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8 Top Thoughtspot Competitors for Embedded Analytics

Embedded Analytics
Mar 20, 2024
8 Top Thoughtspot Competitors for Embedded Analytics

ThoughtSpot is a business intelligence and data visualization tool that has been around for more than a decade. With notable customers like Coca-Cola, T-Mobile, and CVS, it’s gotten a reputation for being an easy-to-use analytics tool for enterprise companies. Even more so once they launched their new AI-based features.

But what if you’re not happy with ThoughtSpot’s user experience, integrations, pricing or customer support? You may be looking into ThoughtSpot competitors and today, we’re rounding up the very best ones to help you make a good choice instead of a guess.

But first…

Why look for ThoughtSpot competitors?

Maybe you’ve been with ThoughtSpot for a while and you’re looking for something that better suits your needs. Or maybe you’re looking for ThoughSpot alternatives because you’re choosing your next BI and data analytics tool. Either way, let’s address some downsides of this tool first.

The pricing gap: for ThoughtSpot analytics, the price gap between the paid plans is huge. For up to five million rows of data, you pay $95 per month. Five million + one? You go to $1,250 per month. In short, ThoughtSpot pricing requires deep pockets.

The pricing for embedded analytics: it’s wildly unpredictable. If you want to offer real-time dashboards for your end-users, ThoughtSpot will charge you per user query. This can result in massive monthly invoices.

The AI features: while it promises to be an AI-based analytics platform, ThoughtSpot fails to deliver. The AI features only support the most basic use cases. For anything more complex than the basic queries, you’re still going to need a data analyst or engineer.

Limited visualization options: compared to industry leaders like Tableau, ThoughtSpot does not have a wide choice of visualization types. Also, setting different chart sizes and customizing those dashboards for the embedded use case is rather limited.

Having said all of that, there are plenty of alternatives out there you can try for data analysis and visualization.

Top 8 ThoughtSpot alternatives in 2024

We chose these tools based on user reviews, features, the range of integrations and data sources, embedded analytics capabilities and more.

Luzmo - best for embedded SaaS dashboards

luzmo as a thoughtspot competitor

Create interactive dashboards for your end-users and empower them to make informed decisions with key metrics in real-time. Luzmo is easy to use for your developers and end-users. In fact, from the moment you sign up to the moment you embed your dashboard, it can take as little as a few hours.

We love our APIs and you can connect Luzmo with a wide range of data connectors, such as Amazon AWS Redshift, AWS Athena, Azure Synapse, BigQuery, Clickhouse, Databricks and many others. The API also allows you to connect with business apps you use every day, such as CRMs, communication tools, and others.

You get true self-service analytics: end-users can drill down into data, explore it, and pull ad-hoc reports. No knowledge of SQL is required! And with the dashboard embedded in your tool, new data insights are just a few clicks away.

We have transparent pricing, so you’ll know exactly what you’re going to pay at the end of the month.

The intuitive interface comes by default - you can create user-friendly dashboards that fit right into your product. Customize the design so the dashboards feel like a natural part of the app. Introduce data analytics automation as a part of your app interface.

We also have AI-powered features and you can use our AI chart generator to feed data sets into Luzmo and create visualizations with one click.

To sum up, Luzmo is cheaper, easier to use, also has natural language data exploration and data discovery features, and looks better in your SaaS app.

Ready to get started? Grab your free trial now!

Tableau - best for internal dashboard reporting

tableau as a thoughtspot competitor

Owned by Salesforce, Tableau has been around the block for a while and is a superb choice for on-premise data analytics and dashboard reporting. It comes packed with a wide choice of visualizations, a large number of integrations with data warehouses and third-party apps, and it’s generally considered user-friendly for dashboard consumers.

On the other hand, setting up Tableau dashboards for your development team is not a drag-and-drop kind of operation. It takes a lot of time and effort to master Tableau, especially for the advanced use cases. Pricing can be very high, too. Last but not least, it’s not ideal for embedded analytics.

It takes a lot of time to load large data sets, and the customization options for dashboards are not that extensive. It’s best suited for teams with Tableau specialists that need data forecasting and analysis on their premises, or online with minimal sharing.

In a battle of ThoughtSpot vs Tableau, the winner depends on your needs and budget.

