OpenText Magellan vs. Zendesk Explore

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
OpenText Magellan
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
OpenText Magellan Analytics Suite leverages a comprehensive set of data analytics software to identify patterns, relationships and trends through data visualizations and interactive dashboards.N/A
Zendesk Explore
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Zendesk offers Explore, a business intelligence and customer analytics tool which integrates with the Zendesk suite featuring ticket analytics, custom fields, dashboards, and other features. Zendesk is migrating customers of the BIME analytics product, which is approaching end of support, to Zendesk Explore in 2019.N/A
Pricing
OpenText MagellanZendesk Explore
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
OpenText MagellanZendesk Explore
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
OpenText MagellanZendesk Explore
Considered Both Products
OpenText Magellan
Chose OpenText Magellan
There is multiple software available in the market to do the reporting and text analytics. Generally, analysts prefer using Python or R. Or we try to use any API available. This software can fulfill almost 80% of those needs without writing the codes. It has the integration …
Chose OpenText Magellan
OpenText Magellan can produce reports that are much more elaborate than PowerBI, which is ideal for users that just need to see a report. On the other hand, PowerBI seems to be better at allowing users to interact with data.
Chose OpenText Magellan
It is vastly superior to these in many ways, for complex reporting it is a much more sophisticated solution. Visualizations are very good. Javascript extensibility is very powerful, others don't support this or as well. Pentaho and MS are both OLAP oriented. Pentaho is moving …
Chose OpenText Magellan
Actuate has been in the industry a while and the open source community make going with Actuate's BIRT a stable decision. Changing report engines can be expensive, so going with a company with a good reputation helps long-term.
Chose OpenText Magellan
I've used JReports and Actuate is very similar but seems to have a lot more customization features for the end user of BIRT reports.
Chose OpenText Magellan
Actuate has a HUGE number of features that can tie nicely into almost any ERP but it takes some time to learn and the development community was relatively small compared to the Crystal Reports alternative. Crystal was far easier to learn and had a massive support base. Probably …
Chose OpenText Magellan
We looked at a few other competitor's products but based on value for features chose Actuate for its total cost of ownership.
Zendesk Explore
Chose Zendesk Explore
Zendesk Explore stands out against Freshchat and Freshdesk for it's deeper analytics capabilities and seamless integration with Zendesk ecosystem. While Freshdesk offers reporting, it lacks on the same level of granular insights and customization that Zendesk Explore provides. …
Chose Zendesk Explore
I selected Zendesk Explore only to provide an easy and quick access for my managers and supervisors regading metrics and volume trends. Is not the most flexible nor complete data visualization tool, but works well for day-to-day follow ups.
You need to use another tool if you …
Chose Zendesk Explore
N/A - the company had already implemented Zendesk Explore when I was hired.
Chose Zendesk Explore
What's good with Zendesk Explore is that data is already provided since it's included in the package. We get the data from Zendesk Support and make a report in Zendesk Explore.

