Item: GoodData
Rating: 6
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Internal reporting platform. Over 600 users on a daily basis across a wide range of subject matter, from revenue to website traffic, client contracts, product activity etc. We have multiple active workspaces with many dashboards that are used extensively

Helps us monitor and manage contract delivery/fulfillment as well has "health" of our various products and websites.
Provides supporting information for our sales team for new sales, cross sales, upsells and renewals of our subscription products

Pros and Cons

Ease of use when onboarding new users
Easy to build new dashboards (classic version)
performance for highly used reporting objects

would be nice to be able to add the same filter to a multi-tab dashboard once instead of having to do it for each tab; tedious and time consuming
Variable use is kind of clunky and would like to be able to hide/show easier
The newer insight based dashboard method does not have the flexibility classic does

Return on Investment

the platform has allowed us to deliver complex, multi-faceted dashboards to end users fairly quickly.
Adding to an existing model, can be more time consuming than preferred but overall has allowed us to provide a significant number of reports across a wide variety of subject matter, user roles, and use cases
The speed to get up and running has been great, much of our initial reporting from initial deployment 8 years ago is still stable and running smoothly with small maintenance requirements.
The platform has been able to handle our transition from on prem databases to cloud sourced and allowed loading the data to the same elements from both to satisfy the business needs.

Usability

It depends on your role too. For just end user, I would rate it higher, as getting in and using the dashboards, is pretty easy and intuitive. I give the lower rating from an Admin/Author perspective. There are some aspects of admin that are very easy and others that are just frustrating because they seem silly that they haven't addressed some of the clunky items. As an Author, for the most part it's pretty easy to use and get a something up and running but some things - like building metrics and the fact that they have their own "language" that you need to learn, can be challenging and not easy to pick up if you're marketing to less technical people. From an overall perspective, the product is pretty easy to use. But like with any any Application it has it quirks.

Implementation

it was within a few weeks we were able to start delivering reports. We transitioned off another BI platform so some effort involved on determining what we should and should not migrate. We did have some highly customized reporting initially that we engaged the professional services team to aid getting us up and running with ingesting data from Google Analytics and getting it to accurately report for a specific product we sell. In parallel, we also worked through a completely separate subject matter and got that workspace up and running with some initial reporting within the first six weeks of purchase. We were able to get three additional workspaces up an going within the first six months, with some highly complex models and robust end user dashboards

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

IBM Cognos Analytics and Tableau Desktop

I was involved in the decision making but not final decision maker. Ease of implementation for GoodData vs Cognos (used for 15 years in multiple companies). I think Tableau's visualizations are better, but there is much that just can't be done in Tableau that GoodData handles really well, like complex data models, sourcing from multiple platforms, performance, data volume. There are features I miss having from Cognos in GoodData, but modeling is easier in GoodData. Initially I wasn't sure how the RLOAP would play out vs the OLAP, but GoodData is easier to scale I think in that sense and you don't have to keep rebuilding a physical data cube. It took a little getting used to and definitely there are things I think they could do better, but as a platform we've used for the last 8 years, it has served us well.

Other Software Used

Tableau Server, Looker Studio, Qlik Sense

Likelihood to Recommend

I think GoodData is probably most well suited to companies or divisions that don't have a dedicated data team and where the admins of the system don't have a lot of technical expertise. I think it's less suited for companies that have highly complex data models and end use needs.
Some of their recommendations like limiting to 8 filters for a dashboard is ridiculous. We regularly use up to 20 because the demands of our business require it. I also feel like the developers should be attempting to use their product themselves for real use cases. I think they would have better insight to how some things can be clunky or frustrating.

Support Rating

Support team has been highly responsive and helpful from our first initial deployment to present day. They engage and work with us. know when to escalate for more challenging problems. They also follow up. Overall have had a very good experience with support

GoodData Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response	None

Overall delivers on scalability and end user adoption

Overall Satisfaction with GoodData