ThoughtSpot Reviews

We make use of Thoughtspot in two ways. Firstly, there are various dashboards and answers that different users can put together and refer to on an ongoing basis. Secondly, we use it as a means of exploring an unfamiliar data set or to answer new questions.

The best way to start using this solution is first explore the data and filter it in different ways. Try to develop new insights as you go along. This will help you decide exactly what kind of dashboards you need.  

The great advantage of ThoughtSpot is that you can explore data in a new way with very little effort. You don't need anyone's help to build a dashboard or to configure a visualization. You just enter the terms you're interested in, add the filters you need and ThoughtSpot will give you insights.

I've set up dashboards that are designed for use by a few hundred people in our organisation. In terms of future usage of this solution, we're contemplating the move to ThoughtSpot Cloud because that is necessary given our backend migration away from an Oracle data warehouse to Snowflake. On the other hand, there's competing products such as Looker from Google, which our IT team is evaluating. 

The ability to do ad hoc explorations of data has been most valuable. 

The dashboards could give you more ability to fine tune the appearance. You get a great deal more control over how something looks in Power BI than you do in ThoughtSpot. If they wanted to compete with PowerBI, they would need to improve in this regard. The second thing that could be improved is their SpotIQ. I've tried to use it and is not intuitive. 

I have been using this solution for four years. 

This is a stable solution. We have not had any outages or problems. 

The challenges that I have involve scaling. Managing roles and security for hundreds of users would be a full-time job. 

I would rate the technical support for this solution a four out of five. 

Personally, I'd been using Tableau prior to starting to using ThoughtSpot. I continue to use Tableau for certain things where control over the appearance of visualizations is more important than speed. I haven't used a product that is comparable with ThoughtSpot before.

Our IT team has been responsible for most of the heavy lifting when it comes to the initial setup. Some of the challenges have included figuring out how to get data from our data warehouse into a table in ThoughtSpot. 

Setting up this solution in a cloud based environment is more straightforward. We've got one IT resource dedicated to the solutions maintenance but this is not a full-time job for one person. It doesn't require a ton of support which is a great thing.

ROI is a hard thing to quantify, particularly since the costs are born by one organization and the benefits are reaped by another. In general, we get a lot of value from this solution. 

For those who are responsible for choosing which tables to feed into ThoughtSpot and setting up the tables and worksheets, I would recommend figuring out your role level security strategy from day one. Role level security is implemented via joints and in some instances, joints were set up in the opposite direction from what they should have been. This reduced the efficiency of some of the worksheets. Unfortunately, once implemented you can't make a change and have to start from scratch. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

On-premises

It's mostly for front-end widgets that we have in our applications and for some of the teams that do ad hoc reporting. We have some scheduled jobs also. So the data is consumed mostly by the stakeholders so that they can view things.

Compared to the other experience that I have had with other reporting tools, it is faster. That load time for the dashboard to open is way faster, no matter how big the data is. That is something that I found really helpful.

The scalability is good.

The most difficult thing I found is that it only deals with the files and does not have direct connectivity to databases. If we have 10 million rows in the data and every time the only option we have is to do a selection on the database and dump it into a file and then load that file, that's not ideal. There should be another way around it. It causes redundancy of data.

There are many other tools and they do have other connectors for other legacy systems or other databases. That functionality should be there in ThoughtSpot. There should be direct connectivity to the database. That would reduce a lot of redundancies. 

The stability could be better. It takes up to 24 hours for a change to register. 

I've been using the solution for ten months. 

Most of the time it is stable. That said, I have faced a few incidents. For example, I was making a change in one of the reports where I introduced a new column, introduced a new table, and joined it. After that, the indexing stopped, and it took 24 hours after the indexing engine was restarted to get going. And after that, users were only able to pull that particular column that was introduced using a join. That is a very common issue that we face every day. It is kind of weird. It is really time-consuming just to wait for 24 hours before that column becomes available due to indexing being an issue in ThoughtSpot.

If someone is making changes on a daily basis, it may not be that stable. 

I am not working directly on the front-end development, I'm doing the development of the back end, adding the columns, new tables, and new joins. Consumers are the end users. If it is taking 24 hours for a change to go live, then that is a really serious issue.

I have yet to face an issue scaling the data. 

We have about 5,000 people using the solution. It is a combination of end users, stakeholders, and developers.

The solution was set up well before I joined the company, and therefore I was not a part of the initial setup. 

I don't have any experience with how long a deployment would take. 

I don't have any details in relation to pricing. 

I'm not sure if other solutions were evaluated or why this solution was chosen. I was not at the company when the decision was made. 

