Domo Reviews

Domo is a data platform that helps us collect different kinds of data. It also allows us to put all the data together, assess it and use it to help work through business processes or workflows.

The dashboard is the most valuable feature and allows for customization to create and share reports. It is also a collaborative tool.

There's some complexity with the charts in the solution, and there's a learning curve before you can get used to the solution. The solution currently has many great features, but enhancements to the visualizations or cards would be great.

We have been using Domo for a couple of years. It is deployed on the cloud.

We have not experienced any issues from a stability perspective. There have been no crashes or downtime, or any loss of information.

This solution is designed for scalability and depends on how much data you want to collect.

I don't know the exact number of users using this solution, but it is probably at least 100. In terms of the roles of users, it ranges from engineers to developers and managers. In terms of maintenance, there is a primary contact, and another person acts as a backup if the primary contact isn't available.

We've used technical support once and have not experienced issues with Domo. We've only leveraged general support.

We used a solution called Qlik in the past, and I believe the pricing was the deciding factor in switching to Domo.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I can't speak specifically to pricing, but we do not plan to increase our number of licenses. We are satisfied with what we currently have working for us.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. Regarding advice, I would recommend going with the cloud version and something seamless. Also, leverage the dashboard, and explore it. There might be an initial learning curve, so ensure you have enough buffer time to learn.

We use it to work on many business problems using the data visualization. Currently, I'm working for a company which deals with title insurance. We use Domo to visualize the data: How many open orders are created, which agent performed better, which region got the most orders, how many were closed or lost. Our company has data related to mortgages so that's what we use it on. In our division, directors and VPs get insight from the data.

Workbench is deployed on-premises and then we have a web application, a cloud application, for visualization purposes.

Users can log in and directly view the data. Unlike some other visualization tools, they don't need to play around. They don't need to do more steps, like with Tableau or Power BI. Those solutions are a little bit complicated whereas Domo is quite helpful.

There are so many charts available to visualize our data in various ways. There are donut charts, stack charts, bar graphs, and we have geographic displays. We can select things based on the given requirements and on what needs to be displayed. 

In Workbench 5, they have come up with a very useful feature called Upsert. When you're pushing data into the data set, if the data is already available it will update the data, and if that the data is not there it will insert it. That is a beneficial feature that they introduced in the latest version.

It's very user-friendly. When you get into Domo you just search for what they call a card, the one which will serve your purpose. You can click on it and you see the visualization. To see the data, you just click on the card and you can view it. You can also export those reports as well.

Connecting Workbench to your data source is really easy and then you can visualize it or choose among many other options. You can connect through Amazon Redshift, or any AWS-based database, or any cloud-based data sets. You can also upload your data set through Excel and CSV files. It provides a lot of convenience.

They also provide many plugins to collate data. If you want to extract the data from Facebook, Twitter, etc., the plugins are built-in. All you need to do is add the plugins to your Domo Workbench and you can extract the data.

Domo as a solution can be improved in various ways. For example, when you're exporting a graph out of Domo — suppose it is in the form of a donut chart or it is in form of a stack — the data comes out in tabular format, not as a graph. When exporting the data, I would like them to create a tab for graphs and another tab with the data in tabular format.

I have been using Domo for more than two years.

When we started using Domo, it was only one or two years old and it wasn't quite stable. It was still in development/beta mode, but now it's quite stable.

It's quite scalable because they keep on adding new features. It keeps up with the market trends.

We used Tableau prior to using Domo. It was because of the organization and licensing that we switched to Domo.

The initial setup is very straightforward. All you need to do is have Workbench set up in an on-prem server, and you need Domo access, the cloud link. That's it, and you're ready to develop or publish any report. It doesn't take much time. All you need to do is create a data set and, once your data set is available, you create cards. However long it takes you to create a card is how long it takes until you have results.

Domo consultants will be assigned to each of your projects. They are really helpful if you come across any gap. You can directly contact them, have a call with them, and they will help a lot. That's part of their standard tech support.

