Dundas BI Reviews

We mainly work as visualization experts for an organization. We know how Dundas BI works, what are its capabilities, and how to deploy the reports for multiple users by using the layering structures, etc. It is basically purchased by the clients, and we end up working as the developer for Dundas BI.

I have been working with reporting groups. For one of our clients, we had a requirement where we had to create reports, and Dundas BI was the tool that they were using at that particular time. It was back in 2016 when I worked for around 18 months on Dundas BI. The client had already upgraded to Dundas BI at that time, and they were using it as a solution for an end client in the Oil and Gas domain. We ended up creating more than 500 different dashboards for them by using Dundas BI. I was working with a team of three or four developers who got onboarded to Dundas BI. 

Six months ago, I again worked for the same client, but it was a different end client of theirs. The end client's domain again was Oil and Gas. We ended up using a lot of features in Dundas BI. They were connecting to multiple data sources in Dundas BI, and they had a semantic layer in between to allow them to connect to the database. They also had a KPI system. They were connecting to more than 40 different sources while creating cubes in Dundas.

It was on-premises. It was not on the public cloud because there were data security concerns for them. They had multiple licenses, and it was a pretty big implementation for them.

Our clients went for Dundas BI because of the options to connect with various sources and the options to make changes in terms of formatting. If you want to go with the external files or if you want to connect to multiple or legacy systems, Dundas BI supports that. That was important for them.

One of our clients used it because with Dundas BI, it was easier for them to meet the needs of their end client. With Dundas BI, they could have the ability to accommodate the requirements by using R, HTML coding, etc. They could also use Javascript. It was easier for the business side to accommodate the changes. The client I worked for was in oil and gas distribution. They had a requirement where they wanted to see the map of their different plants and sites. With Dundas BI, it was easier to achieve that.

The primary reasons why the client opted for Dundas BI were the cost, integration options, and creative visuals.

With Dundas BI, you have a lot of visualization choices, and you can also do customizations by using HTML coding and JavaScript. The ease of development was one of the main factors for going for Dundas BI. The client had different reporting tools, but they wanted something that could accommodate all requirements. 

With Dundas BI, we do not have end-users apart from the developers. End-users do not find it easy to create their own reports. Most of the implementations I have seen require a developer team for creating the visuals, and they then give them to end-users. A self-serve part where end-users or business users can create their own reports would help in terms of the adoption of Dundas BI. Currently, business users find it difficult to work with Dundas BI because there are so many settings that they don't know what they need to do. Even when a developer starts working on Dundas BI, he needs to spend at least one month or so getting used to the functionalities of Dundas BI. Even then, it is not easy to remember where or how they made a certain property change. It takes at least one month for a developer to get acquainted with it.

Working with the color palette is difficult in Dundas BI. They can work on different color palettes and make them organized and user-friendly. It would help a long way. Most of the time, the users face challenges in assigning colors to the fields that they have created or to the dimensions and measures in a chart.

Dundas can further reduce the number of settings they have. When you create any chart in Dundas, you get a lot of features to control each setting, which is pretty useful for BI, but for end-users, it is difficult to identify the exact settings to change a property. 

I would love it if some of the options come pre-selected. If some of the settings are set to best practices by default, it will be helpful.

Whenever we have any issues, the error messages that we get in Dundas BI are not very helpful in identifying the root cause.

Making these changes will bring a lot of change to the end-user experience.

Overall, I have seven years of experience working with Dundas BI. 

When we connected Dundas BI with more than 40 different data sources, we observed that certain services connecting to Dundas BI would fail. The end extraction would either not refresh on time or time out because of the data volume. It wasn't completely on the Dundas BI side, but it required analysis to identify what went wrong. The error messages that we get in Dundas BI are pretty standard, and it becomes difficult to understand the root cause of the issue.

With Dundas BI, you need to have a dedicated development team that can work on creating visualizations and reports and provide them to the end-users. As long as there is a development team working on things and deploying them for the client as a dashboard, it works smoothly for even 100 users. We did not observe any major issues in terms of performance in our region because we used the in-memory option in Dundas BI. When it comes to scaling for a larger user base, the biggest barrier of Dundas BI is the inability of business users to create their own reports. If they can create their own reports, the license count will automatically go up.

While working on one of the projects, we had a team of around seven developers. Over the period of two years, the number went up to somewhere around 15 users, but the end-users were around 200 or 300. That's how it worked for that particular deployment. In the latest deployment that I worked on, we were in the initial phase of creating the sample dashboard for the users. They were planning to increase the number of users. We created the reports, and our client was planning to add on users. It went pretty well, and they're going to increase the number of licenses.

