It’s surprising how many acquisitions have happened recently in the business intelligence sector. We’ve seen big names like Yellowfin BI and Logi Analytics become acquired by third-party businesses, to name a few. Now, the newest addition to the list is the BI platform Grow.
Epicor, a global pioneer in industry-specific enterprise software that helps companies grow, announced that it had acquired Grow Inc. Grow is a no-code full-stack business intelligence platform that allows anybody, from the boardroom to the plant floor, to make data-driven choices using easy-to-build dashboards and interactive visualizations. They kept the financial details under wraps.
The purchase complements Epicor's analytics portfolio, providing a comprehensive collection of resources for hardworking organizations that make, transfer, and sell data to provide actionable insights. However, we can't guarantee that the acquisition will benefit Grow users in particular.
What is Grow?
Grow combines data connections, data warehousing, and visualization into one platform, allowing enterprises to connect and comprehend their data. It offers over 150 pre-built data connectors that work with some of the most popular platforms, databases, and CRMs. When users need to make key business choices, the BI platform imports data easily via APIs that constantly update and refresh data, ensuring current and reliable metrics.
What is Epicor?
We don't know much about this company, and our information is a little sketchy. Epicor provides enterprise solutions for a variety of application cases. The automotive, building supply, distribution, manufacturing, and retail industries are Epicor's clients. It's difficult to say whether or not this acquisition is a smart idea.
What Happens to Grow After the Acquisition?
We can’t know for sure. However, there has been an unsettling trend of companies buying up BI tools and increasing their pricing model, cutting off support, merging and removing features entirely, etc. We can hope this won’t happen to Grow, but one can never be sure. If you’re concerned about the direction Grow might take post-acquisition, we’ve put together a list of six potential alternatives to the platform to look into.
Top 5 Alternatives to Grow (Plus 1 Bonus)
Klipfolio
Klipfolio is a well-regarded web dashboard software that makes it simple to create real-time dashboards. It is the preferred dashboard platform for monitoring marketing, sales, accounting, and IT performance. It's a well-liked product that distinguishes itself from the competition thanks to its ease of use, competitive pricing, and flexibility.
Custom styling, roles and groups, data connections, a comprehensive formula editor, and top-notch API and SSO are among Klipfolio's features. While this is a good product, some users have expressed dissatisfaction with the inability to adjust chart elements and the limited number of data sources available.
Klipfolio, on the other hand, should be one of your first alternatives if you need visually appealing dashboards and want to go live quickly. Some think it is a great alternative to Grow because of its efficiency and flexibility.
Metabase
Metabase is an open-source business intelligence application that allows you to generate charts and dashboards with data from multiple databases and data sources. To generate visualizations, you don't need to know SQL. However, Metabase does allow SQL for sophisticated customization.
It is fairly simple to create color-coded graphs or filters in a table so that the viewer can quickly understand the data. When the data is so complicated that traditional graphs and tables struggle to comprehend it, queries can be used to create the data using a user interface and assist the users.
The SQL interface aids users in understanding the data's intricacies. However, some customers have complained about how rigid it is.
Cyfe
Cyfe is a corporate dashboard software that lets you track and analyze data from websites, departments, and other sources through dashboards. They can retrieve data from services like Google and Salesforce using pre-built widgets in the app.
Users of Cyfe get a complete picture of how well their firm is doing and what business trends they should be aware of. Data may be viewed in real-time with Cyfe dashboards, so clients are constantly up to date on what's going on.
Cyfe also has a decent number of sources from which it obtains its data. This reduces the number of reports delivered to them because they can share information with them quickly and securely. Some users have complained about the platform's annoying usability flaws.
Toucan Toco
Toucan is a cloud-based, guided analytics platform with a single goal: to simplify the process of delivering data insights to business users. Toucan makes analytics a little easier, from data connectivity to distributing insights wherever they're needed.
With one-touch deployment from staging to production, easy embedding with web components or iFrames, and publishing to any device, deployment, and maintenance are simplified.
Toucan Toco's visual data readiness feature makes data preparation simple, allowing business people to accomplish actions with data that would normally require a data professional. Many consumers have complained that this product is too code-heavy for the typical individual to utilize.
Google Data Studio
Google Data Studio is a free data visualization tool that allows you to create interactive dashboards and personalized and attractive reporting. Data Studio is frequently used to track critical KPIs for clients, show trends, and compare performance over time. The majority of Data Studio's capabilities are simple to use, and reports may be easily shared and scheduled.
Data Studio is essentially a beefed-up version of the earlier Google Analytics interface, severely lacking in features. Google Data Studio offers live data connection, over 220 connectors, complete control over the report, and visual customization.
This includes the ability to add as many pages or charts as needed, dynamic controls with report and page level filters, and advanced formulas like calculated metrics and calculated fields. This platform, however, has a steep learning curve, few data sources, and lacks many of the capabilities available in other business intelligence systems.
Bonus: DashboardFox
Now let’s talk about the bonus option as a worthy alternative to Grow, DashboardFox. Rather than put ourselves in the top alternatives, we’ll let you be the judge of that, but we think DashboardFox is a pretty good bonus option to know about.
DashboardFox might not be as well known as some of these other options. Still, we have many of the same amazing data visualization capabilities (and a few features like security and branding that exceed the competition).
DashboardFox allows you to create interactive dashboards, charts, tables, graphs, and other forms of visuals in a no-code environment that saves organizations from needing a developer to produce dashboards and reports.
With DashboardFox, you don’t need to be proficient in computer programming languages because it is designed to be used by anyone, including those with zero programming knowledge.
Apart from that, DashboardFox’s one-time payment policy and VIP-level assistance set the bar high for everyone, not only for large corporations but most especially for small and medium-sized businesses. DashboardFox believes that everyone deserves the best in business intelligence, no matter how big or small they are.
With DashboardFox, your business can still grow (pun intended) even without Grow.
What are you waiting for? Reach out to us: schedule a meeting with our staff or book a free live demo session. We’re always here for you.