In our organization, Domo is widely used. The division I work in has one of Domo's staff to support us, dedicatedly our division. Somebody else is assigned to another division.

It's saving use effort and time but I can't talk about how they affect ROI because I'm not familiar with the cost of the solution.

I'm familiar with Tableau. Tableau is more evolved and has many more features than Domo does, but Domo is still evolving. At some point in time it may be in a parallel position.

One of the major differences between them is the UI look and feel. In that area, Tableau is better. In Domo, you upload the data set and then you create the job which will be NRT — near real-time. You keep on scheduling the job; you can schedule it to run every minute. But in Tableau you can have a data set cached in your system or you can have a live data set from the DB. You can directly connect it from the database.

There are more than 500 people using it in our company, although that's just a rough estimate. They are mostly in high-level management: SVPs, VPs, and CFOs. And it doesn't take many people to support and maintain it. It's low-maintenance.

It's a good tool, overall. I would rate it at seven out of 10. There are a few features that Domo doesn't have. If they keep on adding features and work on the UI, that could make it a 10. I would rate Tableau higher.

One of our internal customers is a capital finance team. Before we reached out to them, they were pretty much handling all their data in Excel sheets. Their data has been expanding rapidly and they needed reporting in a visualization solution. They have different forecast methodologies and cycles, and different metrics within those forecasts types. They have various types of capital metrics. If you are from a finance background, you might have heard of what an IOI or an NPV or an IRR is. They had been doing it in Excel.

Ideally, to fulfill their needs, you would need two different solutions. One is a transformation solution. When you are handling huge amounts of data, you certainly need a database and, most commonly, what you prefer is SQL. Once your transmission is complete, you would also need a visualization solution. There are many available in the market.

With Domo, we can do everything in one place. We don't need a separate database. We can do ETL and the visualization in one location.

It's not on a device. It is completely cloud-based. Since we are a healthcare provider, we chose the secure instance of the public cloud: a PSI-certified instance.

Instead of having two different products, one for data transformation and one for visualization, we are able to do those functions using this tool, with one person or two persons at the max.

The day before yesterday, one of the teams wanted to see how its employees were performing in their line of business. That team has around 140 employees, and wanted to see what their current roles are, what their future roles will be, what their primary skills are, and what their secondary skills are. All this time, they've been using Excel sheets and they take a week's time to process. We put in a one-time effort of one week and, going forward, that particular team doesn't have to spend an entire week to provide an analysis to its leadership. All they have to do, once their data is updated, is push it into Domo and all the metrics that they want to see are readily available. It hardly takes five minutes, instead of one week. For that team it is definitely a great thing because the product manager doesn't have to sit for a week and do that. It has definitely made his life easier.

The same thing applies to the finance team. Our finance team gets its data on the 10th or 11th of every month and when they had to process that data in Excel sheets for another 10 days, the month was almost over. Here, again, things now happen in a couple of hours, and their data is ready the very next day and they are ready to present their finance metrics to their leadership before the 15th of the month. Based on that, they can plan their next month, or the upcoming forecast for financial metrics, more efficiently. Now they have 20 days instead of 10 days.

The most valuable feature is the ETL. With ETL transformations in SQL lists, you often write a lot of queries. You have to build a bunch of code for the data. With Domo, one of the pieces we have is Magic ETL. In Magic ETL, you don't need to write code. You don't need to be a specialist in SQL or any database query language. You just need to have common sense or to know how to use Excel and you can do a better job than a querying professional or a coding professional. Magic ETL is one of the best features I have ever seen in the ETL world.

Also, you can limit the users. Finance data is very critical so not everyone can be seeing it. We can create customized security options and provide privileged options to groups or a particular person, so only they can view things.

In Tableau, you can create virtually any kind of visualization. Based on your creativity, you can create a visualization on a human body structure, you can create a visualization on anything that you want. But Domo is limited to a few kinds of visualization views: standard things like bar, pie, and some other charts. You can't create something outside of the box. I would like to see them add new views for presenting the data in the visualization space. That definitely needs improvement. We have provided this input to the product owners at Domo, so let's see what comes out of that.

