Straight Talk Review: Is Mode Worth It?
Many entrepreneurs and startups look for highly collaborative solutions when it comes to analytics platforms. Just as well, more and more startups are doing away with paying for multiple licenses for different things. As a result, all-in-one platforms or analytics platforms with lots of extras are becoming more popular.
Mode is one such analytics platform that seems quite interesting in the BI world. But how exactly does it work? Do the benefits outweigh the downsides? Is the price point worth it?
In this straight talk review, we’ll break down the upsides and downsides of Mode, so you can make a more informed decision about which embedded analytics tool is right for your project.
What is Mode Analytics?
Mode is a popular cloud-based analytics platform with a collaborative focus designed to help entrepreneurs and businesses, particularly in the tech sector, manage and build new data. This platform is particularly popular with data analysts and data scientists. Mode is also used to perform ad hoc analysis processes, review important business segments, and generate custom reports.
Mode offers many features, but the following are the most well-known:
- R analysis
- Integrated charts
- Unlimited collaboration space
- Report editing with collaborative capabilities
- External distribution
- Visualized dashboards and data exploration
- Single sign-on capabilities
- Automation scheduling
- Webhook automation capabilities
Mode’s analysis functions and features are designed to help teams manage new test reports, demos, marketing campaigns, and sales. Just as well, Mode provides a fairly user-friendly developer interface automation tool that allows for customization using a variety of programming languages, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.
The mode can also integrate (with various levels of difficulty) with a few different types of third-party software, including Amazon Services, SQL Server, Microsoft Azure SQL, MySQL, Oracle, Google BigQuery, Hive, Impala, MariaDB, MemSQL, and more.
Mode follows a subscription-based SaaS business model. The Studio plan is free and offers SQL, Python, R, and private database connections for freelance analysts. The platform also offers a Business plan and an Enterprise plan-- both of which do not publicly list their actual pricing. This could mean that Mode is particularly expensive or relies on case-by-case quotes to determine price plans in the SaaS world.
The Pros of Mode Analytics
The mode has plenty of benefits as a modern BI platform:
- It offers a free trial/demo and a free version for individual data analysts.
- It’s ideal for organizations and startups with queryable data sources that need to be usable.
- Mode operates as a fairly good all-in-one, consolidating place to query data from a wide range of data sources.
- It’s cloud and web-based, which might be beneficial to some startups.
- It offers a wide range of support options and in-person and online training for your teams.
- Users can generate ad-hoc reports easily.
- Mode focuses quite a bit on security, which is very important for BI tools that are cloud-based and deal with sensitive customer or internal data.
- Mode offers Slack integration for ease of collaboration and reporting.
- It’s relatively easy to use and ideal for organizations that want to use the programming language of their choice.
- Supports white label embedded analytics.
- The analysis modes are very flexible.
- It’s great for querying database tables through SQL.
- Mode’s visualizations are very easy to set up, and users can style anything they wish on their report using CSS, JavaScript, or HTML.
- The Python and R library offerings set it apart from many other similar platforms.
- It boasts a simple and aesthetically pleasing layout.
- Sharing reports within the user organization is extremely easy, even without Slack integration.
- Setup for Mode is quite easy, given the nature of the product.
The Cons of Mode Analytics
While a great platform, Mode has its downsides:
- It is a cloud-based BI tool, which could be problematic in importing data onto a third-party cloud. There can also be privacy and security concerns that come with relying on another business to store and protect your business data.
- The drill-downs and advanced filters for this BI tool are not very simple.
- The process of organizing reports is notoriously difficult to manage.
- Mode lacks custom triggers and the ability to visualize map data.
- The UI tends to become glitchy, though the Mode team has been solving this issue.
- Mode is notoriously mysterious about its prices, which could be a red flag. It’s also a SaaS platform, which means that licensing and ongoing resources will need to go towards its use every month.
- While it does offer white label functionality, it doesn’t get updated as frequently as it should. Just as well, it doesn’t seem as if Mode offers complete rebranding customization-- which can defeat the purpose of embedded analytics BI tools in the first place. This is pretty surprising, given that reports are extremely easy to customize on the platform fully.
- Heatmaps can be difficult to implement.
- Queries will often fail, and dashboards can take a while to refresh.
- The platform itself is only really easy to use if you have some technical background-- Mode is definitely not ideal for teams with no development knowledge, which might be a downside for fresh startups.
- Visualization charts and report creation could be improved, especially usability.
Bottom Line - Is Mode Analytics Worth It?
When it comes down to it, Mode has several excellent benefits. There are also quite a few more affordable and dependable options out there worth exploring. However, the downsides are quite glaring-- especially for startups with limited resources that may not be able to afford Mode’s price point.
How Can DashboardFox Help?
Depending on your requirements, DashboardFox could be a good alternative to Mode. While the features between Mode and DashboardFox are comparable, the key differentiators that may give DashboardFox an edge for you include:
- Self-Hosted. Self-hosting adds a degree of security to safeguard your interests. Instead of transferring your data onto a 3rd party cloud where data privacy and management are out of your hands, you maintain full control of your server and data access (including when you update and do maintenance).
- Real-time database connection. Its real-time updates allow you to access your most precious data and do what you need to do about it. Get the freshest updates and the most important data whenever you need it.
- Perpetual license model. DashboardFox isn’t a subscription product. That price includes one year of upgrades and priority support to be fully transparent. Our challenge is to thrill you with our service and continually give you great new features to encourage you to renew the annual maintenance fees. But even if you don’t, you can still happily use the version you have forever. Pay once, and use it for life.
DashboardFox provides a big savings compared to subscription models in Cloud BI, where if you don’t pay, you lose access to all your history, data, and reports.
Let’s Make This Happen
Enough of this talk. We want to show you how the magic happens. Feel free to reach out to us for a meeting or, better yet, book a free live demo with our team of experts to see how things get done, the DashboardFox way.
What does the fox say? “We’ll be waiting!”
How was our review of Mode and its pros and cons? We want to hear your thoughts in the comments below.