Share your experience using ThoughtSpot

We're trying to load our expense data and reports to see what parts of the organization are spending and where. This solution allows you to type out your questions. 

There is less barrier to entry for users. If you know how to type what you are looking for, it's easy to find what you are querying. 

The ThoughtSpot model of getting charged for the amount of data that you put in, instead of how many users we need to put on the platform, is ideal.

We can do pinboards and save our queries.

It's easy to drill down or expand data to get more details right out of the box. 

We'd like more flexibility with the calendar as our fiscal year does not align with the calendar year. We have to load or create our own custom calendar to actually need our fiscal year-end. With other tools, like Tableau or Power BI, it's much easier to adjust your calendars.

How we get data into the solution is not the easiest. I need to rely on a partner who needs to load the data from Alteryx into ThoughtSpot. We'd like this process to be simplified. 

In terms of features, I'd like to be able to pivot data - for example, going from rows to columns. It's not easy to do. 

I really don't like that when we load data; all the names get automatically put into lowercase. 

I've been using the solution on and off for about two years. For the last three or four months, I've been heavily involved in a use case for work. 

The solution is stable and reliable. That said, I don't know how mature it is overall. It's still new in my organization. 

I have not tried to scale the solution. If the use case goes through, I may scale in the future. 

I'm not sure how many users are on the solution right now. In my department, less than five people would be on it. We might have 50 to 100 people on it if the use case is accepted.

I work closely with technical support right now. If I have questions or need to figure out how to do something, they always help me out. And we have a good support system within the bank to actually get people using the platform as soon as possible as well in terms of onboarding.

I'm also familiar with Tableau and Power BI.

The upside of ThoughtSpot is the fact that it is very searchable, like Google. If the users know the elements of their data, they can very easily type it in. That's easier than Tableau. I also enjoy the fact that ThoughtSpot has the built-in ability to drill down. Whereas with Tableau, you're going to have to build those rules or relationships. However, on the contrary, I use some of the Tableau visualizations, and they're a little bit crisper and easier or more powerful. Also, in Tableau, it is user-based billing as opposed to ThoughtSpot, which is data-based. 

The last thing I would say is that it's easier to apply data security on Tableau from what I from what I've seen so far as compared to ThoughtSpot.

I was not involved in the initial setup process. 

We do have a separate team that handles the maintenance. 

I have not witnessed any ROI at this time. 

I like the pricing structure. I get billed by how much data I put in, not how many people are looking at the data. It's better for me as I can control pricing a bit more easily. 

You want to load your data as quickly as possible, whether it's a quarter, a year, or a month, load it, and play around with it. It can be from an Excel file or a different data source. Once you prove your use case, then you could figure out how to add more data and how to do a feed into ThoughtSpot. The best thing to do is, before you load your data, to understand what your use case is and figure out what you're trying to answer.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. There are still some elements I'm trying to figure out. 

We want to allow various product teams to do self-service analytics with product utilization data showing what users are doing with the products.

We invested much effort into providing a feature in a product that the user said they needed in a particular region. When the product owner checked the usage of that feature in ThoughtSpot, they found that the customers had not even adopted the version of the product with that feature in it. 

With that knowledge, they could work with those customers to understand what was happening. Maybe they didn't know the feature they requested was in the product, or was there another reason they did not adopt the feature? It allowed the product owner to follow up with the customer on product adoption.

I like ThoughtSpot's search capabilities. You can also create custom analytics even if you aren't an experienced data analyst. We have users with no data analytics experience making some of the dashboards we've created, copying components, and customizing them to their specific use cases.

ThoughtSpot is a fairly new product, so some usability aspects aren't as mature as we'd like them to be. One example is their organizational methodology, like how objects are organized in their dashboards inside the product. They're all on a flat list, which works if you've got five or 10 dashboards. However, it's insufficient when you're a large enterprise with multiple groups looking at the same dashboards. It isn't organized well.

I would also like to see more preset visualizations. They've recently introduced the build-your-own visualizations, but we don't have time to build those ourselves.

We started using ThoughtSpot in June of 2022, so it has been about half a year. 

I rate ThoughtSpot nine out of 10 for stability.

I rate ThoughtSpot eight out of 10 for scalability.

I rate ThoughtSpot support eight out of 10. They've been excellent except for one issue that we continue to struggle with.

Positive

We've previously used Tableau and Power BI. We decided to use ThoughtSpot for its self-service capabilities. We have a high demand for specialized analytics per product, so we needed to get data out fast. ThoughtSpot allowed us to do that much better than the other platforms.

Setting up ThoughtSpot was straightforward. Their customer success team was a huge help. They were engaged with us in the initial setup and held our hands through that process.

We had a team of about three or four people handling the deployment. However, we're a massive organization with hundreds of users. A small business could probably do it with one person. 

I rate ThoughtSpot eight out of 10 for ROI. We're still in the ramp-up phase, but we're already seeing a return.

I rate ThoughtSpot six out of 10 for affordability. 

I rate ThoughtSpot a solid eight out of 10 overall. It's the best platform we found for self-service analytics.