I have been using Domo for the last two years.

The solution is very efficient and very good. So far, we haven't seen any outages. It's very fast and very interactive. No matter if we're dealing with millions and billions of rows of data, we never experience any lag, which is something we used to see in Tableau, Power BI, and other solutions. With Domo, never. It's as fast as you can imagine.

It is scalable. Our company is a classic example of that. Our company deals with healthcare data for the entire United States, part of Canada, and some parts of South America, and additional international locations. So our data is huge. Really huge. I don't think any other organization deals with this much data. And Domo scales as much as you want.

We have around between 1,500 and 2,000 customers using this, and their roles range from CIOs to vice presidents, directors, analysts, and financial analysts. Currently, in our company, it is not being used as actively as Tableau, but we are expanding usage. When this product was introduced in our organization, we had a customer base of around 20 or 30 people; two or three different teams. We are further expanding it to the entire organization. Our target for this year is to have around 6,000 to 7,000 folks onboard.

A few of our internal customers are using Tableau, a few are using QlikView, a few are using Power BI, and a few are using Domo. We have varied usage but we are trying to expand Domo to be used in place of the other tools.

I was never part of the initial setup, but I think it's straightforward. As with anything that you're getting from the cloud, you only have to establish your data connections to the tool. We use several things, including Excel files. It should be a straightforward exercise, instead of taking time.

I have read about how it is done in other companies and what I've seen is that implementation took less than two days.

There is no specific maintenance for the solution. Two people can do the job for a large organization, because the only thing that you need to determine is how you want to give access and what kind of access. That is done by our customer success manager, and there is a product manager who takes care of who should be given a Domo license and who should not be, in our company.

We have seen ROI with Domo. For example, our finance team invested in Domo and they have saved around 20 days per month. They are now working more efficiently and their numbers have drastically changed compared to their previous year's performance. They can see how they're trending for the last month and they're efficiently planning their expenditures and forecasting accordingly.

Similarly, for our technology teams, we are doing different SLA metrics for incidents, problems, their availability, storage, etc. At one go they are now able to see the problem areas that are not performing and they can plan their technology maintenance accordingly. For some of the organizations within our company, their availability was around 91 percent. Against the standard of 99.9 percent available, they were losing 8 percent per month, which was going to cost us a lot in terms of penalties. They have identified their problem areas now and they are avoiding paying penalties. 

Each of our internal customers has its own ROI like that.

No matter if you're a developer or an end-user, the licensing cost is around $12 per user per month. I'm not aware of other costs but there would likely be some type of cost for the storage that we use, because we're using Domo's cloud storage.

Before choosing Domo we evaluated other options, including Tableau and QlikView. But the problem with Tableau was that it was very slow. It was extremely slow because of the amount of data that we are trying to push in. It was not efficient and stable.

And the problem is with Tableau and QlikView is that you would need a separate ETL tool altogether, like SQL. With Domo we don't need that. We can directly talk to any kind of data source that is available in the market. That is what separates it from the others.

The biggest lesson I have learned is that this makes the job very easy. To do some things in Tableau would take three days, but in Domo I do them in one day. It has made me a lazy person. But I'm now able to focus on other important things. I'm now learning other technologies whenever I have time. Domo has taught me that you shouldn't limit yourself to one area of expertise. You should always expand to new areas.

I would definitely suggest you consider Domo if you don't have any cost constraints. The way I see it, implementing Tableau is more expensive than using Domo. A Tableau user license, per annum, costs around $1,000, I think, in India. And then you need to have a Tableau server to publish the dashboards that you have developed. There is a lot of cost involved in that. This is a major selling point for Domo.

Also, with other dashboards, when you develop a new dashboard you have to develop a mobile version again, or you have to make some enhancements to a mobile version. But with Domo, you don't have to do that. What I've done on dashboards for the web works as well on the mobile application version. These are the things we pitch when we have an initial meeting with a potential new internal customer.