We had to connect with the Dundas BI team when working with the previous client. We connected with the Dundas BI team to understand the performance criteria and how we can improve the performance of the Dundas BI. We were connecting to multiple sources, and during that time, a particular dashboard was taking a lot of time to load requests. The client's expectation was that it should load within a certain number of seconds. So, we connected with the Dundas BI team to understand what can be done in terms of improving the performance further. We worked on the optimization on the database side and the Dundas side.

There are defined steps that you need to perform for its initial setup. In terms of setup, I don't find it very difficult. Their setup process is pretty well defined in terms of what needs to be done. So, I haven't faced any challenges with that.

I tried installing it on my local system multiple times, but I did not observe many issues. You need to install the SQL Server or the other database system for the Dundas systems, and it is okay.

The installation and setup on the local machine took a day or two, but for the enterprise-level deployment, it takes somewhere between three to four days. The first part is mainly for identifying or doing the installation. The second part is validating or connecting to the sources. The installation itself is not that much of an issue, but connecting to the data sources, validating everything is working smoothly, and pulling in the data takes time. Overall, it takes anywhere between two to five days for an enterprise-level solution.

I am not majorly involved in its licensing. We are not the end license purchaser of the Dundas BI. It costs somewhere around $4,000 a year for the enterprise solution, but I am not sure.

To new Dundas BI users, I would suggest going through the videos and duplicating the things done in them. Dundas has opened up their online solution for a trial period, which is pretty helpful.

I would rate Dundas BI a seven out of ten. The reason for reducing two points is that it lacks adaptability by the business users, and the other part is the number of options that we have in Dundas BI. As a BI developer, it is very appealing, but at the same time, it becomes an overhead to identify and change the properties. However, in terms of integration and visualization options, it is a well-rounded platform.

It is a dashboarding tool. We have had multiple use cases where we were providing the UI for our sales and marketing data. It was primarily used for report generation.

It was quite easy to use. The UI was basically drag-and-drop based. So, even if you were a beginner at coding software or something else, it would be easy to catch up on Dundas BI.

It lacked advanced features in a few areas. For example, dynamic charting had limitations. We had a use case where we had to generate a report based on the user selection. If we had a dropdown with 10 fields, a user can select what he or she wants to view at that moment. Even though such a feature was there, it had very limited functionality. I don't remember the exact thing that it failed to do, but we could not really do a lot. They had not developed it completely. 

For every object, references are generated, but sometimes, there was a problem with the references overlapping each other. Everything would go off. It would stop working, and then from the admin side, people had to do something to bring it up again.

They could maybe provide some support to directly use JavaScript. This will allow those developers or UI people who are well aware of JavaScript to code. Currently, there is an option to code, but you need to use Dundas Script. Dundas Script is based on JavaScript, but it is not exactly JavaScript. Finding things on Dundas Script is not that easy because the documentation that is available online is not great. They have online documentation where they have used Dundas Script to get the objects and other things, but that's more of a sample to show you how to do something, such as creating a text box via scripting, in case you do not want to use the drag-and-drop functionality. That kind of documentation is available, but it doesn't really support JavaScript.

I have used it for around two and a half years, but I don't work on it anymore.

It was majorly stable. There were some problems with the references that were getting generated in the tool. 

It is license based. So, it depends on the number of licenses. We had around 40 or 50 developers using it.

We contacted them multiple times. When we had the references overlap issue, from a developer's perspective, it was not easy to understand what should be done in such a case. Also, for getting the data to Dundas BI, there were multiple ways. One option was through stored procedures, which was a little bit complicated. A lot of times, we had to contact them to debug if a stored procedure was being used in the background.

I was not involved in its setup.

I'm not aware of its cost. Its licensing was probably role-wise. Most of us had reader access, editor access, or developer access. For admin, there were certain restrictions. So, I'm assuming it had role-wise licensing.

If you do not have very complex use cases, it would be a good tool. If you have tables somewhere, you can just fetch the data directly from there. In such a case, it is easy to use, but if there is a lot of complexity involved in bringing the data, it is not recommended. For example, if your use case involves dynamic charting, I would not recommend it because in that case, you just end up saying, "We are sorry. This is not possible in this tool."

I would rate it a seven out of ten. Whatever functionality they're providing, they should improve that a little more. Based on people's requests, they can accommodate the changes and make the components that they have added support a little bit more.

We use this product for dashboarding and visualization. I'm a credit analyst. 

I like the drag-and-drop feature for creating dashboards. The solution also provides a lot of different filters that can be customized according to how you'd like the dashboard to perform. You can change column orders and tables, and it's also possible to add formulas. When I had to use a filter, I was able to quickly navigate it and create multiple views in the same dashboard. 

I think the customer experience could be improved. I don't always want to have to contact vendor support to get my query sorted out; it takes a huge amount of time to raise a request. If I could find some answers online, user forums, some example dashboards and a video about creating dashboards, that would be amazing. As an additional feature, I'd like to see the ability to link the dashboards together. My current preference would be to work with Tableau or Power BI because they're more user intuitive and both have a good user interface. I don't find Dundas BI so easy to work with. It's the data integration aspect that is causing trouble. 

