Blog

8 Top GoodData Competitors for Embedded BI

Data Visualization
May 14, 2024
8 Top GoodData Competitors for Embedded BI

Looking for an analytics platform that has all the bells and whistles but don’t want to go the mainstream way with Qlik, Tableau or Power BI? GoodData has been around since 2007 and it’s become an interesting alternative to traditional BI powerhouses.

But what if you’ve tried GoodData and you were let down by its limited plans, lackluster features and unpredictable costs? There are plenty of alternatives to GoodData for business intelligence and data visualization. 

Today, we show you some of the top GoodData competitors to keep on your radar. But first…

Why look for GoodData competitors?

If we take a look at GoodData reviews, one of the most common complaints is the ease of use. Namely, it has a very steep learning curve for beginners. The advanced features in this analytics solution can be tough to navigate, especially since you won’t get a customer success manager - but more on that in a second.

GoodData uses a proprietary version of SQL called MAQL which many users find confusing. 

Gooddata review 1
Source

Creating reports, filtering them, and getting actionable insights for the end-user can be overwhelming. GoodData is easy to use but only for the most basic workflows and use cases. 

To drill down into reports and create complex data visualizations through GoodData’s semantic layer, you have to spend a bit of time getting to learn GoodData. And good luck with that, because the user documentation is not that amazing.

Gooddata review 2
Source

The GoodData pricing model is another issue. If you want to get the basic package for internal reporting, it is just $30 per user, but you need at least 10 users, and you’re locked to a maximum of 30 users. Anything more than that and you have to opt for the more expensive plan that costs an additional $1,500 for the platform costs.

For embedded analytics dashboards, GoodData pricing is even more complex, because you need to pay for every workspace your team uses, on top of the $1,500 platform cost.

Last but not least is the customer support. If you get stuck, you have to troubleshoot alone unless you’re on the most expensive enterprise plans because they are the only ones that get priority support and a dedicated customer success manager.

Top 8 GoodData alternatives for (embedded) business intelligence

If you want a business intelligence platform that helps your team become more data-driven, but without the complexity of the user interface or the pricing, we have good news. These data analytics apps and tools do everything that GoodData does, but better.

Luzmo

GoodData competitors - Luzmo

Why it’s better than GoodData: focus on embedded analytics, easier to use, better customer support, transparent and easy-to-understand pricing.

Luzmo is a BI tool specifically designed for embedded analytics. It allows you to create and embed beautiful dashboards in your SaaS products so that your end-users can get to actionable insights more quickly and easily.

Thanks to our powerful API and a variety of data sources (data warehouses such as Snowflake, Google BigQuery, and many others), connecting your data and embedding your dashboard in your app is a breeze.

It also solves some of the common pain points of self-service analytics, such as multi-tenancy, strong security, easy data filtering and custom reports, real-time ad hoc reporting and much more.

Luzmo pricing starts at $995 per month for 100 monthly active users, and you can grab a free trial today.

Domo

GoodData competitors - Domo

Why it’s better than GoodData: data warehouse integration, ETL, and data visualization in one place; easy real-time reporting and analytics

If you want to pick a tool to grow your business with, Domo has a great starter kit as it provides data warehouse integrations, ETL and visualization tools in one place, potentially saving you the hassle of choosing several different vendors.

Thanks to having Domo as your primary data store or augmenting your existing stack, your reports and dashboards will be super quick to load. If you have a SaaS product where customers need to track key metrics in real time, Domo fits the bill for this type of microstrategy.

However, many users complain that it’s overly expensive, even compared to the likes of Looker. To the platform costs, you can also add the cost of training your team in Domo because it’s not as easy to use as Power BI or Tableau for beginners.

Sisense

GoodData competitors - Sisense

Why it’s better than GoodData: great visuals, easy embedding

Sisense is built primarily for embedded analytics, which is reflected in its positioning and pricing plans. It also means that once you build the dashboards (which is fairly easy to do), you can embed them just as easily using one of their SDKs.

That’s about as far as it goes because the complex user authorization systems and the variety of features can confuse the end users. In other words, you really have to know what you’re doing to make the final dashboard more useful than confusing for the person viewing it.

There is a solid choice of chart types and visualizations, and whitelabeling and customization are fairly easy too.

