Item: GoodData
Rating: 7
Author: Stijn Habekotté

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Currently, we're using it to enable the fast track of the development of an analytics cloud solution that is currently being used and will be used in the future by our customers in the library space. We have built our own SAP within Angular 15 and are using the GoodData backend to render the graphs on our dashboards. The dashboards are requested from the GoodData API, and we use that data to template our pages. Due to the fact that we have access to the GoodData backend, we can easily and quickly iterate the dashboards shown to our customers. To build all that ourselves would have taken significantly more effort and funding, and we shrunk our development time from an estimated one year to a little over four months.

We needed a quick way to go to market with a competitor product to accompany our own hardware; previously, this functionality was either not available to our customers or slow and feature-poor. Taking the development on ourselves made us more in control of the finished product.

Pros and Cons

Manageability
Customer support.
Feature updates.
Deployment flexibility.
Database support.

Angular UI kit support.
Angular UI kit documentation.

Return on Investment

We have been able to quickly go to market with a feature-rich version of our application.
The licensing costs are manageable but make our offering more expensive than alternatives.
The possibility to horizontal scaling with Kubernetes is a bright outlook for our business.

Usability

Because the documentation really coached us through the initial setup and configuration of the service, we ran a local Community Edition of the container on an EC2 instance within AWS. It's basically set it and forget it. We easily found a way to configure things with the API, so fresh configurations are easily accomplished due to the programmatic nature of the configuration.

Implementation

We started working with GoodData in early 2022; we did not buy a license until a couple of months later because it was in the Proof of Concept state at that time, from the time of the start of our development of the final product to its initial Minimally Viable Product was about four months since then we have added functionality to suite the needs of our customers.

Self-Service Analytics

We don't actually use GoodData for that purpose yet, however, this is an idea that has been floating around for quite some time, and it's possible we will in the future.

Key Insights

Do you think GoodData delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with GoodData's feature set?

Yes

Did GoodData live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of GoodData go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy GoodData again?

Yes

Alternatives Considered

I was only involved with the final selection and did not actually go into detail on other platforms, I did confirm the findings of my colleague, but I did have a hand in the final decision.

Other Software Used

JetBrains Rider, Slack, Docker

Likelihood to Recommend

I have to admit that our particular use case might not be ideally suited to use GoodData, what we have in our database is time series data, and the main advantage we were going for by using GoodData was time to market with a feature-rich and complete package for not only our customers but also our own staff who need to manage the dashboards for example. I do see the massive potential to eventually even use GoodData to analyze our own sales figures for example. We currently don't have any plans on doing that, but I think GoodData is perfect for situations like that.

Fast time to market with GoodData.

Overall Satisfaction with GoodData