Item: GoodData
Rating: 8
Author: James Roettger

Overall Satisfaction with GoodData

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

GoodData provides an analytics engine that supports B2B implementation and white labeling. Their comprehensive API design allows for greater control over the user experience compared to most market offerings, enabling a near seamless transition between their software and another. Most recently, they've released a new set of products that allows even greater control over how a customer can use their engine in combination with 3rd party data warehousing platforms. GoodData provided us the analytics piece that could be tied into our software without it being a disruptive experience for the end user.

Gives us the ability to take data from an operational source and optimizes performance of of processing it for analytical and reporting purposes.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Ability to embed and white-label.
Simplified experience for non-technical users.
Fantastic Implementation team.

Cons

This is not a platform for data scientists.
Poor ability to maintain code versioning of their workspaces and dashboards.
Limited ways to securely transfer information between your system and theirs.

Return on Investment

Improved user experience in their default product.
We no longer need to spend resources to develop in-house to compete with all the other data platforms.
Excellent controls and options around embedding.

Usability

Their documentation, training, and support resources are excellent.
Their product is designed to be simplified to manage and use.
They have and excellent set of features that covers all the most common asks/needs of someone who wishes to create and share visualizations and KPIs.

They are NOT great for super complicated data science things or to replace statisticians; if you are trying to do anything with K-nearest neighbors or use a Naive Bayes classifier you are going to have a bad time. If, on the other hand, you just want to show a visual related to the ratio of number of times people were injured severely to number of minor injuries for a user defined time period, this is a great platform.

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

Microsoft Power BI, Tableau Online, Qlik Analytics Platform, Domo, Yellowfin, Sisense, Looker, Google Analytics, ThoughtSpot, MicroStrategy Analytics, Pyramid Analytics, TIBCO Spotfire, Logi Analytics, Birst and IBM Cognos Analytics

Each one of the above players had an interesting platform. Ultimately, GoodData beat them based on our need for a customizable user experience, ability to embed, affordable license that is NOT on a per user basis (because if you want adoption, you shouldn't directly tie cost to number of users), and guaranteed performance for certain price points without having to get an incredibly powerful virtual server.

We wouldn't need to perform crazy complicated statistical formulas within the space and much of the self service would be targeting users who are non-technical (or at least building visualizations isn't their full-time job).

Likelihood to Recommend

This platform is fantastic for underserved groups at larger corporations or if you have limited resources and staff to work with data migration and management. Like any analytics platform, this is not going to help you if your company suffers from a lack of data literacy.

The user experience of their default portal (if you choose not to embed via APIs) is excellent for non-technical users to create visualizations, KPIs and data storyboards.

Comments

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Focused, good at what they do, exhibits an expertise in their field. Platform good for end-users