Item: Logi Info (Logi Analytics Platform)
Rating: 5
Author: David Williams

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our company uses Logi Info (Logi Analytics Platform) to provide dashboards, reports, embedded visualisations, and help customers make their own self-service reporting.

We primarily use two products in the Logi Analytics suite, Logi Info and Logi Composer. Logi Info is a web-app builder with XML-based config files and a series of visualisation widgets. We embed these Logi Info items into our core application, primarily with iframes.

Logi Composer is a more traditional BI style app where you make dashboards, reports, schedule reports, etc. - in this case, it is a separate portal/site for our customers to use.

Pros and Cons

Fast visualisation
Scheduled reporting
Putting user-specific custom variables into connection strings or queries to have individual reports tailor to many specific circumstances

Logi Info (Logi Analytics Platform) is NOT a BI tool, and there's a big misapprehension in many places that it is. Instead, it is a tool for making IIS-based web applications that happens to provide a series of BI-related widgets. It's not user-friendly, not intuitive, not awesome, and still needs a web developer to make CSS, JavaScript, and all kinds of things.
Logi Composer offers multiple 'accounts' to partition customer accounts and customer-created reports, BUT all the reports, visuals, data sources, and other items we make are account-bound too. So if we have a standard library of reports we have to either duplicate them for every account (and keep them updated), or we have to have all customers in one account and maintain permissions to hide their reports from each other.
Logi Analytics recently acquired another company / BI tool but don't package it as part of Logi Symphony - instead they want an extra fee if you're interested in checking it out.
While Logi Composer allows you to create custom visualisations, the tutorials online are out of date and still refer to ZoomData, the company Logi acquired which became Logi Composer.

Return on Investment

Logi Info (Logi Analytics Platform) helped the company embed visualisations into a core app, separating that functionality from the core dev team to a specialised team of BI people (who had to then learn/do front-end web dev to make Logi Info look ok)
Logi Composer instead was a much better experience, allowing us to provide a full-featured customer-facing BI portal where users can rapidly create and schedule reports and dashboards

Alternatives Considered

Tableau Desktop, Qlik Analytics Platform, SAS Viya and Microsoft Power BI

To be honest, Logi Info (Logi Analytics Platform) is the weakest of all these products BUT it can offer value if you have a team of web developers who want to add BI widgets, vs. having a BI team who are focused on making great visualisations.

Our company made the decision to procure Logi Info prior to my arrival. Two factors influencing that purchase decision were (a) the company executive believing Logi Info (Logi Analytics Platform) was a BI tool, and (b) Logi Info offering a competitive "all you can eat" license with unlimited users, web apps, and server installations - that latter part is something I agree is good.

Key Insights

Do you think Logi Info (Logi Analytics Platform) delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with Logi Info (Logi Analytics Platform)'s feature set?

Did Logi Info (Logi Analytics Platform) live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Logi Info (Logi Analytics Platform) go as expected?

Would you buy Logi Info (Logi Analytics Platform) again?

Other Software Used

Snowflake, Hevo Data, Microsoft SQL Server

Likelihood to Recommend

Logi Composer is the best of the product range that Logi Analytics offers; Logi Info is, in my mind, a terrible experience and should be discontinued. Logi Info is not a BI tool and many CEOs and product managers believe it is. Instead, it is a tool for web developers to create IIS apps with a library of BI-type components, and with everything else having to be hand-coded in JavaScript and CSS. Maybe this was cool back in the early 2000s when Logi Info came about, but today I'd recommend using Visual Studio, C#, .NET, and finding a NuGet package for your visualisations if you wanted to go the route of making your own web app.

This said, where it is suited is if you have a burning desire to make a stand-alone IIS-based web application and you don't need or want to leverage any existing skills in .NET or PHP or other frameworks/languages. Instead, you want to use the Logi Info XML-based BI widgets and you're happy to make something quick without needing it to look really awesome.

Usability

It's not visual, it's not intuitive, and it's not user-friendly.

Instead, you construct IIS web apps using an XML-based config language that embeds BI components. You still need to use JavaScript and CSS for major functionality and styling.

There is an editor, Logi Studio, which gives you a simple editor and some help on the Logi Info components, but it's far from an app builder.

Usability Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
None	Do not like to use Unnecessarily complex Difficult to use Requires technical support Not well integrated Slow to learn Cumbersome Lots to learn

Logi Info (Logi Analytics Platform) is a mixed bag, so go in with eyes open about what type of product it actually is

Overall Satisfaction with Logi Info (Logi Analytics Platform)