I've been using this solution for four months. 

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. We use it regularly, several times a week. 

Technical support is pretty good, but it requires scheduling a meeting and the process is time consuming.  But they're pretty good and helpful, doing their best to provide an optimal solution. 

We used a third party for deployment. They provided us with all the user accesses and licenses and they also handle maintenance. They maintain our databases, regularly updating all the data that we upload to Dundas BI. 

In comparing Tableau to Dundas, Tableau is easier to understand and to work with. Dundas doesn't have that ease of use and it doesn't provide a good interactive experience. Dundas requires some training, without which it's very difficult to understand what's happening around you if you're new to the game. There are a lot of things available online and the documentation, in general, is okay, but for the areas I'm working in such as filters, this is not available.

I know Tableau is pricey, but I prefer it to Dundas. I rate this solution four out of 10. 

We host Dundas BI on Linux in AWS and connect it to our SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Snowflake, and SingleStore databases. 

We use it embedded into our own platform. Our platform allows us to embed Dundas BI dashboards and we can connect our own system with the user and access management of Dundas BI. 

Our platform also has its own filters that we then connect to the Dundas BI filters to create a seamless integration. We white-label Dundas BI so the user does not see a difference between our platform and Dundas BI. We analyze all kinds of data from sales to supply chain, finance, marketing, HR, and more. 

We have now the ability to create interactive and complex reports without the need for software developers and code. We can create these reports very quickly. Our users are happy because we use the flexibility of Dundas to provide highly customized and targeted solutions that give justice to the many different use cases we need to cover. The great licensing model and the floating users allow us to serve a great number of users while being able to accommodate for usage spikes (e.g. financial reports at the end of the month).

The flexibility of the dashboard designer is great. You can control every single pixel and no matter what the user asks for we can deliver. It has a lot of out-of-the-box options that you can use to customize your dashboard. 

There is also the option to use their JavaScript API, however, in 99% of the cases, the built-in options are more than enough. 

I also love the control you have on what queries Dundas BI is generating against our databases. This allows us to create really fast dashboards even when running against millions of records.

Dundas BI really has all the features that we need to get the job done. Where it doesn't, we can still use the APIs they offer to get there. 

There are some minor things that would make the tool easier and faster to use, however, over the last couple of releases, a lot of those have already been realized. One example for this would be that I can select a filter to see what visualizations are bound to it yet I cannot select a visualization and see what filters are connected to it. This is not preventing me from creating what I need. Still, it would make it more convenient. 

I've used the solution for more than five years.

It does run stable for us in most cases. 

We had some issues with excessive RAM consumption, however, the support team showed us how we can limit the data size a user can request from the database. Since then, the system runs stable.

We have thousands of users accessing the Dundas BI dashboards. It does scale quite well.

Customer service and support are great. Their support responds fast and is very knowledgeable. Issues get escalated quickly and you don't spend weeks being sent from one person to another. 

They have a customer success program that meets with us on a monthly basis to ensure everything is running smoothly on our end. We have a great relationship with them.

Positive

We were using Dundas Dashboard before which is a product by the same company. We switched to Dundas BI because it is the more modern and superior product.

The setup is fairly straightforward. We have migrated Dundas BI since then several times from Windows to Linux and within a different version of Linux. Every time it has worked with only small and expected issues that we were able to work through either on our own or with the help of the Dundas BI Support team.

We are doing all of our implementations in-house.

We charge our users a monthly fee for running their reports in our platform. Without dropping numbers I can say that our ROI is quite sufficient.

The licensing model is fair and quite flexible. The same is true with the setup. You can run it on-premise or in the cloud and on Windows and Linux. We switched from Windows to Linux and were happy with both systems.

There were no other options evaluated at the time as we were already very happy with the older Dundas product. We have since evaluated other tools such as Tableau and Power BI, however, our tool of choice is still Dundas BI.

They are a great team to work with. If you have any questions, the best thing is to reach out and get in contact with them.

We use Dundas to report on machine sensor data and create dashboards.

It would be helpful if Dundas made the UI more user-friendly like the leading tools and decreased the learning curve. It should be simpler for a beginner to build dashboards.

The setup is about average, but I wasn't involved. 

I rate Dundas BI seven out of 10. It should be simpler to use. I'm sure there are lots of knowledge-base articles that might help, but the process is still complex. you need to build cubes and things like that. It should be more straightforward so an end-user without a technical background can create dashboards. 

Data Visualizations to streamline reporting. It is on a Windows Server in Azure. The dashboards are embedded into SharePoint using the Dundas SharePoint component.

Made it easier to see crucial data that was normally buried in an Excel file, and faster to find issues before they become problems.

