Item: Chartio (discontinued)
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Chartio

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our ultimate goal is to place reporting into the hands of our employees. We want to dispense with having a single team in charge of writing reports across the entire company. What Chartio has allowed us to do is put a user interface in front of all of our teams, across the company, and have them easily create or monitor data that is appropriate for their individual goals.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Clean data representation. Once built, the charts and dashboards are very pleasing to look at and easy to understand.
Great customer service. If there is ever something that I realize I need, but the product doesn't have yet, I can contact Chartio directly and they usually implement a solution for my particular need.
The data transformation steps while writing charts are very useful. You can reorder and rename columns, pivot your data, add extra filters or groups, etc. What is really helpful is that you can preview your data as you're transforming it.

Cons

There is not a last full month date range option. You can still get the range that you need, but the dashboards will have to be manually updated to exclusively display one whole month.
When building a chart, the area which displays your tables and fields is finite. You can't adjust the size to make it easier to see. They do allow a mouse-over to see the entire name of your table/field, but I would prefer to adjust the width.
Once you modify a query in the Custom Query tab, there doesn't seem to be a way to go back to using the U.I.

Alternatives Considered

Crystal Reports

We have an older version of Crystal Reports that just hung around as the company grew. Now that we have more users, it's not feasible to continue with the limited Crystal experts that we have in order to get reporting out across the entire company. What we were aiming for was a product that you could sit a regular user in front of and have them create their own charts with minimal help. The flow of the product allows for someone who has never seen the interface before to get what they need in a short amount of time. We weren't experiencing that with Crystal Reports.

Likelihood to Renew

Chartio allows the creation of teams. This means that you can create dashboards specifically for a department, put all of those employee email addresses in one list, and give them access to exactly what they need. It's very useful to have that transparency and ease of access. We have been very happy with the improvements that Chartio has made and expect there to be many more in the near future.

Likelihood to Recommend

This product is well suited for end users that don't want to get too in depth with reporting. The interface is simple and the default filter options are sufficient for a general report.

Example: Total Sum of Net Sales for all products sold in X State between dates X and X. If the need is for a more complex query, then there is the Custom Query option. This would be something that an administrator would have to police as having users writing their own queries could get really messy really fast.

I suppose the key questions to ask would be:

Do you need a product that will... display all relevant charts/reports in one consistent place? ... be simple for an end user to navigate? ...be web-based and remotely accessed?

Comments

Please log in to join the conversation

Chartio in Brief