There aren't any version names, as such, for the product that we use here. All the updates and features get upgraded. Before any new feature is going to be released into the production version, we get to review the beta version of it. Based on the feedback from the customer, we decide whether we want to have that featured in our instance or not. So it's not like we have a version one, two, or three, rather that the features get updated as and when required.

I collated all the reports that we got from Domo's APIs, then performed some ETLs and processing so we could build a final output from which the dashboard would get powered. Then, we created all types of stuff in Domo. At that point, the license let us use all the available jobs in Domo. Therefore, we were using tables and pie charts. For demographics, we are using the geographical charts for Australia and the USA, as the brands we deal with are mainly from Australia and the USA. 

31 million rows of data are getting processed every hour within Domo.

Domo has their own internal servers and phone apps.

I was using Domo comprehensively and exclusively in my previous organization. In this organization, the visualization has been improved. There were glitches when you went from one page to another, but that lag has been corrected. 

The basic levels of Domo were not made for developers. It was made for anyone who is coming from a nontechnical background. They can utilize Domo on the fly, e.g., if you have data and want to see a type of visualization on the fly, then you can use Domo to quickly examine your data. 

Domo is a comprehensive tool in ETL, visualization, and the media features that we use for the direct connection to all the digital marketing platforms. For the database, we had two to three types of ETL that we could use. It comprehensiveness was major for us. 

The API systems are very good. They were an attractive feature of Domo at the time of  purchased.

The new feature data is pretty amazing that they are providing for insights on the side of charts. If you don't even want to be in the dashboard, then there is a quick dashboard that they are creating based on the data you are uploading. You don't have to write a single piece of the code. You just have to upload your data, then you can use all of the visualizations, which is a new feature that I really like. A person who doesn't know much about programming or SQL can see his numbers on a graph, pie charts, and bar charts.

Domo is not a difficult tool to learn. All you need to know is the SQL for the ETL part. You don't need to write much code. That's the great part. It uses legacy languages, like SQL, which is very common among developers who then don't have to go and learn Domo's own syntax. Therefore, you don't have to learn another hard language to use Domo.

The ETL way of storing is not up to mark. You have to rely on the naming convention that you're using in Domo because there are no folder systems where you can collate all your workflows and put them into separate folders. A folder system should be there so you can easily identify how you are working. Once you want to make some changes to your ETL, then you can see the whole lineage, identifying what is there and not there. I felt that this could be drastically improved. 

The utilization part: We cannot play much with the UX/UI.

While they have APIs, they kept on failing if the data volume was too large. There was a 10 to 20 percent chances that it would fail. I don't know what improvements they have done in the past year since I have used it, but previously the failures were quite consistent in the API stuff. I would like to see them work on that.

When you are looking at a full-fledged product, you want pretty dashboards or storyboarding. In these cases, you cannot use Domo. That's the drawback. It's exclusively for exploratory data analysis (EDA).

I worked in Domo from 2018 to late 2019. I am going through some migrations from Domo to some other tool. Before that, for about a year and a half, I was developing the deal and visualizations, then getting connections between the API data in Domo to extract all the digital marketing data. Mainly, I was laying in the digital marketing domain, like Facebook, Amazon, and Google ads. These were being heavily used as KPIs in my organization. Right now, I am in the touch with the tool for the visualization and deal part, but not for the API connection.

The product is quite stable. From my point of view, it's quite a good tool to use if you need all types of analysis.  Stability-wise, it's doing well. I don't see any lag or other glitches apart from ones that I mentioned for improvement. 

Not many people are needed for the maintenance of this solution. Management of Domo is very easy. Apart from developer access, we can keep it to limited people. Normal users looking at visualization are given read-only access.  Therefore, in terms of access, you can define the roles of the users. That's easy to manage. 

They are doing well with scalability where other companies are struggling with it. Domo is providing a cool feature that other companies struggle to work on, which is something amazing to see. Innovation-wise, Domo is doing well.

