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Business intelligence tools are nothing new - they’ve been around for decades, with big players such as Tableau, Power BI and Qlik running the game. But lately, a need for a new kind of tool emerged. A business intelligence tool for end users, providing self-service analytics functionality to the average app user.
One of the main competitors in this arena is GoodData - a tool that promises AI-accelerated data visualization and analytics for business app end users. In today’s GoodData review, we take a look if that promise holds up.
Founded in Czech Republic in 2004, GoodData is a business intelligence and data analytics company. In 2024, they have over 300 employees, eight data centers and 1.7 million users globally.
As the BI and data analytics market evolved, GoodData’s analytics platform kept adding new features that meet the needs of business users in different industries and markets.
GoodData is an AI-accelerated business intelligence platform powered by something called FlexQuery. This is a composable data service layer based on Apache Arrow. It ingests data in batch or in real-time, computes in-memory, and performs pre- and post-processing transformations.
In practice, that means better performance, faster data caching, less money spent on data warehouses, and introducing a metrics layer within the data lake infrastructure.
Their dashboard builder comes with a drag-and-drop functionality, allowing your internal team and end users to efficiently and easily create dashboards. There are AI features for data forecasting, key driver analysis, and NLQ - which all work well provided that the data is previously prepared and modeled well.
The multi-tenant architecture allows you to embed for individuals or teams, with their own preferences and settings.
Last but not least, version control and a semantic layer ensure that returning to a previous version of your data or dashboard is as easy as pie.
GoodData connects to a variety of databases that you can use for internal or embedded analytics. Some of those choices include:
In short, all of the most widely used data sources are there and with a good developer, you’ll be able to connect your data to a self-hosted or embedded system.
The user interface for the most basic dashboards is pretty good. Creating dashboards and adding metrics and KPIs is no rocket science.
Doing the most basic customizations such as changing colors and folders is pretty straightforward. Even for your end users who want to build their own dashboards, making these edits is easy.
This is where the good news ends. For any kind of extensive customization, you’llhave to go through their documentation (which is reportedly not very good) or have your developer spend a few hours troubleshooting.
One thing that we’ve seen pop up more than once is that GoodData does not perform all that well with big datasets. If you have a large number of records internally or for a specific user, this can cause GoodData’s data model to load very slowly, which results in slow dashboards.
Localization seems to be an issue too, as some users might want to drill down into data with local currencies, time zones, and other details.
The overall rating for GoodData with most users is that for the most basic visualizations and dashboards with not much more than a KPI or two, it’s easy to use. However, advanced customization requires help from customer support, a good developer, lots of time spent on documentation, or all of the above.
There are several different workflows you can use to embed a GoodData dashboard. Their API is pretty decent and with some documentation, your developers should be able to connect it to your app without much fuss.
Their embedding options include iframes and web components, and they offer SDKs for major programming languagues, such as their Python SDK and React SDK. According to many GoodData user reviews, this is one of the strongest suits of this tool.
Having access to great customer support is crucial for any BI tool, especially if ease of use is not its strong side. The GoodData platform has many user reviews complaining about customer service. The reason for this is that only certain GoodData users have access to a dedicated customer success manager.
If you take a look at their pricing page (more on that in a second), you’ll see that only the most expensive, Enterprise plans come with dedicated customer success managers as a part of the offer. Everyone else has to submit a ticket and wait patiently for someone to troubleshoot their situation.
“Standard support” refers to GoodData’s community forums and your issue may get resolved quickly or take days or weeks on end.
If you have a team of experienced developers and data scientists, ideally with previous GoodData experience, this shouldn’t pose a problem. However, if you’re fairly new to data analysis and visualization, you may get stuck often as the tool is not always intuitive. Account for customer support when you consider GoodData as your next BI tool.
As we talked about in our recent blog on GoodData pricing, how much you pay for this cloud-based tool depends on your use case.
If you want to use GoodData for internal analytics, you can start as low as $30 per user, but you have to get 10 users minimum, and 30 users maximum. Depending on your company size and business needs, this may be too much or too little.
The most important thing you should know is that self-hosted capabilities are not included in this pricing tier, and you don’t get a dedicated customer success manager.
Jumping into the Professional plan, you have to pay the same price per user with a $1,500 platform fee on top.
Embedded analytics plans start at $1,500 per month. But if you want to add GoodData dashboards to your SaaS tool, be prepared to pay extra for each workspace, i.e. a subset of users accessing your dashboards.
The bottom line is that the GoodData pricing model seems fair at a distance, but once you look closer, you’ll find that it’s just as expensive as some enterprise tools like Microsoft Power BI or Looker.
It fits into a pretty niche market. It’s for businesses of all sizes that need internal reporting but don’t want to deal with the complexity of Salesforce’s Tableau or Microsoft’s Power BI. It has similar features but they are more complex to use.
What is worse is that GoodData’s documentation is not very good (unlike Tableau, for example) and there is not a huge number of specialized developers out there for this tool (unlike Power BI).
For embedded analytics, this can be a good choice if you already have experience with embedded systems and an in-house team to connect the dots. It’s not suited for first-time users of self-service analytics.
That depends on what you need it for. If you need real-time analytics for a small internal team of users, then it makes sense in terms of pricing and features. If you want to get an embedded analytics platform with great user experience and affordable pricing, GoodData is probably not the best choice.
If you’re looking for a user-friendly embedded analytics platform with easy embedding, plenty of connectors, and fair and transparent pricing - you’ve found it with Luzmo.
Book a free demo with our team so we can tell you how to add customer-facing dashboards to your product in days, not months.
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.
