Simplistic yet Powerful BI tool for collaboration and forecasting!
May 12, 2022

Simplistic yet Powerful BI tool for collaboration and forecasting!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Board

As part of central Cloud Business Office(CBO), I handle FinOps and responsible for evangelising about public cloud optimisation to Engineering groups. We use Board as BI platform to aggregate cost data from all the major cloud providers (GCP, Azure, AWS) and then do cost review with different business units. This tool helps us optimize our public cloud spend. Creation of org level reports is very easy and it is being used heavily to do forecasting and budgeting for the IT spend.

Pros

  • Data imports from various aggregators is super easy with easy roll-ups.
  • The UI is super simplistic and dashborad/report creation is very good.
  • Their customer support is really good and it's a Saas Platform with quick and easy deployment.
  • Recently we have started using their analytics feature for forecasting and making purchase decision for reservations. So far so good.

Cons

  • Data modelling is a bit of hassle and more documentation will be helpful.
  • It would be great to have actionables configured right of the dashboard. The idea is to look at report and take an action right there (eg: sending email or Slack notification)
  • The integration with Office 365 leaves a lot to be desired.

Do you think Board delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Board's feature set?

Yes

Did Board live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Board go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Board again?

Yes

  • For FinOps initiative, we have been successful in democratising cost related data to our engineering team & it has an immediate impact on our cloud spend.
  • Engineering teams are more conscious about their spend and we have been able to create a culture of cost responsibility.
Board is much much easier to setup than compared to Azure Power BI. Power BI also has a lot of challenges around data refresh with their web interface. While talking to support, we were made aware that for full feature-set, we should use the desktop version. Clearly something we didn't wanted to do. Tableau is great for non-enterprise use-cases but feature wise, Board is much more powerful. Especially with its analytic capabilities.
Board is well suited to get data from multiple data sources and create dashboards for quick forecasting and decision making. i.e. it's a BI platform and does a very good job of making data appear more coherent and easier to understand.

The product doesn't have its own intelligence or recommendation system. Hence if you have a specific use-case for it, you probably would like to consider other standard tools in market which do more than what a BI tool can.

Board Feature Ratings

Long-term financial planning
8
Financial budgeting
10
Forecasting
9
Scenario modeling
8
Management reporting
9
Financial data consolidation
9
Journal entries and reports
9
Multi-currency management
7
Intercompany Eliminations
7
Minority Ownership
8
Local and consolidated reporting
9
Detailed Audit Trails
8
Financial Statement Reporting
9
Management Reporting
8
Excel-based Reporting
8
Automated board and financial reporting
8
XBRL support for regulatory filing
Not Rated
Personalized dashboards
8
Color-coded scorecards
Not Rated
KPIs
8
Cost and profitability analysis
8
Key Performance Indicator setting
8
Benchmarking with external data
Not Rated
Flat file integration
8
Excel data integration
8
Direct links to 3rd-party data sources
Not Rated
Pixel Perfect reports
Not Rated
Customizable dashboards
Not Rated
Report Formatting Templates
Not Rated
Drill-down analysis
9
Formatting capabilities
8
Integration with R or other statistical packages
Not Rated
Report sharing and collaboration
9
Publish to Web
9
Publish to PDF
9
Report Versioning
9
Report Delivery Scheduling
10
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
9
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
9
Predictive Analytics
7
Multi-User Support (named login)
8
Role-Based Security Model
8
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
8
Single Sign-On (SSO)
8
Responsive Design for Web Access
8
Mobile Application
Not Rated
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
Not Rated

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