Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Create dashboards from a variety of data sources. Set & track goals based on the data and metrics provided. Send alerts and scorecard updates to Slack and email automatically. Read full review Self-service Easy to use, point and click Little to no training required Easy to share internally and externally Rich visualizations Canned reports Easy to copy/paste/dupe existing reports Ability to join data sets Easy integration with various data sources Flexible data integrations, including lowest common denominator (CSV, XLS, G-Sheets) Wide range of APIs Secure / authentication via Google SSO Easy to share / re-assign ownership of reports and data sources Read full review Cons 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 Read full review Few functionalities are very exclusive only for data studio. It's time taking to load data and at the same time only single Data source can be connected. When editing the reports you have to switch between Edit and View mode to see how does the change looks like. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review 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
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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
Read full review 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.
Read full review Return on Investment It has helped us to show our value to clients Easily digestible dashboards make it easy to understand what you're looking at Read full review Free, so the only investment is time Because it doesn't have native support of non-Google sources, it can cost more money than Tableau The time spent formatting the templates or building connectors can have a negative impact on ROI As a agency, charging for the reporting service is profitable after the first month or two after building the dashboard. Read full review ScreenShots