Lightdash is built for data engineers who are serving the rest of the company. There was no tool specialized around this persona - who wants the power to work like a software engineer & then enable business users to adopt analytics.
Collectors’ first considered Looker, Tableau, Mode, Sigma, and Preset. They later discovered Lightdash and chose it since it offered them
Pricing per user becomes a limiting factor for the adoption of BI tools within an organization. For starters, the buyer has to estimate spends based on the number of licenses & then negotiate who gets viewer or editor access. Lightdash changes this with a flat monthly pricing - removing hurdles for everyone in the organization to access insights.
While there’s been a lot of progress on semantic layers where business users can ask questions and get answers, we haven’t reached a place where there are no intermediaries involved. Data engineers still have to be involved in setting up the semantic layer that showcases an accurate answer.
AI is primarily being used to generate code that data engineers can use. It speeds up the process & increases developer productivity. But it’s not at a stage where there’s substantial impact.
“So when we launched on Hacker News, we gave ourselves a really verbose title and then somebody in one of the first comments put, oh, it's like open source looker. And I thought that was a much more concise way of describing what we were doing. So we actually adopted that tagline for a while.”
Hamzah Chaudhary
“The most successful way to get self-service analytics to work is by having folks - analytics engineers, dedicated to enabling the rest of the organization. These engineers could build semantic layers within data engineering tools & then expose it to an end-user.”
Hamzah Chaudhary
“My prediction is that the dbt metric flow product is going to be amazing and the pricing considerations around it will raise a lot of scrutiny, outrage and give other players in the space a chance to gain some adoption. So unfortunately, that's my prediction there from what I've seen with dbt's pricing at this time.”
Rohan Thakur