Grow

What made Grow ideal for a small(er) business like ours is the fact they provide all three components of a traditional data warehouse solution under one roof: warehouse, ETL, and BI. We were able to engage a single company to handle all of these services without any prior knowledge of cloud computing, business intelligence, etc.

The BI interface is much cleaner and easier to work with than another service that we have worked with. We have used Amazon Quicksight in the past and it always left me wanting more. I have not gotten that with Grow.

I will occasionally encounter some user experience or user interface issues. For example, some of the SQL syntax highlighting/auto-completion will not work. Sometimes text widgets will just "disappear" after I have dragged them onto the canvas. I haven't been able to establish a pattern, but it's kind of inconvenient when it happens.

The two biggest pros for utilizing Grow for our data visualization/dashboard needs is the ability to operate at scale and the accessibility and usability to employees with various technical abilities.
The general requirements of our firm included 200+ dashboards for both clients and internal use that provided extensive user permission options, did not require all users/architects to be extensively skilled at coding languages, and still provided the customization capabilities of higher dollar platforms.
Grow was a perfect solution to all of these challenges. Their transformation “apps” within their builder allow users with limited SQL knowledge to apply all manipulations needed to datasets. Their user permissions, with unlimited users model, allows for a scalable system that handles all internal and external requirements. Their new data explorer functionality empowers end users to further manipulate and analyze data. All this at a competitive price point made Grow a perfect solution for our business.

The two biggest one to utilizing Grow as our data visualization tool are its lack of true BI capabilities and some of the technical challenges we’ve faced. Though neither is enough to sway us from a “definitely recommend” stance, both are worth noting.
When compared to more expensive solutions built around BI (think Tableau or Looker), Grow lacks BI capabilities. The new data explorer functionality helps significantly close this gap, but it still is up to the architect and end-user to provide the “analysis” component. If your team lacks the ability to translate data into action, Grow doesn’t have BI/AI/etc capabilities like other platforms to bridge that gap.
Additionally, while Grow performs reasonably well, it’s not without its technical challenges. Being a smaller company than the titans of the visualization space, technical challenges stretch out longer than they seemingly should. Additionally, though their business model/pricing makes it incredibly scalable, large volumes of data sources (not necessarily a large data source; simply having many different sources connected at once) can lead to slower loading/building that can hamper my team’s efficiency.
Again, neither of these are deal breakers by any means, but are worth noting.

Their UI is awesome. I love the overall look and feel for the entire system. Graphs look updated, clean, and they are fairly easy to customize. Making the dashboards look good is fairly simple.

Not data warehousing the data is an issue. Long load times really get me frustrated with the software. It seems to take a minute to edit a metric, load a new metric, or even sometime update a metric. Updating a dashboard can take 2 minutes at times.
Drilling down and looking into the data is very underwhelming. Dashboard filters don't exist so you're stuck loading filters only to individual metrics, not the whole dashboard.
Email triggers that send reports on a set schedule are limited to only 7 am MT on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule.
Time zone offsets have been the death of me in the system. They use SQLite to format the data coming in but their out-of-the-box data filtering overrides all SQLite filters. It's been super frustrating trying to get the data we want.