Great first time tool. We used it for a while, and eventually moved away.
Overall Satisfaction with Chartio
We purchased Chartio as an internal BI tool to provide teams external to the data engineering team access to reporting data. We did this for the purpose of ad-hoc analysis. We are a smaller company, so we used Chartio to build visualizations relevant to other teams that they can access and then use in their day-to-day. For example, we would build dashboards that the customer success team could use in their QBRs. In reality, it was meant for the entire org to use, but it ended up being used by engineering and product and consumed by other teams.
Pros
- Really easy to get going. We tested many solutions - and Chartio is by far, the quickest. Took us a legitimate 30 minutes from nothing to up and running.
- Chartio visually illustrates your database structure. This is phenomenally helpful for users who need to understand how to join tables and get the data they need.
- The UI is pretty typical of other tools, so there's not an additional learning curve if you've used other BI tools. It's actually more simple than most, but still pretty similar.
Cons
- Slow - the queries aren't optimized for speed. In order to combat this, you may need to build aggregate tables for date ranges and typical calculations.
- Expensive. We negotiated down to $25k a year. That's pretty typical for BI tools, but the value ended up not being equal to $25k.
Initially, we selected chartio because it was the easiest to connect to data and get going making visualizations. Ultimately, we moved away from Chartio because we needed a tool that would work as a buffer between our data structure and the visualizations. But majority of BI tools have this same problem.
Comments
Please log in to join the conversation