Looker Studio vs. Roambi (discontinued)

Does great at open canvas editing and letting you fully customize without the need for a grid. It is democratizing self-service no-code analytics. You do not need to be a data or analytics engineer to get started, and you can go very far based on how intuitive and straightforward the UI is. Some of the biggest challenges with Looker Studio relate to user management/security, embedding options, and issue support. For a long time, every user needed to have a Gmail to invite them to view a dashboard via login, not sure if that has been improved yet. You can let any user view without logging in, but that is not always recommended due to security reasons. In terms of embedding, you can only iframe dashboards. More sophisticated BI tools let you embed elements via API or Javascript. Iframing dashboards also make drill downs and dashboard to dashboard navigation tricky/near impossible. There is also no ability to contact Google for support when bugs or outages happen. They point everyone to the Data Studio community. There is some ability to get in contact with Google if you have an enterprise-level contract with Google Cloud, but the path for support is very ad hoc and not always fruitful.

Incentivized

I would recommend Roambi for its ease-of-use and quick deployment. It is very visually rich and eye-catching, and I believe it is best suited for presenting business & finance dashboard to C-level management and sales representatives in the field. Because it can be accessed on the iPhone or iPad, it is very mobile and the Apple touch interfaces are nearly flawless. If an organization needs to really dig deep into their data, I would look elsewhere, as Roambi has certain limitations.

• Self-service
• Easy to use, point and click
• Little to no training required
• Easy to share internally and externally
• Rich visualizations
• Canned reports
• Easy to copy/paste/dupe existing reports
• Ability to join data sets
• Easy integration with various data sources
• Flexible data integrations, including lowest common denominator (CSV, XLS, G-Sheets)
• Wide range of APIs
• Secure / authentication via Google SSO
• Easy to share / re-assign ownership of reports and data sources

Incentivized

• Very intuitive user interface that exploits the touch capabilities of tablets and smartphones very well.
• Offline capability - extremely helpful for sales people that can not always be online.
• Integration with existing BI solutions - almost all of our clients have already a BI Infrastructure. Roambi integrates very well.

• Few functionalities are very exclusive only for data studio.
• It's time taking to load data and at the same time only single Data source can be connected.
• When editing the reports you have to switch between Edit and View mode to see how does the change looks like.

• The system that performs the rendering of data to the front-end can be improved to intelligently read the back end data template or at least the layout. Inserting new rows/columns of data completely messes up the rendering on the front end and the process of re-selecting information to ensure proper rendering is a very tedious one.
• Also, Roambi should have the capability to analyse information in formats other than excel such as word, ppts and/or pdfs. I found the lack of this capability a major hurdle because each time I had to export information into excel to render into a template.

It is the simplest and least expensive way for us to automate our reporting at this time. I like the ability to customize literally everything about each report, and the ability to send out reports automatically in emails. The only issue we have been having recently is a technical glitch in the automatic email report. Sadly, there is almost no support for this tool from Google, but is also free, so that is important to take into consideration

Incentivized

The only reason we would not renew is if there is something out there that is less expensive that is cross-platform for mobile devices. Our clients are no longer exclusively using iOS, so in order to keep their business, we need to change with them.

It is not ideal and requires time and dedication to understand how to work with it. Also, it has a lot of limitations around data it can accept. But in most cases, this tool is sufficient for everyday tasks of product and marketing departments. I wouldn't say that the interface is very user-friendly, but for people who regularly work with analytical tools, it must be ok.

Incentivized

VERY easy to use. Only limited by how the graphs and data is initially set up.

I give it a lower support rating because it seems like our Dev team hasn't gotten the support they need to set up our database to connect. Seems like we hit a roadblock and the project got put on pause for dev. That sucks for me because it is harder to get the dev team to focus on it if they don't get the help they need to set it up.

Incentivized

Looker Studio is far easier to implement, stand up, and learn. The interface is simpler and user-friendly for various levels of data visualization/analysis knowledge and experience. The biggest benefit of Looker Studio, however, is its ease of connection to GA data and speed. Furthermore, since it is an online program/tool, it requires less CPU/battery/storage on the user's device.

Incentivized

Comparing the mobile capabilities of both products - as of course, Tibco Spotfire is a complete solution whereas Roambi focuses on mobility. While some would argue that the ten View (template) limitation of Roambi works in favor of competitors, we have found this to be untrue. Users quickly get used to this native interfaces, which are found across the templates. Additionally, the ten available Views cover 99% of the types of reports or insights you'd ever need. If this is not the case, are you sure you are asking the right questions?

• Free, so the only investment is time
• Because it doesn't have native support of non-Google sources, it can cost more money than Tableau
• The time spent formatting the templates or building connectors can have a negative impact on ROI
• As a agency, charging for the reporting service is profitable after the first month or two after building the dashboard.

Incentivized

• positive ROI
• and any analytical tool needs more historical data for accurate analysis, in that case, roambi 's part is as a presenter can't influence the ROI exactly..
• overall objective its a value addition for sap based data analytics and others as well.
• for CIO or analytics people good tool to convince their business users and executives.

Incentivized