Overall Satisfaction with Chartio
At Workiva, we are currently using Chartio to display KPIs and other research metrics in a dashboard format. The dashboard format makes information easier to consume on a regular basis, as well as, presenting during sprint reviews. The product is currently being used by our Product Management and User Experience teams, other departments are considering the tool for their own purposes.
- Constantly updating: many of the BI tools we looked at were slow to iterate on their product. This was a main selling point for us.
- Ease of Use: We have many users that are new to BIs tools and database management in general. BI software as a whole has a pretty steep learning curve for most people, but Chartio does a good job of making things easier all around.
- Database Support: It seems as though every department insists on storing their information using different databases. Chartio had support for everyone one we needed which was very helpful.
- Limited in-depth functionality: In speaking with our Data Science team, it seems Chartio is limited when it comes to more in-depth BI features. An example is the lack of ability to have complete control over queries: how often they fire, when they fire, which charts can refresh when, etc. Chartio has been improving on this, however.
- Limited Google Analytics control: In my speaking with the Chartio CSMs, this seems to be more on Google's end. Examples: The API doesn't fully pull in custom dimension names and query limits seem to still be imposed even though we have GA premium. Chartio does attempt to give workarounds like letting you rename the custom dimensions until they roll out a permanent fix.
I kind of hit on this earlier, but simply put: Usability. We were given tutorials by our Data Science team using Birst, and even they encountered a few hiccups explaining things: they use this everyday! We trialed Chartio with people having zero BI software experience and they took less than an hour to go off creating their own charts. Tableau was more expensive than we were looking to spend as this was a whole new undertaking.