Choosing the right business intelligence (BI) platform can be a tough decision, and at 5000fish (the company behind DashboardFox), we want to help you make it simpler.
DashboardFox is a BI platform, and we think it’s a great choice, but we know it might not be the perfect fit for everyone. If that’s the case, there are a few other BI products we feel good about recommending, and one of those is Domo.
Domo is not a newcomer anymore, but compared to the other leaders in the industry, it’s a relatively new name in the BI space. Launched in 2010, its CEO, Josh James, had co-founded another analytics company called Omniture, which was acquired by Adobe for $1.8 billion in 2009. Following the Adobe acquisition, James purchased Corda Technologies and rebranded it as Domo. Starting with $43 million from venture capital funding and angel investors that included Salesforce’s Mark Benioff, Domo went on to raise a total of $714 million before going public in June 2018 with 9,200,000 shares at $21 per share.
Domo has an impressive pedigree and solid backing, and it is certainly a good choice for many users of BI software. However, its pricing structure is a bit of a mystery, so interested users will want to dig a little deeper into costs before signing any agreements.
TL;DR: Domo doesn’t share information about their pricing publicly. Users who visit their pricing page are greeted with the message, “Please contact our Sales team for a personalized quote”, but we’ve been tracking them for years and have some insights.
What’s the big secret about Domo pricing?
Although the pricing isn’t currently available on Domo’s website, we’ve been able to speak with some customers who have tried both Yurbi, DashboardFox, and Domo over the last couple of years.
It is important to note we don’t have any affiliation with Domo – there’s no insider information being leaked here; everything here is simply third-party information that we’ve received during meetings and other exchanges. Our sample size is very small, but among those we’ve talked to, we do hear similar trends.
With that caveat, here is what we do know about Domo’s pricing.
Prior to the launch of Domo – after James’ acquisition of Corda Technologies – the company’s pricing was in stealth mode. In fact, potential customers had to sign an NDA promising not to discuss the pricing. By early 2017, however, pricing was open to the public – only to be switched back to “contact Sales” in May 2017.
In January 2018, new pricing models were listed on the website, but a couple of months after the IPO, in September 2018, the pricing was once again removed. Since then the website has listed only features, with no discussion of tiers, levels, or pricing.
What we have heard from potential customers is that there is a multi-stage vetting process in order to actually get to speak to a member of the sales team. After speaking to a presales' person, those who pass that vetting process move onto a second person. Once past that second person, you can actually get to go through a demo with a salesperson. After the demo, in theory, you then find out pricing.
To the best of our knowledge, the product pricing is broken into three or four tiers. Back when the pricing page provided information, this is how they appeared:
Domo Standard Plan
When we first started tracking the Domo pricing plan in 2016, the starter plan was a five-user plan that cost $5,700 per year (or $95 per user per month). As of January 2018, the Standard plan was for $83 per month, or $996 per year per user up to 20 users, which was similar to Tableau’s per-user pricing at the time.
As of September 2018, the Standard plan was for 20 users, but it was unclear whether that was a starting point, or if it was the maximum before upgrading to Professional plan – it seems likely it was the maximum, and if you needed more than 20 users, you’d have to move on to the Professional plan.
It appears the Standard plan had a limit of 250 million rows of data and on-demand refresh (all data, whether on-premise or in the cloud, must be synced to the Domo cloud), which was the same as the free plan that existed at the time, but allowed more users and the possibility of consulting from the Domo team.
Domo Professional Plan
The professional plan was for organizations that needed more data and admin controls and cost $2,100 per user annually (or $175 per user per month), plus a $25,000 annual platform fee.
In the January 2018 update, they appeared to have removed all mention of a platform fee (and hopefully gotten rid of it entirely), and the pricing at that point was $160 per month, or $1,920 per year. There was no user limit on the Professional Plan, but there was a limit of 250 million rows of data and, like the free and Standard plans, on-demand refresh.
Domo Enterprise Plan
The enterprise plan started at $3,000 per user annually (or $250 per user per month), plus a $50,000 annual platform fee when the pricing page was first released. In January 2018, that price was reduced to $190 per user per month or ($2,260 per year). This plan included advanced security and HIPAA compliance. In the past, Domo considered data-level security as advanced security, so it seems likely that to get the role and data level security that most organizations require, you’d need the Professional or Enterprise level of pricing (formerly an Enterprise-only feature, in September 2018 it appeared to be a Professional feature as well).
When their pricing was first made public, Domo detailed the data limits in terms of size (5GB for Standard, 25GB for Professional), but in the pricing plans in January and September 2018 it was expressed in terms of rows – 5 million rows in free and Standard, 250 million rows in Professional, and unlimited (which appears to be up to 20 billion max) in the Enterprise plan. Another pricing component to keep in mind is its professional services fee. Although we don’t know for sure what it is now, or if it exists, is has historically been a $25,000 one-time fee.
The Bottom Line on Domo Pricing
Our bottom line, it’s great software, but it’s expensive. And generally not affordable for small to medium-sized teams.
In this article, we’re focused on just the Domo pricing, but later we’ll talk more about the software itself and if it’s actually worth it (hint: it’s great, but as with all BI software, it’s not right for everyone).
Our best advice to businesses is not to spend more on BI tools than the value of the solution they are solving.
It’s a simple return on investment principle. Unfortunately, too many times we see companies swayed by the marketing hype and aggressive sales techniques of many firms and falling for the ROI “promise.”
If you’re a company that cares about the bottom line, I recommend you give DashboardFox a try. With a one-time fee, no-subscription pricing model it could potentially save you thousands (compared to Domo, potentially 100’s of thousands).
We don’t have all the features of Domo and may not be a good fit, we will be the first to tell you if that is the case.
But while we may not have all the bells and whistles, we do aim to be the solution that meets the majority of the dashboards and reporting needs for 90% of the companies out there (there’s always that 10% that needs something custom).
Contact Us To Discuss
We’re simple to reach, just contact us here, and you will get a live person responding within a few business hours.
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Share your experiences with Domo and pricing in the comments below. The more information we can get the more it can help the community.