SAS Visual Analytics vs. Cyfe, by Traject

I was in a meeting with the client and there I have to show them some analytic data to them. But I was confused about how I will manage to show big data to clients with accuracy. But then the SAS Visual Analytics software helps me in presenting accurate data at the moment and it was very presentable and through that, I got the deal for that business.

Incentivized

Cyfe might be for you if you are looking for a cost-effective way to display all of your marketing metrics in one place. If you are looking for a detailed, fine-tuned, niche, or extremely specific metrics, this might not be the best solution. Cyfe is good for a general health check-up of marketing, but not a finely tuned examination.

Incentivized

• Provides the flexibility to the end user to slice and dice the data.
• Anyone can make predictive models with the help of in-built algorithms without the need to write a single line of code or knowledge of what's under the hood of algorithms.
• The feature to simply ask a question related to data and getting a response in form of text, chart or graph is amazing.

Incentivized

• Has preset metric groups that pull similar stats together in one "bucket" saving you the time of setting up each stat-line one by one
• Allows you to easily adjust the timeframe for what stats you want to see, so you can find YOY stats or just last month's stats rather quickly
• Colored visualizations of stats make it easy to notice when campaigns are taking off

Incentivized

• SAS is relatively expensive when compared to other BI tools and requires a large amount of upfront fee which becomes an issue for smaller organizations.
• UI for the dashboards looks a little date in comparison to competitors like Tableau and Microstrategy.
• Integration with other open source software like Python needs to be built in.

Incentivized

• I'd love to see additional functionality to customize colors. The light/dark option is very nice, but a little more flexibility in the colors would go a long way, especially if it was possible at the dashboard level rather than just the account level. Along the same lines, being able to customize the charts a little more, for example being able to show an x-axis on single data type graphs, could make them easier to read in some cases.
• Being able to choose to report on converted clicks or conversions in AdWords would be helpful.
• Needs the ability to show the date range on the shared URL dashboards. Would be even better if the date range was adjustable on that view, too.

SAS really is the cutting edge in Business Intelligence. That is all they do! They are constantly coming out with new products, product upgrades, and their tech support is second to none. In addition, their support of Education has made our ability to acquire their product possible.

It has become a part of our internal tools so unless a competitor comes out with similar functionality as a similar price point it is unlikely that we would not renew. One area that would cause us not to renew would be if a competing service came out with more third-party integrations that match our needs. Price at this point is no longer an issue as it would allow us to automate a somewhat manual process that we have now connecting Cyfe widgets to Google Sheets.

SAS BI is good for creating reports and dashboards and then sharing it with the users. It also has ability to manage access to the reports and dashboards but somehow with most of the world moving to open source languages R, Python and Julia, SAS BI feels to be archaic in terms of feature set and integrations it allow[s]. Also, comparing it with other Business Intelligence tools like Tableau and Microsoft BI, the functionality of SAS BI is very limited and doesn't justify the pricing.

Incentivized

I gave it a rating of 7 because it does a good job at what it does, but there are missing that are missing which I would have benefited from. For instance, if I was able to drill down more on the specific metrics I was able to see, that would have been helpful.

Incentivized

When you call tech support, you are immediately routed to a person who can answer your question. Often they can answer on the spot. However, if they cannot, you are given a track number and then followed up with. There have been times when I have had multiple track numbers open and they will actually TRACK YOU DOWN to ensure that your problem has been resolved. Issues do not fall into black holes with SAS. They are also willing to do a WebEx with you to diagnose the problem by seeing your environment, which is always helpful.

Because I had a very minor question and I was able to speak directly to the founder through LinkedIn and through email. I know that as they grow this may not always be an option but the fact that he made himself available to answer my questions said a lot about his passion for the product.

Cyfe is a 15 minutes implementation, then some time to get your data sources created. This is an easy one person job that will not result in down time or unnecessary wasted man hours.

I have used Crystal Reports, Jaspersoft and SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). I would recommended Business Intelligence over SSRS and Crystal Reports. SSRS is very SQL-centric and Crystal Reports is more of an end-user tool. I would recommend Jaspersoft over Business Intelligence for developing a seamless web-based reporting interface but I highly recommend Business Intelligence for end-user ad-hoc reporting.

Incentivized

The Salesforce dashboard is comparably flexible and intuitive, but designed more to its internal CRM focus. SumAll shares the social media dashboard capabilities, but lacks all others. Its interesting feature is side-by-side graph analysis for cross-channel performance. Cyfe might borrow from SumAll's default weekly email summary of performance from the dashboard, but implementation could be too complex. Nuvi dashboard is exclusively for social media marketing, but lacks Cyfe's flexibility for third party integration and window customization settings.

• SAS Visual Analytics licensing cost should be reduced to enable users to use it in mass scale.
• More statistical and mathematical equations and theories should be converted into SAS functions for reusing.
• Because of enriched ETL and reporting capabilities SAS Visual Analytics is most preferred by business users.

Incentivized

• Cyfe allows us to provide real time data to our clients
• Cyfe allows us to provide detailed analytics to our clients showing actual results
• Cyfe reduced our need to provide monthly "reports" to our marketing clients
• Cyfe allows us to have better situational awareness and know what is going on throughout our multiple organizations