Business Intelligence Buyer’s Guide

User Friendly Dashboards

Preset provides a clean, modern, and customizable user interface and dashboard that are user-friendly and easy to navigate. The dashboard is highly interactive, enabling users to click on any widget to access additional information or take action.

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Embedded Dashboards

You can utilize the Superset Embedded SDK to embed your Preset dashboards and analytics within your own applications. A Preset guest token allows your users to access embedded Preset resources, such as dashboards, without the need to log in to Preset as usual. Please note that embedded features come with separate pricing and require annual commitments.

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Data Modelling

You can manipulate your data by:

Using Preset’s built-in SQL editor to create virtual datasets by treating the results of a SQL query as a table.

Using Preset’s Datasets feature to change the data type of the data columns and add calculated metrics with SQL or formulas.

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Cross Filtering

Cross-filtering feature allows you to filter data from multiple charts at the same time

Filters Scoping

Select specific Charts or Dashboard that will be affected by a specific filter.

Drill to Details

When you want to explore the underlying data of a specific value or a set of values on the chart, for example, all columns in the dataset for rows filtered to the selected values, you can use the Drill to Detail By functionality.

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Reports

Reports are snapshots of your data that can be scheduled to be delivered on a regular basis. Reports can be sent via email or Slack, and they can include charts, tables, and text.

Alerts

Alerts are notifications that are sent when a specific condition is met. For example, you could create an alert to be sent when the number of failed login attempts reaches a certain threshold. Alerts can be sent via email, Slack, or SMS.

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Intelligent Visuals

Power BI is one of the best tools when it comes to the customization functionalities of your visualizations and dashboards With the launch of Copilot, you can simply describe the visuals and insights you’re looking for, and Copilot will do the rest, which leads to faster insights.You can experience an interactive Power BI dashboard and try for yourself.

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Embedded Dashboards

You can use Power BI REST APIs and Client APIs to embed your Power BI dashboards and analytics in your own applications. Depending on your hosting region and node type, embedded dashboards starts at $700/month, see detailed price here.

You can check the embedded capabilities in this sandbox.

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Data Modelling

You can manipulate your data by :

Create and manage relationships between tables manually or automatically though auto detect. 

Utilizing Data analysis expressions (DAX), which is a library of functions and operators, to perform advanced calculations and queries on data in related tables and columns. 

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Drill down to row level data

You can drill-down, drill-up, and expand to add another hierarchy level to the current view. You can also export the raw data into tables for further analysis.

Cross-Filtering and Cross-Highlighting

Selecting a data point in one visual on a report page will cross-filter or cross-highlight the other visuals on the page. Cross-filtering removes data that doesn't apply, and cross-highlight retains all the original data points but dims the portion that doesn't apply to your selection.

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Industry-leading AI

Now with Copilot and Power BI, non-technical users can just describe their needs and Copilot can automatically create the reports, and you can ask any deep dive questions in chatbot.

“Get Insights” button

Power BI allows you to run insights on the entire dataset or on a specific report with just one button click and conveniently pin the insight charts to the dashboard.

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SQL-First Approach

Lightdash allows users to use their favourite text editor and test changes in a sandbox before merging to production. You can also use live previews and development environments to speed up our development workflow.
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You can experience an interactive Lightdash Marketing dashboard to try it out yourself.

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Using DBT for modelling

In Lightdash, everything you need for BI is written as code in your dbt project. You can use dbt to transform all of the data from your data warehouse, then use Lightdash to explore the data. To get a model in dbt Lightdash-ready, you need to define all of the columns that you want to explore in Lightdash and then test them out in a Lightdash preview environment.

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Self-serve exploration

Anyone can get to the right answers quickly using pre-built metrics can get to the right answers fast using pre-built metrics. Define your business metrics once and make it available everywhere for your whole team to use. Lightdash offers powerful analytics capabilities, including the ability to perform advanced calculations and create custom metrics. Users can also create custom data pipelines to transform and clean data before it is visualized.

Using Tables and the Explore view

A Table is the main starting point for exploring data in Lightdash. It contains a group of related dbt models, dimensions, and metrics. You can explore tables, under table view.

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Data drill down and Cross-Filtering

It also have the most frequently used features, such as Viewing the underlying data and cross-filtering.  It also enables us to implement chart-to-dashboard by using a data point on a chart.