It provides suggested templates and report formats also which you don't get on the other platforms. …
Chose Zendesk Explore
Zendesk Explore is more user friendly and the software plus maintenance cost is less. The report section is more detailed and no lag while creating report for a large data source. The report segments and formats are editable which make it more convenient to make a report …
Chose Zendesk Explore
We tried other reporting and Zendesk Explore was by far the best as it was already implemented into our support system we were already using; Zendesk. The main selling point for us, is that all of the reports are customizable and that no coding knowledge is needed to build out …
Chose Zendesk Explore
Zendesk Explore is better than Freshservice Analytics. In Freshservice, even though the interface is more attractive, the functions are not as good as Zendesk Explore. Reports and dashboards are hard to build, and the materials to learn are not as good as the materials on …
Chose Zendesk Explore
For support data, we have only used Explore because it came with our ZenDesk membership. So I can't speak to other solutions! That said, it's awesome to have Knowledge Base and support data in one place.
Features
OpenText MagellanZendesk Explore
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
OpenText Magellan
7.0
Ratings
15% below category average
Zendesk Explore
9.0
Ratings
10% above category average
Customizable dashboards7.00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates7.00 Ratings9.90 Ratings
Pixel Perfect reports00 Ratings7.10 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
OpenText Magellan
8.3
Ratings
3% above category average
Zendesk Explore
8.3
Ratings
3% above category average
Drill-down analysis8.00 Ratings9.50 Ratings
Formatting capabilities8.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages9.00 Ratings4.80 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration8.00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
OpenText Magellan
8.3
Ratings
0% below category average
Zendesk Explore
8.4
Ratings
1% above category average
Publish to Web8.00 Ratings6.90 Ratings
Publish to PDF8.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Report Versioning9.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling8.00 Ratings8.90 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
OpenText Magellan
8.0
Ratings
0% above category average
Zendesk Explore
7.2
Ratings
10% below category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)9.00 Ratings6.60 Ratings
Predictive Analytics7.00 Ratings5.50 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization00 Ratings7.10 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining00 Ratings9.40 Ratings
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
OpenText Magellan
9.0
Ratings
6% above category average
Zendesk Explore
9.1
Ratings
7% above category average
Role-Based Security Model9.00 Ratings9.50 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)9.00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)9.00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Multi-User Support (named login)00 Ratings9.50 Ratings
Report-Level Access Control00 Ratings8.60 Ratings
Mobile Capabilities
Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of Product A and Product B
OpenText Magellan
7.0
Ratings
12% below category average
Zendesk Explore
7.8
Ratings
1% below category average
Responsive Design for Web Access7.00 Ratings6.10 Ratings
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile7.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Mobile Application00 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
Comparison of Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding features of Product A and Product B
OpenText Magellan
6.2
Ratings
23% below category average
Zendesk Explore
5.9
Ratings
28% below category average
REST API5.00 Ratings5.40 Ratings
Javascript API9.00 Ratings5.90 Ratings
Java API5.00 Ratings5.60 Ratings
Themeable User Interface (UI)7.00 Ratings6.20 Ratings
Customizable Platform (Open Source)5.00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
iFrames00 Ratings5.50 Ratings
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OpenText MagellanZendesk Explore
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Medium-sized Companies
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Score 10.0 out of 10
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User Ratings
OpenText MagellanZendesk Explore
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
9.5
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
3.9
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
OpenText MagellanZendesk Explore
Likelihood to Recommend
It depends on extensibility, set-up, access & style. Actuate performs fairly well, but has performance issues because it sits on top of eclipse, which sits on top of Java. Extensibility usually comes at that price. Set-up is fairly straightforward and it can be secured.
Read full review
Compared to other analytics functions of other Ticket Management System, Zendesk Explore is the easiest to learn. Moreover, the learning curve is high. Once you pick up the fundamentals, you will be able to create all types of analytic reports. In addition, if you know basic coding or SQL, you can create your own metrics and attributes to capture extremely specific elements such as the tickets that contain a certain word or etc.
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Pros
  • Ability to connect to different kinds of sources, including web services, and customize those queries to the extend needed
  • Provide tools to customize the look & feel of the reports as much as needed, even being able to choose different appearances for different outputs
  • Allowing scripting in the reports extends the functionality available
  • Allowing to embed reports without further licensing and maintaining all the functionality
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  • As with most "suite" products, if you already use other Zendesk features (Chat, Talk, etc), then Zendesk Explore adds an extra facet to the customer experience. The more we know about our clientele, the better we can understand/anticipate their needs.
  • I like that we can get as in-depth as we feel is necessary. For example, is just one customer having an issue? Or are many experiencing a similar problem? We can better rack this type of trend using Explore.
  • Our team can dive deep into the data based on exactly what we're looking for. If the marketing team wants a certain kind of segment, we can give them that info. If we want to sort by date or another set of parameters, we can do that as well.
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Cons
  • Report rendering can take a long time for large reports (250,000+ pages) - we run these in batch over night
  • The deployment of production code from development to test to production enviroments can be complex due to the number of components that must compile
Read full review
  • More detailed pieces of training on where to find datasets/queries.
  • Have demo reports to do live trainings; instead of watching videos.
  • Have a key as to what all of the datasets mean.
  • Have a pop-up that analyzes the data "looks like your csat dropped this week!" etc...
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Likelihood to Renew
I am no longer working for the company that was using Actuate but I believe they would continue to use it because the stitching costs would be to high. It would require a complete rewrite of the reports and the never version of Actuate (BIRT) even required an almost complete report rewrite
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No answers on this topic
Usability
It is quite intuitive to use. It is fit specifically for doing sentiment, emotion, and intention analysis as well as text classification and text summarization. I would have given 10 if it is fit for the purpose of doing image processing and analysis as well. There is a huge market to analyze video and image data.
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I rate Zendesk Explore 8 out of 10 for it's overall usability because it offers powerful reporting and analytics with an easy to navigate interface and intuitive dashboards. It helps improve customer satisfaction by providing valuable insights into ticket handling, agent performance and customer satisfaction. Though the complex query builder can be challenging for non technical users.
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Support Rating
Always there on the front and backend for us and the client.
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Zendesk Community is extremely useful for Zendesk Explore beginners. The live support provided by Zendesk will also help a lot. If you don't know anything you can ask live support right away. However, one drawback of Zendesk Community and Support is the creation of complex reports on Zendesk Explore. Zendesk Community and Support cannot really help you much if you are trying to build a complex report as they are not a complete expert on it as well.
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Alternatives Considered
It is vastly superior to these in many ways, for complex reporting it is a much more sophisticated solution. Visualizations are very good. Javascript extensibility is very powerful, others don't support this or as well. Pentaho and MS are both OLAP oriented. Pentaho is moving more toward big data, which was not our primary focus. Others are stuck in the Crystal Reports Band metaphor.
Read full review
Zendesk Explore stands out against Freshchat and Freshdesk for it's deeper analytics capabilities and seamless integration with Zendesk ecosystem. While Freshdesk offers reporting, it lacks on the same level of granular insights and customization that Zendesk Explore provides. Compared to Freshchat which focuses more on live chat and conversational analytics Zendesk Explore excels in historical trend analysis and comprehensive dashboarding. We choose Zendesk Explore for it's robust reporting and drill down capabilities.
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Return on Investment
  • Actuate can handle 50 to 60 sub reports inside a report very well.
  • Dynamically creating the datasource, chart, graph, reports are the main advantages. We can do any level of drilling, and can create a performance matrix dashboard efficiently.
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  • Positive impact of around 5 hours/week in Dashboard building and visualization
  • 10 hours from Product to review dashboards and find potential patterns
  • Enabler to find opportunities based on agents´ occupancy rates
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ScreenShots

OpenText Magellan Screenshots

Screenshot of A Magellan BI & Reporting dashboard that an individual can interact with and personalize to their needs, such as changing chart types or computations.Screenshot of Magellan Data Discovery provides a Smart User Interface, designed to equip new users and users seeking a more streamlined set of features for insightsScreenshot of Magellan Data Discovery provides an Advanced User Interface that allows data analytics pros to leverage its breadth of sophisticated capabilities for insightsScreenshot of Magellan Text Mining insights can be displayed within easy-to-use dashboards.Screenshot of Data scientists can create visualizations within the Magellan Notebook and see it dynamically update as they write changes to it.