Grow

Pros

What separates Grow from the other players in the SaaS BI reporting software space is three fold.

1) Price. I had a call with DOMO and actually laughed when they told me what their platform would cost me each month. Grow is affordable for small agencies, startups and small to mid sized companies - especially when you factor in the ROI it generates.

2) Ease of use. We looked at MSBI but it's complexities - especially around Google Analytics made getting our reporting up and running extremely expensive. Grow makes connecting data sources super easy. I was up and running with basic reporting the day I signed up.

3) Data scientists. In my experience with SaaS software, their onboarding calls can be a big time waster, simply because the people performing the onboarding, are not experts in the field but rather lower level employees who were trained to follow a predetermined onboarding process. My onboarding at Grow was presented by a real data scientist! Not only did he provide excellent training on the software, he made suggestions on how to tweak my reporting needs to show greater value to my clients.

The combination of these three elements come together seamlessly to create a truly viable alternative to Microsoft BI, DOMO and Tableau. Watch out big guys! Here comes GROW!

Cons

Surely I could find something bad to say right? Not really! I guess if forced I would say that they need to be easier to find on the web. I would have started using Grow months ago - had I known it was out there. So, get those marketing guys to work! Hey - I'm a marketing guy - put me to work!

Pros

Can do almost anything with patience and logic, no need to distract developers to assist with complicated data queries. Customer support is outstanding, always taking the time to properly understand and help address anything you throw at them - very solution-focused.

Cons

Can be a bit buggy at times, especially after big releases, requiring more attention than I would like towards "fixing" metrics that were previously working fine. Can also be very slow with large data sets, some of which are just too big for it to handle.

Pros

Their UI is awesome. I love the overall look and feel for the entire system. Graphs look updated, clean, and they are fairly easy to customize. Making the dashboards look good is fairly simple.

Cons

Not data warehousing the data is an issue. Long load times really get me frustrated with the software. It seems to take a minute to edit a metric, load a new metric, or even sometime update a metric. Updating a dashboard can take 2 minutes at times.
Drilling down and looking into the data is very underwhelming. Dashboard filters don't exist so you're stuck loading filters only to individual metrics, not the whole dashboard.
Email triggers that send reports on a set schedule are limited to only 7 am MT on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule.
Time zone offsets have been the death of me in the system. They use SQLite to format the data coming in but their out-of-the-box data filtering overrides all SQLite filters. It's been super frustrating trying to get the data we want.

Pros

Grow provides out of the box connections to most of the software that we already use. Additionally, their sales team was much more consultative than other software companies.

Cons

You need to have some technical ability. If you're not "good with spreadsheets," you're going to struggle implementing Grow. That said, anyone can read the charts once they're created.

Pros

Ease: because 100's of the most common data sources are pre-integrated you can quickly get past the headache of secure access and onto the business of working with data. Because you can do most analytics without deep sql knowledge more of the business staff can participate in developing the graphs and knowledge.

Pace of Innovation: Grow is launching new features every month making it increasingly easy to develop the metrics you need.

Pricing Model: Because this isn't a "pay per seat" model and instead a per metric model the value delivered is aligned with cost - occasional users, heavy users all can leverage the full power of the platform without breaking the bank.

Cons

If you want super advanced visualizations on par with the highest priced BI tools this isn't for you - this tool is rich but has made appropriate tradeoffs for the purpose of simplicity. For example, you can't have multiple series on the second axis of a 2-axis graph.