Databox is business intelligence software built for teams that need fast, actionable insights.
$199
per month
Geckoboard
Score 9.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Geckoboard enables users to create real time dashboards using data from over 80 cloud services. It integrates with other products such as: AWeber, Basecamp, Campaign Monitor and HubSpot.
$35
per month
Tableau Public
Score 9.9 out of 10
N/A
Tableau Public is a free edition of the Desktop product. With this edition, data can only be published to the Tableau public website and does not allow work to be saved or exported locally.
Much cheaper and seems to do at least as good of a job while having a similar integration stack. I also appreciate the efforts Databox go to on their blog and podcast to help educate people on all things data and metrics.
I believe Databox can be an asset for any company. We are a small company, but I can see the value for large companies too. Databox is a great fit for departments or organizations that need to put their data into a readable form without needing a ton of reports. Databox allows you to save time and put together a nice report without having to do too much extra work. Once it is set up, it basically runs on its own at the frequency you set. I personally receive a daily report and have it sent to the respective people on the day of our meeting so we can quickly review it.
Great value for the money. Excellent for smaller agencies with multiple projects and teams in a smaller space. We can quickly roll out mobile displays to help with a particular deployment push or monitoring a clients website engagement. It's also useful for showing live data without requiring analytics to run reports from a CRM, etc.
Tableau public is the best platform to build dashboards for your personal profile and share with recruiters. It's always good to keep ourselves updated on the latest features, create sample dashboards and save them to a personal profile. Tableau public is free and doesn't need any subscription. anyone can create an account and start building reports.
Data visualization: lots of different options, including bar, scatter, pie, waterfall charts to explore relationships between variables, and to present findings/trends to different teams
Integrates readily with limited, though different data sources: TXT, CSV, TDE, Access
Exports reports for review of different dashboards: client-ready/team-ready, with a clean and tidy presentation in PDF format (or hardcopy)
Some types of data can only be reported on for 1-2 months back. Unless I'm misunderstanding the function of the software this seems really weird. I can't figure out how to report on Activities more than 2 months ago
Tableau Public (both Desktop and Server) like their "for a fee" counterparts offer very easy to learn and use tools to transform data into pictures and gain insights into your data. Most organizations report a reduction in development time of 10x vs. other similar tools, due to the intuitive user interface. That said, with Tableau Public, published workbooks are "disconnected" from the underlying data sources and require periodic updates when the data changes. Users are limited to 1 Gb of storage space per user ID and password as well.
I would like to see better options for public sharing of visualizations and data from within the "for a fee" products as more and more organizations are moving in the direction of data sharing with partners and their communities.
It's free, right? I'll keep using the free version. So the real question to ask is this? Will I pay $999 for the Personal version or $1,999 for the Professional? Yikes! That is a big stretch. I'm not sure about that. The product comparison chart is at: http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/comparison
Databox is an intuitive, well-designed platform that can be used by non-technical marketers. It is easy to learn, and while set up takes time, usability is high and the team has enjoyed creating custom dashboards and clients have also given us great feedback regarding its usability and value. While other BI tools are much more complex to navigate, Databox is a breeze.
With a simple interface and available templates, creating basic dashboards is easy. Obviously depending on the data you want to visualize, there may be higher learning curves. That being said, they have a huge amount of integrations and extensible frameworks. If you are using anything made in the past ten years there is an API function or integration that can get it talking to the platform. As such, it's pretty easy to hit the main data points you want and get it on a cheap display in front of your team.
Tableau public is a great training tool to understand the basics of Tableau before buying it. A great tool to extend Excel's visualization and to publish data for others. Not useful for anything you need secure. No ability to access databases. Static information only.
I have really enjoyed using Databox and have seen the value of it in many ways. They also continue to improve the functions of it and grow their integrations and templates. I look forward to continuing to use Databox in the future, potentially even finding ways to incorporate it into other departments to help them with reporting as well.
The support levels vary based on the level of plan that you have but that's to be expected. Virtually everything except the Enterprise plan has basic chat/email support. While they are responsive they are not going to be much assistance in helping you figure out API calls or implementing 3rd party integrations. That is to be expected and the support community can pretty much get you in the right direction if you look.
Start at the end and work backward. Identify the business case / issue and questions the end users have, then identify the data needed, and where to get it.
Databox is unique in its ability to report from multiple data sources. Google Analytics is the standard when it comes to web metrics, but it's just one of the tools that integrates with Databox. Tableau is fantastic for data visualizations and reporting, but it's much more expensive than Databox, so it's not ideal for everyone. Tableau is also superior with customization
Google Charts/Drive is sufficient for simpler data sets, but it does not integrate with other web platforms and the visualization does not look as professional. I'm not aware of any other competitors that offer the same package as Microsoft.
While we originally used this as an internal IS tool, we eventually have expanded it to be used by nearly every department.
Because pricing is monthly, we can grow or decrease our usage based on our current client needs.
Because it is low cost and easy to deploy, we can utilize it in place of considerable resources in analytics and reporting by delivering snapshots of data without pulling reports.
