Likelihood to Recommend It makes creating queries very easy for end users so not only research or technicians can do it. The availability for creating Live reports that are accessible via Excel on the network has given many of our users the ability to get the information they need in a format they can use without needing someone to translate the raw data
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Simple user-interface: Informer is relatively easy to learn and end users can begin running reports and creating new reports quickly. Email "burst" functionality: This feature allows emails to be sent out based on data in the report. So for example, a report could be scheduled that would email all student employment managers listing out the specific employees that report to them that haven't submitted their time sheets. Each manager would only see the rows that correspond to their email address. Analytics and grouping: Users can quickly drag columns to group and sub-total, and can use the analytics tab to get deeper insights into the data. Read full review User self-help - the video tutorials and a robust publicly accessible knowledgebase. Geckoboard can aggregate data from a number of other apps into a singular dashboard. Sleek, dark UI. Read full review Cons There are a lot of reports that we have in Informer that say they have never been run, even though I know they have been run. So that makes it really difficult to determine which reports can be deleted to keep a tidy report list. The only other complaint I have about Informer is that there doesn't seem to be a properly detailed error code/message when the student information system can't be accessed. For example, I am currently trying to move Informer to its own standalone server and I get an error message saying that our license isn't valid. Informer Support sent a new license, which prompted the same message, and the only explanation they have given me is that Informer can't reach the student information system. I would think that if that were the case, the error message would say that instead of an invalid license. Read full review A bit more flexibility in the number of columns would be nice. Ability to scale to mobile device (web). App capabilities are missing on Android. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Informer has been handily meeting most of our reporting needs, and we've created a library of hundreds of reports that are used every day. They have a terrific support service to help when you have questions, and I've found them to be great at listening to what customers would like and adding new features. They are a small company that really listens and really cares, and I've been very pleased over the past few years getting to know them.
Read full review My company did not renew due to changes in the organization.
Jordan Zwick Business Analyst (Business Development/Market Valuation)
Read full review Usability From the perspective of the new user and a seasoned user I would say eight would represent both parties. It presents a 'familiar' interface and easy to navigate display. Tagging is quite nice and allows for organization of reports based on those tags. These have to be monitored like anything else to keep them consistent but provides a better than average means of organizing reports.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Reliability and Availability We have 10 concurrent licenses and we average between 6-8 at any given time during the day; and we host the application.
Read full review Support Rating I would have given 10 but no one and no system is perfect. The only issue with support is not the staff nor the response but the support Wiki and support pages in general run very slow at times. I believe this has been addressed by the company but the technical speed of the pages have been an issue.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating We bought the product on a Thursday morning, and we were writing reports on Friday afternoon. We did take about a month to manage the Mapping, Linking and Security to allow us to open it up across campus. We are now mapping from as many third-party vendors as we can to enable the creation of more ad-hoc reporting.
Read full review Alternatives Considered I have experience with Advizor AnalystX, and it was just awful. It is advertised as an interactive reporting tool, in which you can use your mouse to select and segment constituents by where they live (by clicking on a map), how much they've given to your institution, when they last gave, etc. In practice, their map feature was unusable; it's a static map image (imagine a paper map hung on your wall), rather than draggable and zoomable Google Maps, and it required hours of work to configure one map region. As far as computing constituents' giving statistics, it required way too much back-end work to build simple giving totals.
Read full review Domo is more robust. We do use both because Geckoboard is really easy to show the rest of our team without the need for additional licenses.
Read full review Return on Investment We have definitely improved customer service due to better reporting using Informer. All departments are better empowered to help our students in a more timely and accurate manner. Using Informer has given us the ability to eliminate functionality within our ERP system and offload reporting to a data store instead of the transactional system. This has resulted in successfully upgrading our core systems and improved response times. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots Entrinsik Informer Screenshots