Business Intelligence Tools We Recommend 4/4 – DataDeck

This is the fourth part of our series covering some of our favorite Business Intelligence (BI) tools. Our previous three posts covered Metabase, Redash, and Tableau. In this post, we will cover DataDeck, an analytics tool that can serve you well if you are just starting out in analytics and want something easy to grasp for you and your team. Check out their online community right here!

In this series we will cover the four following applications:

• Open-Source
  • Metabase
  • Redash
• Commercial
  • Tableau
  • DataDeck

Overview

DataDeck is more of a “plug and play” types of BI tool compared to the 3 other ones we have covered. It has a variety of commonly used applications and data sources such as the following:

1. Stripe
2. Google Drive Documents
3. OneDrive Documents
4. MailChimp
5. MySQL
6. Amazon Redshift
7. Google AdWords
8. And more below…

DataDeck is a business intelligence tool primarily meant for non-technical users. You’re able to connect multiple different accounts from which DataDeck will automatically pull data from you. One of the biggest benefits of DataDeck is that they have a myriad of templated dashboards you can choose from for different sources that you connect. If you’re interacting with a stakeholder who’s never had any previous BI experience before and you would like to create something quick to show them, DataDeck is the way to go. Set up takes no time and the UI is very intuitive.

This business intelligence tool has a simple screen used to create charts and graphs that a non-technical user can holistically understand in less than a couple of minutes. Below is a screenshot of how a user can create a dashboard.

Switching between chart types is easy, and the Data and Displays tabs will change accordingly as you switch. On the right side, you will find the available list of data fields based on the data source you chose for this particular visualization.

One of the biggest pros of DataDeck is that the interface of this BI tool is very easy on the eye, even when displaying a dashboard that contains a variety of measures such as the one below.

DataDeck also integrates nicely with Slack, our favorite online messaging tool for businesses! You can easily pull up the various DataDeck visualizations (or “widgets” as they are called in DataDeck lingo) with simple Slack commands. They have also just recently started collaborating with Zapier (one of our favorite integration tools) to give users the ability to connect applications like Instagram, Intercom, and Trello to DataDeck. Over the last few months we have seen multiple new integrations added and the fact that DataDeck has started working with Zapier to bring in more integrations can only be a good thing.

Pros

1. Intuitive and good looking interface makes it a pleasure to use
2. Easy to pick up
3. Out of the box templates
4. Integrations with Slack and Zapier

Cons

1. Not a huge collection of data sources unlike more established BI tools
2. Its simplicity is a double-edged sword, some people may view it as a negative
3. No strong community around it…yet?

Have you tried out DataDeck before? What do you think of it? Let us know if you have any feedback or questions about what’s the best business intelligence solution for your business!

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash