ThoughtSpot - from a user/admin perspective
February 06, 2018
ThoughtSpot - from a user/admin perspective
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with ThoughtSpot
We are using ThoughtSpot throughout the organization. I've personally trained our call center supervisors in the use of the tool along with retraining our corporate users repeatedly. I am the in-house expert on ThoughtSpot.
Our main use case is research and ad-hoc exploration. Tasks that would take hours to days previously are completed within 1/2 hour and span millions of rows of data in the process. Specifically, we are speeding up our access to data (user license limitations are removed with ThoughtSpot) and speed of insight (e.g. ad hoc exploration).
Our main use case is research and ad-hoc exploration. Tasks that would take hours to days previously are completed within 1/2 hour and span millions of rows of data in the process. Specifically, we are speeding up our access to data (user license limitations are removed with ThoughtSpot) and speed of insight (e.g. ad hoc exploration).
- Millions of rows via in-memory database creates quick-insight/access to data
- No user license restrictions (license is based on data loaded to the instance)
- Easy Google-like interface for querying data
- Simply put, ThoughtSpot is a new product. formatted/pixel-perfect reports are not what ThoughtSpot is good at.
- Limited app-level administration controls.
- Limited in allowing modification to "loaded" tables. For example, a DBA likes fields in a proper order. ThoughtSpot relies heavily on unchanged table structures (assigned by guide) and so new field adds must be added to the end or all relationships and reports are invalidated. This is not the end of the world.
- SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform and Tableau Desktop
In ad-hoc reporting...ThoughtSpot is superior in speed-to-results. The other products are capable, however, they require SQL coding and setup that ThoughtSpot only requires on initial load of data. Both PowerBI and ThoughtSpot use a text-based "natural language" query engine, however, PowerBI forces the user within a very narrow dataset path, whereas ThoughtSpot will allow broad queries across all tables (just don't select any data sources).