BI solutions. If you see BI as embedding information into your organization and business processes, and thus as more than just a few scattered dashboards and reports, arcplan is your platform. It's less suitable for ad-hoc reporting and data discovery. It can do it (everything is possible), but there is strong competition in this area.

• Ease of use, I can put together a dashboard in about an hour that is used by daily.
• Support, their support team is super helpful and always has detailed insight.
• Connectors, they have a huge number of connectors that allow easy integration of your data sources.

Incentivized

• Excellent dashboard.
• Well advanced BI metrics.
• Better interfacing to other DW.

Incentivized

• More widgets.
• Sometimes it takes a while to refresh.

Incentivized

• Positioning and marketing. Most BI vendors use a non-technical sales strategy and focus on shiny, sexy dashboards to sell the story. In order to position arcplan fairly and correctly, the technical and business advantages need to be part of a sales story. So, it is not really an easy product to sell to customers, if it has to compete with now-to-wow-five-minute products.
• Learning/training for developers. It's easy to learn the basics of arcplan, because the interface is logical. But nothing prevents a beginning developer from creating a monstrous application, because there is no prescribed architecture. It really takes some experience to become a good arcplan architect. It's a disadvantage resulting from one of arcplan's biggest advantages.
• Data connectors: arcplan standard comes with a connector of your choice. Additional connectors need to be purchased separately. Many other products come with a full range of connectors.

Like I mentioned before, the ease of use means we not only get very quick results and beautiful dashboards in minutes, it means my team is actually using it because they aren't frustrated in the learning curve or wasting time trying to accomplish simple tasks.

Incentivized

We've only needed support a couple times in the beginning as we were learning the system and how to display our data in interesting ways. Every time we reached out we got very detailed responses and were connected to someone that you could tell was very interested in making sure we were happy with how things were going.

Incentivized

ClicData was the most flexible. It is cloud-based and even has WebService access. You can publish your data for access from other applications. The sheer number of data connectors is amazing. The ability to not only create dashboards, but you can schedule them to be delivered to specific recipients on a scheduled basis via PDF or a static HTML page.

Incentivized

Personally, I prefer QlikView not because it's more stable but simply just for the looks of the dashboard. One of my clients in Sydney recently moved from arcplan to QlikView. The reason was mainly looks and that QlikView has more training materials for the support users to train with. So in all, it does not really stack well against QlikView.

Incentivized

• ClicData was by far the most reasonable cost-wise, and we were able to get ROI within just minutes of using it.

Incentivized