In my organization, there are four users who use the Domo license. Two of them are managers, another is the group head, and the fourth is an analyst.

The technical support is very responsive. They are ready to reply, always having a solution ready. They are good at their work and what they do.

We previously used Tableau. We shifted to Domo because Tableau was getting expensive and the features that we get in Domo are what you get in Tableau. 

The deployment was very easy. You don't have to buy your own server. These visualizations are nice because they have their own structure to handle these things, which is a good feature. 

There was another company who was entrusted with Domo's setup.

My previous organization is still using Domo and are happy with what Domo is giving them.

The price that they offered was around $200 per user license. It was pretty cheap at that time compared to other companies. I think they have revamped their pricing structure since then. 

Our company purchased a private license for approximately 20 users.

With Domo's competitors, you have to go in separately, buying your own server. The drawback with Domo is it doesn't allow us to work on the UX/UI much because of the layout. You cannot go around doing a full comprehensive view with Domo. If you have seen Tableau or QlikView, they provide very good UX/UI in their products. This makes their dashboard appealing to see. Domo lacks that and was not a product created for storyboarding. It is more for analysis.

The advanced analytic charts are easy to create. If you compare it with other tools in the market, it's very easy to check your data and build charts.

Go for it. The product is quite good. I would rate it as a seven and a half (out of 10).

It makes things more attractive and simpler. When you come to the analytics part, you want things to be simpler because there are other areas that you want to focus on than just creating a dashboard.

Domo is being used in quite a few areas. We're using it for financial reporting and analytics. Basic financial reports have just the numbers, but those kinds of reports don't answer your questions. Questions like "why?" and "where are the problem areas?" So, we're using it for business analytics to get insight into our financial performance.

We're a parts manufacturer, so we're also using Domo for tracking quality, including defects, warranties, and claims against the parts we manufacture.

We're using it for sales planning to give business insight into industry trends that might affect our sales. We're also using it to get insight into our sales results.

We're using it in our plants now — and this is newer — to track shipments and resources required so we can get the right resources where they need to be to load the trucks, based on when the parts are ready. That's actually an IoT use case.

In addition, we're using it to track our patents and our inventions, as a design company.

It started out with a couple of small use cases but it has blossomed very quickly. As soon as people see Domo for one case they come knocking on my door and say, "Hey, we'd like to use Domo as well."

This is just one example of many similar things, but in engineering we had directors and senior managers having to download spreadsheets full of financial reporting data every month and then manipulate the data and tweak it. Every manager and every division was doing it somewhat differently, making it difficult for the executive vice president to get a consolidated insight. 

Not only was it all manual, but it was all done with pivot tables and spreadsheets. It took a tremendous number of hours every month from senior leadership just to create a basic "What's our situation?" And that didn't even get into insights into what led up to that situation. 

One of the early KPIs was getting the financials in Domo. Now, the senior leaders all see the same thing. It doesn't matter which department you're from, it's all in the same format. None of them has to do anything, except for a couple of us who load the data into Domo. Once you load the data it automatically runs and updates all of the visualizations, and everybody is looking at the same thing.

We were able to put permissions into it as well, so if I'm in this department I only see this department's financials. If I'm one level up and I have five departments, I see those five departments' data. And if I'm the executive vice president I see the whole of engineering's data.

Just that one, simple implementation, which was one of many we've done, saves a tremendous number of hours by senior-level employees, every month, and provides a consistent answer across the organization.

The ease of use, overall, is one of the valuable features, as is the ease of setup. Other than making sure IT was aware of, and agreed with our proceeding, we did not need IT for any of the setup. The ease of setup is more valuable than you might think. The ease of configuring the security policies, setting up groups, and setting up personalized data permissions so that only certain people can see certain data — that stuff is amazing. 

The ease of content creation — both the ETLs, meaning the extract, transfer, and loading of the data into Domo, and then the transforming of it into a structure that lends itself well to reporting — is a big feature.

