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Thank you for the honesty. This is very valuable feedback.

It’s very hard to find a way to convey what’s different... i’ll keep trying



I particularly appreciate comparison pages to other products (even if they are clearly biased). How does this product differ from Tableau / Metabase? Or perhaps there's a different competitor to compare to. It helps me understand exactly what the product does and why I should want to use it.


Great point. Thanks


To expand, the big 3 players (that I know) in the analytics are Tableau (simple things are easy, complex stuff is near impossible using the desktop app alone), Spotfire (simple stuff is not super easy, but with the desktop client the sky is the limit, as it comes with R, IronPython and JavaScript by default), and PowerBI (very powerful too, but I don't know it well).

However, these 3 solutions are screen-based. They are designed to be interactive and be consumed in the monitor.

Another user here made a comparison to Crystal Reports. The last time that I used it, Crystal Reports was a picture-perfect page reporting tool. While you can consume it on the screen too (of course), reports are designed to be printed in specific paper page size (letter, checks, etc). This is not bad. It is just different, and a very scarce feature nowadays, as most applications are leaving this functionality out. Cognos ReportNet and Business Objects are also picture-perfect reporting tools that try to do too many things and don't do anything particularly well. That's why the visualizations tool like Tableau and simple picture-perfect reporting tools Crystal Reports are eating the market. You need to understand your niche.

On your comparison, you need to explain how can people connect to a database. Once connected, what in-app support do you provide to help the non-programmer user join a few tables and limit records (WHERE) based on values, if any.

Are the visualizations interactive? If yes, how selecting interesting data points in one visualization will highlight data points or rows in another visualization? Before implementing, make sure that there's no active patent for this. I was curious that this basic feature exists in Spotfire, but not in Tableau. But then I remembered a presentation from the Spotfire inventor showcasing this functionality when he was a student in the University of Maryland about 15 years ago. Maybe he patented it.

Will I be able to transform data (change table shape or derive new transformed table from the tables that were requested from the database (client processing)? If yes, you should highlight that. Regular Tableau installation cannot do it, but Spotfire can, and I think that PowerBI can do it too.

Can you create HTML/CSS dashboards? Can you import pictures to act as buttons? Can you create a map of and office campus to let me click on buildings to get statistics?

How about world maps?

And, since you are talking about cell based visualizations, have you evaluated what Smartsheets can do in this field. I know people how do awesome visualizations using Smartsheets. There's also Airtable, but I don't think that it is competitive with Smartsheets in visualizations (I might be wrong).

The current tools are very featured. You can find a niche, but you might have to level the playing game in term of features with the existing tools in order to be gain the user mind share.




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