Business intelligence can help you to skyrocket your business, but regardless of how great your BI tool is if you don't have access to the data you need, your business won't benefit.
These days, even small businesses have data spread across multiple data sources, including internal databases, SaaS Cloud services, and of course, spreadsheets. When you realize how valuable it would be to convert all that data into useable insights for your business, you're faced with a common dilemma:
- Pay an arm and a leg for a BI solution that connects all those Cloud services together (🍬but only gives you eye candy metrics, not ad-hoc reports)
- Manually copy/paste and try to tie all your data together in spreadsheets (😱time-consuming!)
- Hire a consulting firm to build you a data warehouse and reporting solution (💰super expensive)
- Take advantage of modern solutions such as Segment, Stitch, or Panoply to create a data warehouse and leverage an affordable ad-hoc reporting tool such as Yurbi (🥇hint: winner idea)
These days what used to be a complex task has been made simple (and affordable) and data warehousing of data, regardless of the source, is one of them. Since we work with clients all the time that have data spread over many different locations, we keep an eye on some of the best options available in the data warehousing marketplace and in this article, we'll talk about 3 of them, Segment, Stitch, and Panoply.
We will tell you about the differences among the three but before that let me tell you that all these tools can be used for pumping all your data into AWS RDS, Redshift or a local database. And once you have that database, you'll have a local, historical data repository that you can hook a self-service BI tool like Yurbi to and enable all your users to build reports and dashboards to their heart's content, without needing a technical pedigree.
What is a Data Warehouse?
First, what exactly is a data warehouse? Well, a data warehouse is nothing but a central repository of data and the data present here is collected from different sources which can be one or more sources. So, basically, we are dealing with the relational database here. Now that you know the basics, it’s time for you to know the difference among Segment, Shift Data, and Panoply.
What is Segment?
Segment.io is a web-based platform that collects, stores and routes the data of your users from hundreds of tools within a jiffy. If you are looking for the best way of loading the user data into a warehouse, then Segment may be the tool that you need.
Segment warehouse saves your time by eliminating your need of indulging into the messy analytics installation process. As a result, you get to devote more time on using your data instead of wasting it on tracking the data down. It should be further noted that the segment warehouse helps you to save money by cutting down the integration costs. You can run advanced analytics on Segment. In fact, it captures, schematizes and loads the user data into a data warehouse of your choice. Let me make the things a bit easier for you by giving you three benefits of having a segment warehouse.
- It collects data from every customer touch point.
- It helps you to sort customers and turn them into meaningful audiences.
- A standard schema is used for schematizing the data.
The segment pricing package is different for developers, team, and business. The developers can use segment for free. For team, the price is $120 per month base and custom prices are available on the basis of your requirements for business purpose.
To see if Segment has the integrations you need, visit their integration catalog.
What is Stitch Data?
Stitch is a cloud-first platform which is developer-focus and it is used for rapidly moving data. Stitch stores all the user data in your various cloud services within a few minutes and that too without any API maintenance, scripting, JSON wrangling, and cron jobs. And therefore, with Stitch, you can turn your attention towards building dashboards and for extracting valuable insights without having to focus on the API creation. A piece of additional information for you is that Stitch is now part of Talend.
Also, Stitch data allows you to do selective replication. You could say that Stitch is an extensive platform which enables you to add any data source easily. Destinations which are supported by Stitch are Amazon Redshift, Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse, data.world, Google BigQuery, Panoply, PostgreSQL and Snowflake. Stitch data has a free plan and a paid plan that ranges from 100 to 1000$ per month.
To see what integration sources are available with Stitch, check this page on their website.
What is Panoply?
Panoply is another cloud data warehouse that gathers all your data effortlessly in one place and then seamlessly connects to business intelligence tools and allows you to analyze the data at rocket speed. Panoply guarantees that you can set your cloud data warehouse in just three simple steps.
- Step 1: Set up the dashboard
- Step 2: Make sense of your raw data
- Step 3: Discover data insights
Boosting your data insights with Panoply is that easy! Critical features of Panoply includes data integration, data schema modeling, query performance optimization, storage optimization, and automated maintenance.
Panoply has four packages for its users. The cheapest package is for the starter for $249/month, then a pro package for $499/month, business package for $749/month and finally, the enterprise package which the users can customize and the payment for the same depends upon the features included by the user. The first three packages of Panoply is available for a free trial for 21 days. You can try it for free and if you like it, you can go ahead with your purchase.
Check out the over 100 integrations available with Panoply here.
Yurbi Makes The Process Further Easier For You
Now that you know the differences among Stitch, Segment, and Panoply, it’s time to get the advantages of BI for your business that we talked about earlier. Bringing all your data into a single place makes the reporting process easier and faster. You'll also have a wealth of historical information that you can tap into for ad-hoc reporting, date range comparisons, and trend analysis (things that are difficult with Cloud-based API access only).
Yurbi is an on-premise, web-based platform that combines the ease of self-service business intelligence (BI) with the power of enterprise BI tools.
Yurbi is designed for business users as we discussed above, but we also provide the IT team the tools they need to ensure data is protected and the features needed for complex environments, such as multi-tenant security, multi-data source querying, and data governance capabilities.
Yurbi serves businesses that are looking for an easier way to leverage and securely share data as well as software vendors that are looking to embed analytics within their solution.
To learn more about why we think a data warehouse for your Cloud services is critical to business intelligence or to discuss more how Yurbi can help with your requirements, feel free to contact us. One thing you can be sure of, we'll always give you the "straight talk" and not the marketing buzz.