Another key thing to understand is that Domo had built-in connections to more data types than any other BI tool, at the time we evaluated solutions. I suspect it still does because it has mushroomed out. It's even bigger than it was before. There are just so many ways to connect the data, both manually and automatically. They had 400-plus data connections and now they have 676. So, if you want to do analysis from Google Analytics, or Adobe Analytics, or Facebook, or the Department of Labor Resources, not to mention your own stuff, you're able to connect to them. We can get data from our internal database, on-premise, and automate that and load it in a timely way. That's been fantastic.

Another very easy-to-use feature is the creation of their reports, their little graphics, that they call "cards." 

Domo really is extraordinarily full-featured, but it's really easy to use.

I'm actually a little hard-pressed to say what needs improvement because they keep changing it and adding new features. On a monthly basis, you come to work and, boom, there's a new release. And we've taken advantage of that. 

The only things I could be critical of are extraordinarily minor tweaks that sincerely aren't worth mentioning.

We've been using it officially for about a year-and-a-half. We went through a pilot and evaluation process before that, so our exposure to Domo has been over the course of two years.

As a service, we have never experienced any availability issues with Domo. We have not had a single outage.

There was one time where they did a major upgrade and they let us know a couple of months in advance that, in the middle of the night, on a certain date, Domo wouldn't be available from this hour to this hour. It was a very short period. Other than that one tiny maintenance window, I know we haven't had a single outage.

You can automate the data collection, the data transformation, and the content creation. By content creation I mean the content generation, and for that, you have to initially create the cards, the pages, the dashboards, which is easy.

When the situation was one where people spent countless hours every month on various — between you and me, somewhat useless — data reports, with no insight, no drill-down capability, nothing, it was not a scalable approach. Now what we have is a scalable solution that provides business insights on-the-fly for folks, even on their phones, to answer difficult business questions, they don't have to spend countless hours manually trying to create that content in the first place.

The other thing is security. If you have to manually implement all of these security measures there's a cost. We haven't done this yet, although it's one of the things on deck this coming year, but you can set it so that security groups are automatically established for a person based on the department they're assigned to and on their level in Active Directory. That will grant them, or prevent them from having, access to specific content within the tool. That, once again, is scalable. In other words, we're not having to set up many individuals' security levels in Domo. We're in a position now to take advantage of that.

Even before making that leap, even manually setting up security groups and assigning people to those groups and creating security policies, is pretty easy and scalable. Going from sending out spreadsheets via email to the right people, to this kind of solution is a significant difference. It's a very scalable solution.

If we want to quadruple the size of our user base, meaning a lot more resources, or increase the content that we load into it because we have a new use case which means we're going to load another million rows of data a week into this environment, we can do so. If it was an on-premise solution we'd potentially have to buy servers, upgrade the CPU processors in the servers, upgrade the storage. With Domo, it just happens. We basically have unlimited data in our agreement.

Our first agreement was for three years and it was to get up to 650 users, and it was really intended primarily for senior management and above. But for that IoT solution for shipping, we have section leaders, people who are not managers in the quality group, who are using it. They had field reps who, instead of being out there serving the customers, had to create all of these reports on how things were going. Now, that all happens for them and that has saved a tremendous amount of their time.

We have individual performers, all the way up to the CEO, who have access. The meat-and-potatoes, the folks that really use it the most, are the senior managers and directors.

When you find some minor issue within the app, there's a button you push and it goes off to Domo support and you don't have to make a phone call. But when I do make a phone call, because I have such a good relationship with our account executive, they get right on it.

In general, Domo's technical support is exceptional. I can go to support in the tool itself. There's a Help Center button and within that I have Domo University, "How To," Knowledge Base articles, and a very strong community forum. That's also where the Support button is. I just click on that and I can open a case and get a very timely response.

The vast majority of people in our company who are using Domo now were using spreadsheets and pivot tables. The more sophisticated ones might have been using Access databases. As a corporation, the official tool selected previously was Yellowfin. It never really launched successfully. Yellowfin is a good tool, but it was a case where it went through our IT department but they didn't have the business focus or the right resources to dedicate to it. I think they're doing a Yellowfin 2.0 for some of the standard, global financials, but in general, it wasn't as easy to use and it would have significantly increased our dependency on our IT group. We wouldn't be anywhere near where we're at right now if we went with Yellowfin.

