Looker Studio vs. Cyfe, by Traject

Does great at open canvas editing and letting you fully customize without the need for a grid. It is democratizing self-service no-code analytics. You do not need to be a data or analytics engineer to get started, and you can go very far based on how intuitive and straightforward the UI is. Some of the biggest challenges with Looker Studio relate to user management/security, embedding options, and issue support. For a long time, every user needed to have a Gmail to invite them to view a dashboard via login, not sure if that has been improved yet. You can let any user view without logging in, but that is not always recommended due to security reasons. In terms of embedding, you can only iframe dashboards. More sophisticated BI tools let you embed elements via API or Javascript. Iframing dashboards also make drill downs and dashboard to dashboard navigation tricky/near impossible. There is also no ability to contact Google for support when bugs or outages happen. They point everyone to the Data Studio community. There is some ability to get in contact with Google if you have an enterprise-level contract with Google Cloud, but the path for support is very ad hoc and not always fruitful.

Incentivized

Cyfe might be for you if you are looking for a cost-effective way to display all of your marketing metrics in one place. If you are looking for a detailed, fine-tuned, niche, or extremely specific metrics, this might not be the best solution. Cyfe is good for a general health check-up of marketing, but not a finely tuned examination.

Incentivized

• Self-service
• Easy to use, point and click
• Little to no training required
• Easy to share internally and externally
• Rich visualizations
• Canned reports
• Easy to copy/paste/dupe existing reports
• Ability to join data sets
• Easy integration with various data sources
• Flexible data integrations, including lowest common denominator (CSV, XLS, G-Sheets)
• Wide range of APIs
• Secure / authentication via Google SSO
• Easy to share / re-assign ownership of reports and data sources

Incentivized

• Cyfe makes it easy to create a professional looking dashboards in a short amount of time. With so many built-in data sources and the intuitive nature of the interface, you can have beautiful looking charts and graphs in no time!
• One of the best features of Cyfe is the many data sources built-in and that each dashboard is not constrained to one source. One of the drawbacks I've seen in other tools is the limited ability to pull from multiple Google Analytics profiles, multiple AdWords accounts or from both AdWords and Bing in one dashboard. Cyfe has no such limitation.
• Google Spreadsheets - if the data you need to show is not available via an API, being able to pull from Google spreadsheets is a great solution. Once set up, you can add data whenever you need to the spreadsheet and your widgets in the Cyfe dashboard are automatically updated. Huge time saver!

• Few functionalities are very exclusive only for data studio.
• It's time taking to load data and at the same time only single Data source can be connected.
• When editing the reports you have to switch between Edit and View mode to see how does the change looks like.

• Sometimes the percentages in Cyfe seem off. We'll review the numbers month over month in Google Analytics and the same numbers are pulled into Cyfe, and yet Cyfe reports a different percentage
• It would be nice if Cyfe had more styling and layout choices to brand it more to our company's style and look

Incentivized

It is the simplest and least expensive way for us to automate our reporting at this time. I like the ability to customize literally everything about each report, and the ability to send out reports automatically in emails. The only issue we have been having recently is a technical glitch in the automatic email report. Sadly, there is almost no support for this tool from Google, but is also free, so that is important to take into consideration

Incentivized

It has become a part of our internal tools so unless a competitor comes out with similar functionality as a similar price point it is unlikely that we would not renew. One area that would cause us not to renew would be if a competing service came out with more third-party integrations that match our needs. Price at this point is no longer an issue as it would allow us to automate a somewhat manual process that we have now connecting Cyfe widgets to Google Sheets.

It is not ideal and requires time and dedication to understand how to work with it. Also, it has a lot of limitations around data it can accept. But in most cases, this tool is sufficient for everyday tasks of product and marketing departments. I wouldn't say that the interface is very user-friendly, but for people who regularly work with analytical tools, it must be ok.

Incentivized

I gave it a rating of 7 because it does a good job at what it does, but there are missing that are missing which I would have benefited from. For instance, if I was able to drill down more on the specific metrics I was able to see, that would have been helpful.

Incentivized

I give it a lower support rating because it seems like our Dev team hasn't gotten the support they need to set up our database to connect. Seems like we hit a roadblock and the project got put on pause for dev. That sucks for me because it is harder to get the dev team to focus on it if they don't get the help they need to set it up.

Incentivized

Because I had a very minor question and I was able to speak directly to the founder through LinkedIn and through email. I know that as they grow this may not always be an option but the fact that he made himself available to answer my questions said a lot about his passion for the product.

Cyfe is a 15 minutes implementation, then some time to get your data sources created. This is an easy one person job that will not result in down time or unnecessary wasted man hours.

Looker Studio is far easier to implement, stand up, and learn. The interface is simpler and user-friendly for various levels of data visualization/analysis knowledge and experience. The biggest benefit of Looker Studio, however, is its ease of connection to GA data and speed. Furthermore, since it is an online program/tool, it requires less CPU/battery/storage on the user's device.

Incentivized

My company already subscribed to Cyfe when I began, so for me there wasn't any shopping around. While Cyfe does pull straight from the "back end" side of many social media platforms, or from Google Analytics for websites, the benefit is that you can see all the stats in one place rather than having to log in to so many other platforms to grab those metrics.

Incentivized

• Free, so the only investment is time
• Because it doesn't have native support of non-Google sources, it can cost more money than Tableau
• The time spent formatting the templates or building connectors can have a negative impact on ROI
• As a agency, charging for the reporting service is profitable after the first month or two after building the dashboard.

Incentivized

• Cyfe allows us to provide real time data to our clients
• Cyfe allows us to provide detailed analytics to our clients showing actual results
• Cyfe reduced our need to provide monthly "reports" to our marketing clients
• Cyfe allows us to have better situational awareness and know what is going on throughout our multiple organizations