Sisense pricing starts at $10,000 per year.

Looker

GoodData competitors - Looker

Why it’s better than GoodData: superior data modeling, a wide selection of visualizations.

Known as the BI tool of choice for enterprise companies, Looker offers a streamlined user experience and a plethora of features your developers and end users will appreciate when working on big data.

Looker has a proprietary language called LookML, which is a variation on the theme of SQL. With a couple of handy Looker developers, you can do advanced data analysis with ease.

Looker also prides itself on some of the best visualizations in the industry, not just in terms of the output (as they look great), but also the selection of graphs, charts, scatter plots, histograms, and many, many others. Looker for embedded analytics is not the best option, though.

Small businesses don’t often go for Looker because of its restrictive pricing - the cheapest plans start at $5,000 per month, and it’s not uncommon to pay more than $100,000 annually for Looker either.

Microsoft Power BI

GoodData competitors - Microsoft Power BI

Why it’s better than GoodData: easy integrations with other Microsoft tools, with a wide range of data sources and connectors.

If you live and breathe Microsoft, Power BI is a natural choice for a business intelligence provider. Built on top of Azure, it connects to many databases, data warehouses, and some online sources such as Google Analytics and Facebook.

It offers advanced analytics, mobile accessibility, rich visualizations, as well as security and compliance features for your data pipelines, such as GDPR and HIPAA. If you’re looking for something that is primarily desktop-based and you need a self-hosted BI solution, PBI is a solid choice.

However, if you don’t have developers who are handy with this tool, you might struggle with getting every functionality to work properly out of the box.

Zoho Analytics

GoodData competitors - Zoho Analytics

Why it’s better than GoodData: it has a free version, a great choice if you’re already in the Zoho ecosystem

Just like HubSpot, Zoho has a tool for everything a business may need, regardless of their size. But unlike HubSpot, Zoho has a BI tool that helps its users get to business insights with ease.

Like the rest of the tool stack, Zoho Analytics has a user-friendly interface, and data integrations with tools such as Google Analytics, Salesforce, Quickbooks, and many others.

It’s better suited for internal reporting, as it has collaboration tools that allow your team to easily share dashboards and reports and work on them together.

Prices start at 24EUR per month for two users for the web-based version.

Qlik Sense

GoodData competitors - Qlik Sense

Why it’s better than GoodData: easy data storytelling

Qlik has been around for a while and established itself as a tool for experienced data analysts. With something called Snapshots, you can create data visualizations easily through the drag-and-drop interface.

The associative model in Qlik is one of its biggest selling points, allowing users to explore and analyze data without significant preparation beforehand. If everything is set up properly, your team or the end-users can do self-service analytics through features such as natural language processing and artificial intelligence.

Prices start at $825 per month.

Tableau

GoodData competitors - Tableau

Why it’s better than GoodData: huge online community, great visualizations, variety of options for data analytics

Whether you want to do data analysis in the cloud, on-premises, or a mix of both, Tableau has a tool in store for you. It’s one of the most widely used BI platforms out there and for a good reason.

The choices are abundant, both in terms of data integration and visualization styles. Unlike other enterprise-grade tools, you won’t need a developer with specialized knowledge to get started.

Even better is the fact that they have great customer support and a massive online community of Tableau experts who are ready to help out if you get stuck. However, don’t expect much from their embedded analytics as it is rather clunky and difficult to get it to work in an embedded setting.

Prices start as low as $75 per month.

Conclusion

If you need a high-performance data analytics tool to empower decision-making in your own team or with your customers, GoodData is not the most user-friendly choice out there. It can be complex to use, overly expensive and does not come with decent customer support.

Instead, choose Luzmo and give your business users interactive dashboards that they can easily understand and explore.

Grab your free trial today to see what makes us the best embedded analytics solution in the market!

Mile Zivkovic

Mile Zivkovic

Senior Content Writer

Mile Zivkovic is a content marketer specializing in SaaS. Since 2016, he’s worked on content strategy, creation and promotion for software vendors in verticals such as BI, project management, time tracking, HR and many others.

Build your first embedded dashboard in less than 15 min

Experience the power of Luzmo. Talk to our product experts for a guided demo  or get your hands dirty with a free 10-day trial.

Dashboard