We are end-users. 

I'm not sure which version of the solution I'm using. It is the latest version.

I'd recommend the solution. It's a fast business intelligence tool. However, they should now expect the same functionality as they would in other reporting tools. 

I would rate the solution six out of ten.

On-premises

I'm not very actively using it. That said, sometimes it's the requirements, so that's why I have to use it.

I'm basically the Power BI developer, however, our company recently purchased ThoughtSpot. I had to make a shift from Power BI to ThoughtSpot. I use it mostly for reporting purposes for higher management. That's why we're using it.

ThoughtSpot is mostly good for showcasing matrices.

It is easy to set up the solution.

The solution is stable.

It's scalable.  

There is more flexibility in Power BI than in ThoughtSpot.

In the matrices, for example, the size is very limited and the ratios are fixed. It would be better if they could be adjustable. The formatting for rows and columns separating could be more flexible. 

If I want to order columns, this feature is not there. 

I have just recently started using the ThoughtSpot. It's been over a month.

It is stable. The solution is reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash and freeze. I'd rate the stability nine out of ten.

I do find the solution to be scalable. 

There are more than 200 people using the solution.

I've never reached out to technical support. Whenever I have had an issue, I'd reach out to the ThoughtSpot team I deal with.

I've also used (and prefer) Power BI. In terms of creating visualizations and formatting backgrounds, it is better. It's also more flexible. 

Our senior management has exposure to ThoughtSpot. They were comfortable with it, so they decided to go with ThoughtSpot.

It's very easy to implement the solution. It's mostly drag and drop. There is not much required to learn in the case of using it and doing the setup, which makes the process fast and simple. 

I'm not sure exactly how long the deployment takes. 

There was a ThoughtSpot team, and they did the installation.

I can't speak to the exact cost of the solution.

If your work is senior management type and you need only matrices, then I would advise you to use ThoughtSpot. That said, if your work is a very creative thing, and you want to do analysis and show it in proper formatting or in a very themed presentation, then I would say Power BI is better.

I am an end-user.

I'm not sure which version of the solution I'm using. 

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. It can handle a lot of data.

Public Cloud

Microsoft Azure

Currently, our company is using ThoughtSpot for marketing reporting. We build reports based on the tables in the cloud, utilizing the outlet views for ThoughtSpot, which then visualizes them. The system includes filters, aggregation levels, time periods, and a lot of marketing KPIs, such as coupon views and incentivized spend.

I very much like the UI and UX of ThoughtSpot. The visualization and user experience are very nice. They frequently add new features, and my favorite is the alerting system that allows you to set up alerts on the KPIs. This alerting feature is very beneficial for our company at the moment, and we use it extensively. Additionally, ThoughtSpot is much easier to work with and maintain than other BI solutions, and it significantly reduces costs related to manual labor.

There are a few areas where ThoughtSpot could improve. A crucial feature we needed is missing, which involves restricting views of certain KPIs when users select conflicting parameters. We had to create a workaround, which impacted performance by loading pinboards slowly. Disabling drill-down features without affecting sorting in tables is another issue. Also, the process to push new feature requests is lengthy and requires a lot of upvotes, even if you have dedicated support.

I have used the solution for a year and a half now.

We had a situation where a missing ThoughtSpot feature required us to implement a workaround. This workaround consumed a lot of resources and led to reduced performance, with pinboards loading for approximately two minutes for each filter criterion. We had to add extra resources to resolve this issue, which increased our costs significantly.

I do find ThoughtSpot scalable. There are so many opportunities for them to implement additional features.

I find ThoughtSpot's technical support to be quick with responses, but they are not always helpful. We have dedicated support contacts for our company, but pushing through features we need requires long processes and upvotes on their website despite the support. Overall, I would rate the technical support as six out of ten.

Neutral

In my personal experience, I have worked with Power BI from Microsoft and a custom solution called Qlik for reporting. There was also another custom solution called GetHandsome, which no longer exists.

The initial setup takes time to understand, but there was nothing extremely complex or complicated.

While there is no straightforward way to calculate the ROI of ThoughtSpot, it reduces costs by minimizing the manual labor required for reporting.

The pricing is on the higher end but reasonable for what ThoughtSpot offers.

I have worked with Power BI and a custom reporting solution called Qlik.

Overall, I rate ThoughtSpot as an eight out of ten. I recommend it because it is easy, clean, and nice to work with, despite some rules to consider. It is easier to work with compared to Power BI and does not require a complex skill set to create visualizations. Based on my experience, I would rate the product an overall eight out of ten.

Public Cloud

Google