What is ThoughtSpot?
What is Qlik Sense?
24/08/2020
What is the best BI-tool?
21/09/2020
Welcome back to our
BI-series!
And because all things must come to an end, today is the last day that we will be speaking about the crowned “Leader BI-Vendors” in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms.
And so, last but not least today's vendor is ThoughtSpot!
Let's start!
So what is ThoughtSpot?
ThoughtSpot is a Search and AI-driven analytics platform that wants to solve the analytics bottleneck by providing an app simple enough so that the average business person can use it. Thanks to its In-memory engine (a technology that analyzes data faster by cutting the time it would take to access data from a disk) it is capable of analyzing billions of rows of data from all kinds of sources in seconds.
The rational search engine allows users to type any question they want as they would do in Google, and get accurate answers in understandable representations. Powered by AI, users get suggestions for new questions to ask. The suggestions also get smarter every time that other co-workers in the company search and provide new feedback. Like all the other platforms mentioned here, it is also available as a mobile app that facilitates running it anywhere at any time.
ThoughtSpot´s Dashboard
Let's go over some of its features to understand how it works.
- Connectors: ThoughtSpot supports many databases enabling its users to access data in the cloud or on-premise, as well as from flat files, enterprise apps, and data archives regardless of the source. A few examples are Amazon S3, Hive, JDBC, Jira, MySQL, Oracle, Salesforce, SQL Server, and Zendesk.
- Performance and data management: The “Google-like- search” is probably one of the strongest points of the tool, it allows users to ask questions just by typing or speaking like you would in any of the search engines we all know and love. ThoughtSpot is also strong when it comes to proactive alerting, having feeds of related content visible for users like they would have on regular social media.
On the downside, the customization of the visualizations is somewhat limited and the data needs to be prepped (in a nutshell this means to convert the raw data to one file that can be easily analyzed) with the help of another program or tool before using ThoughtSpot. In Gartner’s words:
“ThoughtSpot’s software typically complements other products and does not cover the full spectrum of ABI requirements... Relatively few reference customers viewed ThoughtSpot as their only enterprise standard for ABI.” - Ease of learning: Even though the interface is easy to use, the learning curve of the tool as a whole can be a little too steep for users with no previous BI knowledge. Gartner's report also said:
“Successful implementation of ThoughtSpot’s software requires data preparation and mapping of data in advance. This typically demands IT skills and effort.” - Price: ThoughtSpot's pricing is not available without previous consultation. They offer their main product ThoughtSpot Enterprise and an extended version of this one. Both options include unlimited users and the prices are data capacity based.
We hope that you enjoyed, and that you can use this information while choosing the best BI-Tool for you and your business. Remember to always take what you read with a grain of salt and always consider your business's specific characteristics and needs!
Join us next week for the: ABI-Platform- series wrap up! Where we will be going over the most important points that we learned about these BI-titans and will be closing the series with our personal conclusions.
Until the next time,
Your Statistance team!
This post is also available in:
German