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Share insights with your team

You can share a URL to a 'work-in-progress' data exploration or share a link to a saved chart or Download results as a .csv or a .png of the chart.

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Personal access tokens & Whitelisting email domains

You can create a personal access token (PAT) to authenticate in the CLI or with the API to provide additional security. Also. organization admins can add allowed email domains to their organization settings so that anyone with those email domains can automatically join their organization (without explicitly inviting them).

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Spreadsheet-like UI

Sigma is built for modern cloud data warehouse with your familiar spreadsheet-like UI and your most frequently used features, such as excel formula and pivot tables to manipulate data. You can experience an interactive Sigma dashboard to try it out yourself.

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Embedded Dashboards

Sigma allows you to provide your customers with easy self-serve access to their data within your product via embedded dashboards. You can customize the dashboard theme, authenticate your customers using existing sign-on framework, and setup row-level security for the embedded dashboards.

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Data Modelling

You can manipulate your raw data, such as changing data type, format, and parse out JSON easily via Sigma’s Datasets feature. Create a new calculated field simply by inserting a column and write Excel formula.

Dataset used to empower workbooks (i.e. dashboards) and updates to the dataset is cascaded to all workbooks built on it. You can also connect directly to dbt to centralize your business logic, and view the metadata for the dbt job, columns, and tables.

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“Bringing your own data” with Input Table

When your data is not in the data warehouse, such as finance forecast, you can use Input Tables to integrate new data entries into your analysis. Another useful use case of input table is to dynamically updating calculations in Sigma and creating a sample scenario model.

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Drill down to row level data

For business users, they can check the details behind the rolled-up data by drilling all the way to the specific transaction or item.

Dynamic dataset parameters & controls

Creating dataset parameters and referencing them allows you to dynamically replace values used in calculations, which allows you to ask the all-important “what if” from your data.

Show additional data in tooltip

You can customize the content of the data point tooltips and add additional fields to provide more information.

Workbook collaboration with Live Edit

Teams can work together on workbook drafts real-time, with all editors seeing and contributing to one live draft.

Taking notes and leave comments

You can add comments, notes, and analysis right alongside your charts and data so you never have to wonder “What did we do here?” again.

Self-serve Explorations

Looker's direct connection to live, row-level data enables you to dig deeper into the metrics and gain a deeper understanding of the underlying "why". Business users can access “Explores”, which are created and verified by the data team, ensuring everyone is looking at metrics with the same definitions.

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Embedded Dashboards

Looker’s embedded dashboards works with public embedding and private embedding via Looker login, Google OAuth, OpenID Connect, or even SSO. Lookers offers extensive customization of the embedded dashboard, granular access and data control, and you can even configure the session-level security such as how long users can stay logged in.You can experience a looker embedded dashboard at Atom Fashion (requires Google account to log in).

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Data Modelling

Looker's data modeling relies on LookML, the Looker Modeling Language. LookML is used to create semantic data models, describing dimensions, aggregates, calculations, and data relationships in your SQL database. By writing a LookML model, Looker constructs SQL queries tailored to a specific database, facilitating efficient data analysis and exploration.

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Your Looker data model exists in two states: Production Mode and Development Mode.

Development Mode

Development Mode lets you make changes to LookML files and to preview how they will affect content on your instance. The changes you make to LookML files in this Mode do not affect the production environment, until they are pushed to the production environment.

Production Mode

Production Mode is the production version of Looker. Everyone using a Looker instance in Production Mode accesses their projects in the same state. Project files are read-only in this mode.

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Drill down to row level data

For business users, they can check the details behind the rolled-up data by drilling all the way to the specific transaction or item.

Filters Galore

Offer users the magic of data manipulation with multiple types of filters, providing intuitive and powerful environments for personalized exploration and empowering users to find the information they need independently.

Cross Filtering

Cross-filtering makes it easier and more intuitive for viewers to interact with a dashboard's data and understand how one metric affects another. With cross-filtering, users can click a data point in one dashboard tile to have all dashboard tiles automatically filter on that value.

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Threshold based Alerts

The user-friendly alerts available on each tile of a Looker dashboard allow you (and your users) to react to small changes before they become big problems.

Unique Visualization

Different businesses require different visualizations. In the Looker Marketplace there are a host of add-on visualizations, built to fit more custom data needs. And if you want something even more bespoke, you can add custom Javascript visualizations for everyone to leverage.

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