Qlik Sense - best for experienced data professionals

qlik as a thoughtspot competitor

Qlik takes a different approach to data analytics and allows you to create Stories. As data progresses and changes over time, Qlik takes Snapshots of it in different states. In the end, you connect these in a Story, allowing you to do just that - tell a story with data.

The problem with this approach is that it’s seemingly easy to use but Qlik presents a headache unless you’re a trained and experienced data professional. Even beyond this feature, Qlik is challenging for creating, editing, and visualizing dashboards.

On top of that, the price is not cheap as it starts at $2,700 per month for the most basic features.

Power BI - best for users in the Microsoft ecosystem

power bi as a thoughtspot competitor

Microsoft’s Power BI is one of the most technologically advanced data analytics solutions in the market today and for a good reason. It comes with a wide range of data integrations, such as databases like Azure SQL or SQL server. It also supports a variety of local file uploads like JSON, Excel, or XML files. It’s based on a proprietary language called DAX.

It’s incredibly powerful in the right set of hands, and that’s precisely the problem. You’ll need a Power BI expert to get the most out of this tool and unlock every functionality you need for your business users. Speaking of which, Power BI embedded analytics features are fairly slow and unintuitive. 

If you’re already deep in the Microsoft ecosystem and you only need internal reporting, this is a solid choice.

Sisense - for beginners in the world of BI

sisense as a thoughtspot competitor

Sisense is an on-premise and cloud-based business intelligence tool renowned for its ease of use. The drag-and-drop builder is easy to use for beginners and you don’t even need knowledge of SQL or another programming language to get started.

The dashboards look sleek and modern and you can plug in a variety of data sources with Elasticube.

Where Sisense is lacking is embedded analytics. Embedding dashboards is pretty difficult, unlike the main data analytics features. Once the dashboards are embedded, they’re going to break often and load slowly - so keep that in mind.

Domo - for enterprise businesses that need all the tools in one place

domo as a thoughtspot competitor

Domo is known in the enterprise circles for having a rich feature set that replaces many different tools in one app. ETL, data warehouse, data visualization - you can streamline the process instead of grabbing three different tools for the job.

For real-time data analytics, Domo is unparalleled. But that comes at a cost, and a high one at that. Wherever you look, users report that Domo is extremely expensive for what it offers and that it even puts Tableau and Power BI to shame.

The wealth of features comes with another hidden cost - the ease of use, or lack thereof. You’re going to spend some time learning this app or you’ll have to hire a Domo expert instead.

GoodData - for businesses that need AI features

gooddata as a thoughtspot competitor

GoodData is similar to ThoughtSpot in that it is focused on AI-based features. With this BI tool, you can explore and analyze data using natural language processing. It comes with a wide range of pre-built templates and dashboards for different use cases that are handy for beginners.

The downsides? Getting those AI features to work requires quite a bit of initial setup. You’re going to need a seasoned group of developers to handle the job first, before the average Joe can use plain English for analytics.

Pricing is not very transparent and figuring out the costs can be very difficult, especially if you need embedded analytics. All the best features require a $1,500 platform fee on top of the per-user rate.

Looker - best for businesses with a heavy focus on security

looker as a thoughtspot competitor

Looker uses their proprietary LookML language for building dashboards and workflows. This BI tool is widely known for its rich feature set, including data preparation, data modeling, predictive analytics, and excellent visualizations.

It’s built on top of Google Cloud and it has row-level security (RLS) and SSO authorization, meaning your data are safe whether you show them internally or to the world. Business users often complain that LookML has a steep learning curve and that the embedding is more of an afterthought than a core feature.

When it comes to embedded analytics, Looker is not phenomenal either.

Most of all, ThoughtSpot can be expensive, but Looker blows it out of the water as it can easily go over $50,000 per year for the average business. 

Wrapping up

Empowering your team or users for data-driven decision-making should be one of the key goals for every business in 2024. But the business intelligence platform you choose needs to have it all: ease of use, great data integration options, superb embedding capabilities, great security, transparency and predictability in pricing, AI and machine learning tools…

Which sounds like a lot when you put it all in one sentence. But the truth is, we have a platform that offers all that and fixes the issues ThoughtSpot may be causing for you and your end-users.

Get a free demo today and find out how can help you!

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.

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