Entrinsik Informer vs. GoodData

Most schools that use Colleague (the Student Information System) have either UniData or SQL Server as the back-end database. If a school is currently a UniData school but has plans to move to SQL Server in the relatively near future then I'd advise against moving forward with Informer until after the conversion to SQL Server. There is a tool that will convert some reports, but there are many instances where the tool won't successfully convert the report and it will need to be re-written.

Incentivized

If you have consistently formatted data, that you want regular reports on, plus flexibility to let end users build their own reports, GoodData is perfect. Especially if your end users are less technical. If you want to be able to embed your reporting into your app, GoodData excels, though the start up process can be involved. If your data structure varies, it could be more challenging to integrate. It may also not be worth the integration if you have people who can already run their own SQL queries.

Incentivized

• Informer is pretty user-friendly. When teaching other employees how to use Informer, I typically don't have to repeat any steps or further explain how to do certain tasks because of how user-friendly it is.
• Reports in Informer are kept in a list that can be filtered by user, specific tags, or even by how recent the report was made or run. This makes it very quick and easy to find and run a specific report.
• Informer has many options for downloading the report output, including text (txt), comma separated values (csv), and even PDF.

Incentivized

• GoodData helps in simplifying complex data into easy-to-understand visuals. We can create personalized dashboards & tailor them as per requirements. This data can be used from an executive level employee to a team lead employee in the business
• GoodData is a very user friendly platform. The collaborative features simplify sharing and discussing reports among team members which promotes a culture of data-driven decision-making.
• GoodData connects with various data sources and consolidate information from multiple platforms. This flexibility proves invaluable for businesses dealing with data spread across different systems as they can access large amount of data on a single platform.

Incentivized

• Informer needs more predefined date formats in its Column Display Editor. The existing 5 do not meet everyone's needs.
• It's a minor UI issue, but Informer's Edit Columns view stutters and displays empty space when scrolling left or right. It may be because I'm using Safari on Mac OS X, and Informer isn't designed for input devices that scroll with "momentum" (as Apple calls it).
• The Reports Listing takes longer to load reports than I believe it should. At least a progress bar displays to tell you when it's complete.

Incentivized

• would be nice to be able to add the same filter to a multi-tab dashboard once instead of having to do it for each tab; tedious and time consuming
• Variable use is kind of clunky and would like to be able to hide/show easier
• The newer insight based dashboard method does not have the flexibility classic does

Incentivized

Informer has been handily meeting most of our reporting needs, and we've created a library of hundreds of reports that are used every day. They have a terrific support service to help when you have questions, and I've found them to be great at listening to what customers would like and adding new features. They are a small company that really listens and really cares, and I've been very pleased over the past few years getting to know them.

Each client I have worked with and spoken too has renewed their GoodData subscription. I know of not one to date that has cancelled. The GoodData platform has a very high rate of renewal from the discussions I have had with their internal teams as well

Since I don't know code, there are sometimes calculations that are beyond my knowledge to create. It would also be great to be able to format multiple columns at once (center, for instance), rather than having to format them individually.

Incentivized

GoodData provided us with strong overall usability and provided us a platform for various business analytics. Its user-friendly and insightful reports and also the dashboards. Me and my team really appreciate the platform's ability to streamline decision-making processes. However, there is a learning curve during initial setup as I mentioned before. Continuous improvements in the onboarding could further enhance GoodData's usability as well.

Incentivized

We have 10 concurrent licenses and we average between 6-8 at any given time during the day; and we host the application.

We are approximately one month since go-live. There has been one short outage.

Performance on refreshing metrics works well.

Always able to get acceptable solutions in reasonable time from friendly support staff. Initial contact is always with knowledgeable person - not someone reading from a script trying to screen calls. Thanks Entrinsik for being in tune with my needs.

Incentivized

The fast and comprehensive responses we got from GoodData regarding the doubts we had experienced while starting to use the products and metrics were of great help in ensuring the metrics we were obtaining were accurate to what we wanted to know about our customers' experience and our product areas of opportunity.

Incentivized

Petr was a rock star - patient, knowledgeable, clear and easy to work with.

GoodData implementation team was professional and courteous

We bought the product on a Thursday morning, and we were writing reports on Friday afternoon. We did take about a month to manage the Mapping, Linking and Security to allow us to open it up across campus. We are now mapping from as many third-party vendors as we can to enable the creation of more ad-hoc reporting.

Thorough, professional and on time.

Our organization used to use the built in reporting tool for Datatel, but it required more knowledge about SQL so only a handful of users could actually use it. There was no customization of the output or ability to schedule the queries. If you wanted something more complex than what was available, then the programmers needed to write an extraction program to pull the data you needed

Incentivized

GoodData comparing to other platform is very easy to use, customer support and on-boarding support. Set of features, speed of integration in our platform. Also great benefit for us was very competetive pricing.

Incentivized

• We have definitely improved customer service due to better reporting using Informer. All departments are better empowered to help our students in a more timely and accurate manner.
• Using Informer has given us the ability to eliminate functionality within our ERP system and offload reporting to a data store instead of the transactional system. This has resulted in successfully upgrading our core systems and improved response times.

• I personally pushed our management to get GoodData implemented, and there on we have been making much more profits than we ever did!
• Last month we made a decision using the platform and withing a short span of time our ROI gets 7X.
• We also made a marketing spend of $100,000 every quater using the insights and metrics, and we are really happy with the returs.

Incentivized