ThoughtSpot Reviews

To help the business with the latest metrics, KPIs, and important insights, we source our data from various data sources into one golden source. Then we push the data to ThoughtSpot and create worksheets and visualize the data in ThoughtSpot in such a way that it is easy for the business to consume. So they see the metrics that they want to seeto drive insights out of the data to make meaningful insights. 

In addition, our business users and sales representatives who are not exactly technical people use ThoughtSpot to easily move around and help themselves with the data available through simple queries. They can also create a small pin board to extract data in an Excel format that they can then use for their PowerPoint presentations or other purposes. With just a simple query they can find out things like what the revenue earned by a certain client for this month was or what the highest-selling product for this period of time was.

ThoughtSpot is like a beautiful melding of Google's search engine and Pinterest's pin feature. It is very easy to go to the ThoughtSpot search bar and then search by not only a field name, but also by a data element. For example, I can say what was the highest revenue earning client this month or which product that I sold brought in the highest revenue? These simple searches are very valuable. You can then pin those searches to your pin board and then create a pin board of your most important KPIs that you'll be visiting very often.

Those features are very useful for our end users. 

I would like to see more flexibility in adding the pins. Currently, we have four different sizes in which I can add pins, but I would like to be able to resize my pins. 

Additionally, when I add a pin, it goes to the bottom of the screen and I have to drag it all the way to where I want it. So I would like to have a little more flexibility in that. I would also like to have a larger color pallet. A simplistic look is important to me.

I would be happy to see automatic emails for when volume falls below a certain threshold. Right now, I'm sending those out by hand. This would be a wonderful feature to have and I think they are rolling it out in the next version.

I have been using ThoughtSpot for a year and a half.

My impression of the stability of this solution is that there have not been any crashes or issues in the platform. We have not had any data loss. There is some downtime, but that is the case with every application.

I would rate the scalability of this solution an eight out of ten, with one not being scalable at all and 10 being very scalable. There are around 300 users of ThoughSpot in my company right now and we have plans of expanding further.

The ThoughtSpot customer service team is very supportive.

Positive

I previously used Tableau and Power BI.

I currently work on both Tableau and ThoughtSpot. Some of my reports are still in Tableau while others are in ThoughtSpot. I use both tools interchangeably depending on the requirements because Tableau is totally different from ThoughtSpot. Tableau basically boils down to dashboards. You have a lot more features where we can toggle between two different datasets and it has its own limitations. It is always better to use more than one BI tool. Over the years, I have used other solutions and then moved to Power BI and then Tableau and then ThoughtSpot, and a little bit of Click.

The initial setup was not very complex. I would not call it straightforward, but it was not complex either. The team responsible for deployment was no larger than three to five members, which is why I think you don't need a large team for the setup and I know we received a lot of support from ThoughtSpot.

I would say the return on investment is good. Whatever we invested, we got results. We have been finding it easy to use and onboard new use cases.

As a general solution, I would rate ThoughtSpot a nine out of ten, with one being the worst and 10 being the best. 

We're trying to load our expense data and reports to see what parts of the organization are spending and where. This solution allows you to type out your questions. 

There is less barrier to entry for users. If you know how to type what you are looking for, it's easy to find what you are querying. 

The ThoughtSpot model of getting charged for the amount of data that you put in, instead of how many users we need to put on the platform, is ideal.

We can do pinboards and save our queries.

It's easy to drill down or expand data to get more details right out of the box. 

We'd like more flexibility with the calendar as our fiscal year does not align with the calendar year. We have to load or create our own custom calendar to actually need our fiscal year-end. With other tools, like Tableau or Power BI, it's much easier to adjust your calendars.

How we get data into the solution is not the easiest. I need to rely on a partner who needs to load the data from Alteryx into ThoughtSpot. We'd like this process to be simplified. 

In terms of features, I'd like to be able to pivot data - for example, going from rows to columns. It's not easy to do. 

I really don't like that when we load data; all the names get automatically put into lowercase. 

I've been using the solution on and off for about two years. For the last three or four months, I've been heavily involved in a use case for work. 

The solution is stable and reliable. That said, I don't know how mature it is overall. It's still new in my organization. 

I have not tried to scale the solution. If the use case goes through, I may scale in the future. 

I'm not sure how many users are on the solution right now. In my department, less than five people would be on it. We might have 50 to 100 people on it if the use case is accepted.

I work closely with technical support right now. If I have questions or need to figure out how to do something, they always help me out. And we have a good support system within the bank to actually get people using the platform as soon as possible as well in terms of onboarding.

I'm also familiar with Tableau and Power BI.

The upside of ThoughtSpot is the fact that it is very searchable, like Google. If the users know the elements of their data, they can very easily type it in. That's easier than Tableau. I also enjoy the fact that ThoughtSpot has the built-in ability to drill down. Whereas with Tableau, you're going to have to build those rules or relationships. However, on the contrary, I use some of the Tableau visualizations, and they're a little bit crisper and easier or more powerful. Also, in Tableau, it is user-based billing as opposed to ThoughtSpot, which is data-based. 

The last thing I would say is that it's easier to apply data security on Tableau from what I from what I've seen so far as compared to ThoughtSpot.

I was not involved in the initial setup process. 

We do have a separate team that handles the maintenance. 

I have not witnessed any ROI at this time. 

I like the pricing structure. I get billed by how much data I put in, not how many people are looking at the data. It's better for me as I can control pricing a bit more easily. 

You want to load your data as quickly as possible, whether it's a quarter, a year, or a month, load it, and play around with it. It can be from an Excel file or a different data source. Once you prove your use case, then you could figure out how to add more data and how to do a feed into ThoughtSpot. The best thing to do is, before you load your data, to understand what your use case is and figure out what you're trying to answer.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. There are still some elements I'm trying to figure out. 

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.

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.

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.