Entrinsik Informer vs. Geckoboard

Most schools that use Colleague (the Student Information System) have either UniData or SQL Server as the back-end database. If a school is currently a UniData school but has plans to move to SQL Server in the relatively near future then I'd advise against moving forward with Informer until after the conversion to SQL Server. There is a tool that will convert some reports, but there are many instances where the tool won't successfully convert the report and it will need to be re-written.

Incentivized

A beautiful UI, with visuals that interest even those that hate staring at data. It's well suited for small to medium-sized businesses/corporations in which high-level sharing of data between teams is required -- the larger the distance between teams, the better as it's a great tool for level-setting on complex data. It would be less appropriate for small businesses, or those that do not need to summarize complex data to share with those not familiar with the data source

Incentivized

• Informer is pretty user-friendly. When teaching other employees how to use Informer, I typically don't have to repeat any steps or further explain how to do certain tasks because of how user-friendly it is.
• Reports in Informer are kept in a list that can be filtered by user, specific tags, or even by how recent the report was made or run. This makes it very quick and easy to find and run a specific report.
• Informer has many options for downloading the report output, including text (txt), comma separated values (csv), and even PDF.

Incentivized

• Simple to use and configure.
• A good set of pre-built integrations to pull data back and summarise on a dashboard.
• Excellent support! They actually respond when you ask them questions and are very thorough with their response.

• Informer needs more predefined date formats in its Column Display Editor. The existing 5 do not meet everyone's needs.
• It's a minor UI issue, but Informer's Edit Columns view stutters and displays empty space when scrolling left or right. It may be because I'm using Safari on Mac OS X, and Informer isn't designed for input devices that scroll with "momentum" (as Apple calls it).
• The Reports Listing takes longer to load reports than I believe it should. At least a progress bar displays to tell you when it's complete.

Incentivized

• Not a must have, but unless you are decent with CSS, some style options would be nice from the user end.

Informer has been handily meeting most of our reporting needs, and we've created a library of hundreds of reports that are used every day. They have a terrific support service to help when you have questions, and I've found them to be great at listening to what customers would like and adding new features. They are a small company that really listens and really cares, and I've been very pleased over the past few years getting to know them.

My company did not renew due to changes in the organization.

Incentivized

Since I don't know code, there are sometimes calculations that are beyond my knowledge to create. It would also be great to be able to format multiple columns at once (center, for instance), rather than having to format them individually.

Incentivized

With a simple interface and available templates, creating basic dashboards is easy. Obviously depending on the data you want to visualize, there may be higher learning curves. That being said, they have a huge amount of integrations and extensible frameworks. If you are using anything made in the past ten years there is an API function or integration that can get it talking to the platform. As such, it's pretty easy to hit the main data points you want and get it on a cheap display in front of your team.

Incentivized

We have 10 concurrent licenses and we average between 6-8 at any given time during the day; and we host the application.

Always able to get acceptable solutions in reasonable time from friendly support staff. Initial contact is always with knowledgeable person - not someone reading from a script trying to screen calls. Thanks Entrinsik for being in tune with my needs.

Incentivized

The support levels vary based on the level of plan that you have but that's to be expected. Virtually everything except the Enterprise plan has basic chat/email support. While they are responsive they are not going to be much assistance in helping you figure out API calls or implementing 3rd party integrations. That is to be expected and the support community can pretty much get you in the right direction if you look.

Incentivized

We bought the product on a Thursday morning, and we were writing reports on Friday afternoon. We did take about a month to manage the Mapping, Linking and Security to allow us to open it up across campus. We are now mapping from as many third-party vendors as we can to enable the creation of more ad-hoc reporting.

Our organization used to use the built in reporting tool for Datatel, but it required more knowledge about SQL so only a handful of users could actually use it. There was no customization of the output or ability to schedule the queries. If you wanted something more complex than what was available, then the programmers needed to write an extraction program to pull the data you needed

Incentivized

We are a Google shop and our Analytics and Reporting team have and use GDS. However, Geckoboard can output some of the same types of data (albeit maybe not as granular) and can be used by a wide swath of our users (including project managers, account execs, developers, etc.). We can also save and reuse boards for similar products and get our data in front of the eyes that need to see it quickly without a lot of fuss.

Incentivized

• We have definitely improved customer service due to better reporting using Informer. All departments are better empowered to help our students in a more timely and accurate manner.
• Using Informer has given us the ability to eliminate functionality within our ERP system and offload reporting to a data store instead of the transactional system. This has resulted in successfully upgrading our core systems and improved response times.

• While we originally used this as an internal IS tool, we eventually have expanded it to be used by nearly every department.
• Because pricing is monthly, we can grow or decrease our usage based on our current client needs.
• Because it is low cost and easy to deploy, we can utilize it in place of considerable resources in analytics and reporting by delivering snapshots of data without pulling reports.

Incentivized