Just about all of these tools are decent, and they are a quantum leap from spreadsheets and pivot tables. We picked Domo because it was scalable, easy-to-roll-out, and did not burden IT. It has also been easy to create additional content and it's been effortless to maintain because it's software as a service.

The setup was exceptionally easy because it's cloud-based, it's software as a service. That's one of the reasons we chose Domo over the competition, because our IT group is buried in a backlog of work. With Domo it's pretty much "Oh, here you go." In fact, the environment that they set up for us for our pilot — which took them a single day — is what we migrated to for use as our production environment once we decided to go with Domo. It couldn't have been easier.

The environment, the infrastructure, all of that was set up instantaneously. But we had built a core team and we wanted to establish naming conventions for files, rules, security policies, etc. With that very small, core team of passionate people, we did it in a week or two.

So there's the technical setup, and then there's the business side of things where you want to make sure you have a scalable solution once you launch. Thank God we did it that way because it went from a handful of users on day one to many users now. There is some thoughtful preparation that needs to happen to make sure that you set up your environment in a way, from the business side, that's scalable.

We did the implementation in something of in an Agile scrum-type way, although it was a hybrid because our company is used to Waterfall. We wanted to get some quick wins under our belt and let it grow organically. So we picked a couple of key measurements for each of the engineering group, the quality group, and the sales team, and we rolled them out in a month-and-a-half. We had been tinkering with it during the pilot so it wasn't like we were starting completely from square one. We carried over the results of our pilot.

We left ourselves some room for training. We thought that as we developed we'd decide what training was necessary. We actually did pay for a little bit of training but we haven't used it yet because we haven't needed it. It's that easy.

Our strategy has proven to be very successful. We started out small. We didn't over-commit or try to boil the ocean all at once. We grabbed a bucket of salt-water and "heated it up." We got everyone to like it and then come to us for more. It continues to grow on a daily basis.

We have a sister company that heavily utilized Domo consulting. But in our case, we had some talented people. And the tool is so easy to use. We purchased consulting hours that we'll have for three years but we have hardly scratched the surface of those consulting hours. We've had odd, little issues. We did not need them to help us get going, beyond answering the basic questions.

We have absolutely seen return on our investment. We created a strong business case that it was going to pay itself off in well under a year for the 650 licenses, for the first three use cases that I mentioned, the low-hanging fruit. And we just crushed it, we killed it. In the meantime, we haven't even used up all of those 650 subscriptions. We're right around 500 right now, and we've doubled, if not tripled, the use cases using that original set of licenses.

We hit all of the boxes that we thought we would, right out of the gate, and then we doubled or tripled the use cases that we've been able to fit in, all with the original investment.

Because it's software as a service, it's more expensive on the face of it. But there are a lot of variables. I don't have to pay for servers or for infrastructure. I don't have to pay labor for my IT organization to set up or maintain the environment. I don't have to pay for them to upgrade the software, and test it, etc., because when it rolls out, it is transparent and seamless for us.

But, because of that, it costs more, I imagine, than Sisense, or Yellowfin, or Power BI. A lot of those make it sound like they're inexpensive, but when you add in all the hidden costs and all of the overhead, it's probably comparable. 

It's difficult to reach the right, mutually beneficial cost structure for us, and profit structure for Domo, because it's software as a service. In other words, you're paying for that convenience.

That's me searching for a criticism, although it's more a characteristic. They've been very flexible in negotiating with us. Still, one of our other shops has Sisense and they've got unlimited licenses for the whole facility for $65,000 for the year, so that's a sweet deal. But that other shop is doing everything behind the scenes.

