Item: GoodData
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with GoodData

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As a consulting firm, we have GoodData as an option for implementing for our clients. The current client that is using GoodData is a product that involves displaying distributed embedded analytics to their users, and GoodData was one of the only options to support this use case well. Although we weren't able to use GoodData's native React components due to not being ready for React 18 at the time, we were able to use GoodData as a backend-only solution, and that ended up working pretty well! Their documentation is pretty good, but their support is where they shine as they are able to fill in any gaps or points of confusion.

For us they specifically address being able to process, aggregate and display distributed analytics rather than us having to implement that sort of platform on our own.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Embedded analytics
Distributed analytics
Great support!
API has a lot of functionality
Excellent JavaScript library and integration

Cons

React integration - it was a bit painful for us that we couldn't use their direct integration since it's not up to date with React 18 (or at least wasn't at the time) and had to use a third party graphic library to display the views
While their API is very flexible, the way some endpoints' arguments are set up are a little unintuitive and we lost some time to playing around with the API to figure out how to split up data the way we wanted, eg. with stacking

Return on Investment

Saved us a lot of time instead of building it out ourselves, and that itself was a big return

Usability

It's really good, has a very flexible API and an excellent JavaScript library and set of tools. I can't give it a perfect score because I had to use a lot of time figuring out how to use it in our use case since some of the endpoints have unintuitive arguments in the JavaScript library, and some of the examples are out of date in the documentation. There are a couple different libraries as well, and you have to figure out which one is right for you. That being said, support is great for filling in those gaps!

Implementation

It took us about a week to a week and a half to get a proof of concept going, and then to get it going fully, probably an additional week and a half. We had a specific set up that GoodData is not fully accustomed to where we wanted to use GoodData as a backend-only solution, where we would display data using our own/third party graphing library, have our own endpoints on our backend which internally call GoodData's API via the JavaScript library.

Self-Service Analytics

We didn't use the self-service features at all, but they look great! I know our client is interested in migrating from their Power BI dashboards to only using GoodData for the self-service features (i.e. for their team rather than our users).

Alternatives Considered

Klipfolio

Klipfolio is excellent for non-embedded, non-distributed use cases, where GoodData covers those use cases.

Key Insights

Do you think GoodData delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with GoodData's feature set?

Yes

Did GoodData live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of GoodData go as expected?

Would you buy GoodData again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Notion

Likelihood to Recommend

If it's specifically distributed embedded analytics, I think GoodData is an excellent choice. If it's not embedded but still distributed, I think it's still a great choice with the way they have workspaces and data inheritance set up. If it's not embedded and not distributed, definitely still worth exploring but the pricing model will likely not be well-suited for the project.

GoodData Feature Ratings

Integrating GoodData

Ease of Integration

I gave it this rating because I was really impressed at the level of flexibility that the SDK offered, as well as some TypeScript generation that their tools offered. I had to dock some points as there was some confusion around which properties meant what, just a bit unintuitive, and we did need to back and forth with their technical support to figure it out. That being said, they were very helpful and available.

Systems Integrated With

NodeJS + GraphQL backend
React app

For the React app, we wanted to integrate it fully so that the React app would have the GoodData components loaded directly. We were blocked pretty quickly because they didn't support React 18 at the time, and further, the method of authorization in the frontend was a little confusing.

Instead we ended up passing the integration off to our NodeJS + GraphQL backend. The integration was much smoother, and we were able to use our own app's authorization layer to manage what data they should be able to fetch. The NodeJS SDKs that GoodData offer can accomplish a lot, but we did need to interface with their technical support to fully understand some of the details of the SDK in order to achieve our desired "headless" setup.

Types of Integration

API (e.g. SOAP or REST)

Integration Lessons Learned

My advice would be to get in touch with their technical support sooner rather than later if you're stuck, and spend a lot of time digging into the concepts that they outline in their documentation. I'd also triple check that the way they implement authorization will work for your specific use case.

Comments

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Great for embedded and distributed use cases