ibi WebFOCUS vs. ThoughtSpot

WebFOCUS is a good comprehensive tool for BI for companies. I feel that scenarios where you want the user to interact and be able to ingest data in different formats would be a good use of the tool. Performing data discovery is easier with InfoAssist, especially the most recent versions, and allows users to customize their views and provide comments.

Incentivized

By using the power of cloud platforms like bigquery or snowflake, ThoughtSpot can deliver performance at scale ensuring that even the largest organization can quickly analyze and visualize data. The ability to seamlessly share live dashboards fosters collaborations, ensuring everyone in the organization is working from the same data source and aligned in decision making.

Incentivized

• Webfocus reports all have the option to export to Excel. The excel spreadsheet is always very organized and clean, and the information is very easy to read.
• Webfocus is able to maintain data from years prior. We can look up what we featured in catalogs and all the sales history attached with it.
• Webfocus is able to provide support to a variety of departments. For example, our buying team uses it for planning in advance and our marketing team uses the tool to see how categories and products as the selling

Incentivized

• Beautiful visualizations. The visuals are distinct, clean, and easy to discern from one another.
• Intelligent querying functionality. When looking to manipulate the data, the search function makes it easy to manipulate the features in the data, along with aggregating them in the way you'd like.
• Embedding! It has been a smooth process thus far for our product & technical teams to work with ThoughtSpot and bring it into our product.

Incentivized

• The Developer Studio has some bugs. I've faced errors where swapping between our DEV and PROD servers causes that the software stops responding.
• Easy to find documentation and examples. WebFOCUS has some help with this but it'd be better to provide more real life examples.
• Sometimes it's harder to code the graphical interface of the report because of the HTML styling.

Incentivized

• It would be great if ThoughtSpot can add the feature to filter by clicking on visualizations. i.e if I click on a particular data point in the chart if the full dashboard can filter just for that particular data point.
• Color coding the heatmap with different colors like green to orange to red.

Incentivized

This software is deeply engrained with my organization and has become a tool that would not easily be replaced without spending more money and resources to get the same results. License cost is comparable to other report writing tools and the capabilities are greater than the competition without having to buy multiple apps to do the same thing.

Incentivized

We have had success with the initial use cases and there are more use cases that can receive return on investment. I don't give it a 10 because other products like Tableau are building functionality that may start to compete in the coming years.

Incentivized

Best BI tool/product I have used. The others don't compare overall. Some can look fancier, but when you actually use them with large data and data from numerous systems/sources that is where most of the competition falls away. I also don't like downtime. I have basically none for a large user base with WebFocus. Even SAP Crystal Reports went down for 4 days once - 4 days because the admin password got locked out due to a glitch and we had zero reports for 4 days. WebFocus has never had more than a few minutes of downtime. It's like a tank that just keeps rolling. There is no other choice for reliable BI.

Incentivized

The tool is easy to use if you know what you are doing and looking for. I know as they work towards improvements and simple language it will become even easier, but as of now they are doing a great job but there is room for improvement.

Incentivized

Tracking availability formally for almost two years and we are at 99.8%

Incentivized

it's available unless there is a server or system update etc. sometimes the timing of this is bad (for example during a month end close)

Incentivized

It does what it is supposed to. Would be nice to have a bit more insights

Incentivized

They have extremely knowledgeable techs that I have worked with over the years. Some have actually become really good friends of mine. I see them often at local user groups and when we show them how we are using their tools to save millions of dollars throughout the company

Incentivized

I give it this meeting because the team is not only help able to help us in the current solutions but also amazing and taking feedback and feeding it back to their development team which includes more products and features into ThoughtSpot

Incentivized

inhouse in-person training. Took a bit to long to get the basics.

Incentivized

It's hit and miss, the last class was overcrowded and people were having trouble connecting which took up much of the time. Instructors vary

Incentivized

poor instructions

Incentivized

Plan ahead on what data will be accessible and the type of security required on the database and if you will want to use security that is built into the software. It is worth consulting with the vendor on what your plan is and how they recommend you proceed in order to get results you are happy with.

Incentivized

Understand use case and model and design accordingly

Incentivized

Above average. Feature wise [Information Builders WebFOCUS] stands out. User friendliness is OK. It can handle the most complex tasks and its extensions with for example R make it extremely versatile. Support is lagging in western Europe, although i am more than happy with current level. With takeover by tipco it remains to be seen how European strategy will evolve

Incentivized

It is more flexible and PowerBI, easier work online, and share information with many users. Also the dashboards and beautiful, and the user experience is better. Performance used to be faster. We use Looker for different use cases but, when it comes to reporting and sharing information, ThoughSpot is much better.

Incentivized

Because it is very reliable, inside the situation, we need strong internet connection to access a lot of data but easily never had any downtime except during the upgrades

Incentivized

• We are not yet a success story. Though we've been implementing WebFOCUS for over a year, we have very few products in our Production portal. Of course, this is not all the responsibility of Information Builders, but we were ill-advised by our 'training coordinator' in our training of staff and coming up to speed with the tools has been very slow.
• Once skilled analysts and professional IT staff achieve a grasp of the products, they are able to very quickly create polished and well-received products.
• The DW/BI project has helped us to establish standards and protocols of communication that will allow us to more quickly meet knowledge transfer requirements

• Time to market ROI is massive vs hiring the full-time dedicated team to build and maintain a frontend multi-tenant SaaS data viz product.
• It will be interesting to see over time how the advanced features play out in terms of usability and end value, such as Natural Search, which we are very excited about, and the machine learning tools.

Incentivized