Grow

Helpful Strategic Planning Software

Comments: Grow has been one of the best softwares we chose to work with as an organization. It is user friendly to the point where any team member can go in and create dashboards to solve problems and understand how the company is working at any level of detail. The UI is smooth and easy to follow, and the customer support will help right away if there are ever any issues.

Pros:

Grow is a user-friendly, advanced tool that has allowed our company to fully understand metrics from every department. It is incredibly powerful in its ability to pull in data from every platform we use and compare the data against each other in every imaginable style of metric. The customer support is very helpful, and they will not only help you solve your problem, but advise on best practices - helping you learn how to work better in the software.

Cons:

The new feature releases they make are very powerful, however they require quite a bit of manual work to implement. We almost have to overhaul all our dashboards & datasets in order to utilize the new features.

Lowering the barrier to entry on data visualization at scale

Comments: Overall we are incredibly satisfied with Grow as our visualization tool of choice. Though there are minor limitations on performance and BI capabilities, it still provides an incredible solution at a very reasonable price with a low barrier to entry.
If you’re going for a platform that can be easily scaled at a palatable price and don’t have substantial teams of coding experts, Grow is the perfect sweet spot for your organization.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Makes it easy to look at data!

Pros:

I love how easy it is to dive into metrics across our company. I can look at stats in my department or others whenever I like.

Cons:

Nothing! I can't go back to the old way of doing things though.

Not for those wanting to really look into their data

Comments: We use the tool to eliminate some of the data silos we have in our operations. It has wonderful functionality of bringing in multiple data sources - from social media, website analytics, POS data, etc. - into one dashboard.
We've been able to get important data, from multiple sources, into the faces of our managers every 5 minutes (that's the least amount of time between data updates). Which has allowed us to be more agile when it comes to saving money and reducing risk.
It has great flexibility and the team at Grow definitely works hard to impress. They build an integration into one of our software to make it easier to work with their system.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Review for Grow

Pros:

Easily to use, handling capable, analysis

Cons:

I think no drawbacks from this software.