The ability to warehouse query results. This is good because you do not have to have a data warehouse, you let Dundas warehouse the results of a query that runs long during off hours.

The API they have can do just about anything, but their documentation on the API and examples are only for some of the basics. They need to and are working on filling in those gaps. It is understandable that they have not yet documented everything that you can do with the API because there is a lot you can do with it.

One to three years.

As long as the Windows Server is up and has no IIS issues, then this product just works.

My organization is small, but it should just be a matter of how powerful the server is that you run it on.

They are all great. I have had nothing but the highest respect for Dundas support.

I have not used anything like this for more than a trial period. It was at this company when I got here. I would not switch at this point (and I've been asked if we should). The others cost way more, and I do not gain much for the cost.

I have had to set up our development server after starting at this company. It was very easy to set up, the hardest part for me was getting all the passwords to the various accounts needed when setting it up.

In-house.

There's a free trial that is long enough to give it a good workout. Also, they will help you get that free trial up and running. It's very easy to get it going and start working in it. They have some good guides and even a course you can take (for free).

Dundas was at the company when I got hired, I have looked at the features of others and their cost, and there is nothing they offer that is worth the cost increase.

Give it a try, download the trial. I can tell you that you will love it, but you can really only decide that for yourself, so go try it.

Enterprise business intelligence. We use this tool to provide dashboards to business users and enhanced searching dashboards built into SharePoint.

We have been able to move users away from using Excel to collect and alter data, to add in the extra data points needed to the source and build dashboards that everyone can use in real-time.

The built-in ETL functionality has allowed us to combine data sources without the need for a full SSIS package. This saves time and allows for a quicker time to market.

One feature I would like to see added is funnel charts. Dundas has the ability to modify a bar chart to mimic a funnel, or to ingest 3rd part visuals.  But both feel a little clunky to use.  An out of the box funnel chart would be preferred.

Some native functionality to 'write back' to a specific field in a database would be a welcome change as well.  Dundas has the ability to create a form using text boxes that can be used as variables in a stored procedure for writing back to a SQL backend. This works, but our users have not liked the experience.  What our users prefer is a grid of data with the cells being editable, allowing them to update data from within the grid.  

One to three years.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

Dundas BI is very scalable.

Support is amazing. Response times are low, and they are always willing to help.  

We tried to use Power BI, but it did not have the flexibility that we needed.

Setup is very easy. A wizard is provided to walk you through the process.

We did the implementation all in-house.

Have an idea of what you want end users to be able to accomplish; this will help drive the discussion when the time comes to look at licensing.

Set up a trial and build out a dashboard that you currently need. Out of the box, Dundas BI does almost everything needed for an intuitive dashboard, and anything else can be scripted. Their support is top notch and always willing to help.

Creating dashboards to make data available to internal and external customers. We maintain dev and production environments so that we have a place to work and test products before pushing to production.

We have greatly improved accessibility and visibility into our data and reduced the number of manually created reports and one-off data pull requests.

Data cubes, security, and the high level of customization in visualizations that are available right out of the box without being a software developer.

I have no complaints. They work fast and have major releases on a predictable schedule.  Customer service has been exceptional, and they have worked with us as partners to solve bugs that have been discovered.

No, this was our organization's first BI product.

Yes, Tableau, PowerBI.

• Providing template BI reports for our customers with their databases
• Creating different dashboards and PDF exports as well as Excel data dumps where needed.
  

Allows easy multitenancy across our different customers. Makes it easy for them to just log in and go.

Matrix tables. Add them in !!! Currently, they don't do that, and it's hard to create some BI reports due to this.

Pretty average, buggy here and there.

Good.

Pretty decent but the timezone difference can be annoying as they are in Canada and us in NZ.

Yes, Power BI. Lack of multitenancy support and too simple.

It was OK, big process.

Pretty much in-house.

It's hard to measure.

It's too different to tell.

Yeah, a few, but none really had the multitenancy setup.

Great software, it has a steep learning curve compared to the rest but so much more powerful because of it.

Creating market research focused dashboards for our clients to log in and view and explore the results.

It enabled us to create customised dashboards, catering to any data requirement, and any visualisation or interactivity requested by the clients.

Scripting engine enables you to do anything, and the built-in UI allows you to do most of the work by "drag and drop" or by other options for the less technical people.

More of the same! They still need to add some visualisations and could continue to improve the UI to allow users to easily find what they need within the many different options.

They are brilliant! They will get back to you within a few hours usually and have a custom solution for your particular issue or requirement.

No.

Setup is very simple via the installer which walks you through all the dependencies that need to be installed.

Setup and licensing are reasonably priced. Users have two options, either you pay for a named seat, or you can have floating seats that can be shared amongst users. We found that the per-user cost was the biggest expense that we had by far.

We evaluated many options including DecisionPoint, Tableau, QlikView, Birst.