Our 650 Domo licenses are really subscriptions because it's software as a service. With licenses you purchase, there might be annual maintenance, but you purchase them and you own those licenses. With the subscription, you're paying a fee, like Netflix, annually. Similar to Netflix where you don't own the movies, rather you're paying for the use of the environment, with Domo you don't need to set anything up and you have immediate access. You're renting the service.

We evaluated Yellowfin, Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, and Domo. Those were the ones we did in-depth evaluations on. We did a little more industry research beforehand, looking at industry reviews. The reason we narrowed it down to those four is that we knew of other companies within our organization that were using one of them. Qlik is great, but we didn't know of any other users of it within our organization at the time and we didn't want to be too rogue.

Tableau is outstanding. It came in at number-two in our evaluation, and I'm sure I'd be sitting here talking to you all thrilled about it, but Tableau seemed to be going in a new direction. There was the on-prem portion, plus the software that had to be installed on every PC using it for creating content, plus the web thing. It was a little more cumbersome and not as tightly integrated. There were all the different pieces you needed to install on your own infrastructure. They were switching to some cloud, but you were still reliant on on-prem, on-client, on-cloud. Other than that, it was close between Tableau and Domo.

We also heard feedback that, while on the surface, if you don't look at the infrastructure and the maintenance, Tableau looks like it's less expensive, when you really add it all up, and consider the lack of ease and convenience of use, it was going to probably cost more than Domo. That was why Domo beat Tableau.

Power BI was our least favorite, and part of that was because of who demonstrated it. They called it in, they didn't come to visit us, and they didn't do a really good job demonstrating it, but it doesn't seem as integrated. There's a client side, and a publishing side, and it doesn't seem to have as appealing a user interface. Power BI was the most confusing. It just was not nearly as elegant or easy to use, and certainly didn't have the integration.

Yellowfin seems very good. It is a web-based interface. We have it on-prem but I don't know if we've switched to its cloud version yet, as a corporation. But it just wasn't nearly as intuitive to use, and it had only a handful of data connections. It just was not nearly as simple for the business to use — and we wanted the business to use it. Yellowfin just wasn't nearly as robust or easy to use, and still would have required a lot of IT support. 

Domo even has a built-in Agile-scrum Kanban functionality. I don't want to say it's a lesson we've learned, because they've been doing this a long time, but it reaffirmed that while a lot of companies are still doing Waterfall, and the traditional "Where's your Gant chart and your Microsoft Project?" approach, I rebuffed that. Domo has upped that and I use a hybrid scrum, like Agile. 

The biggest thing that I learned was from our sister company that loaded Domo up first. They tried to boil the ocean. They used a traditional approach and said, "Oh, requirements, and we have these 50 reports we want to put in Domo." They had all of the status updates in a traditional Microsoft Project structure, with PowerPoint slides to present to leadership and spreadsheets to track issues. They put so much overhead on themselves. But they were behind schedule, plus they used Domo consulting.

So the biggest lesson is this: You want to have the business create the content for the business. That's why we picked this tool. You don't want to have someone else involved, whether it's a consultant, or IT, and here's why. In every business department, there is the person who is creating the pivot tables, knows Access, and has the aptitude to create this content. The benefit of that person doing it is that they know the business. And with Domo, they don't have to go fill out some project-request with IT or some other organization and say, "Oh, we want a new report or a new card." Then, that other organization has to review it and put it in their backlog of work. And when they get to it they have to have requirements-gathering and all of this discussion. Finally, there's a document that meets the requirements and they say, "Okay, now let's create a draft." Back-and-forth, traditional Waterfall takes forever.

I had someone come up to me and say, "Hey, John, we need XYZ." In 15 minutes I had created new content. But it's still controlled because we have a very small structure, a core team, which has key content creators from each critical business unit and those people have the poetic license to do as they please.

It's so much quicker. That's why we've been able to implement so much. Domo is not like traditional software development where you're "pouring concrete" and you better get the forms designed and measured perfectly, because once that concrete sets it's a bear to have to break it out, and reform, and repour. With Domo, it's more like molding clay. So when someone says, "Oh, well, I don't like that." "Okay, let me change the color," or, "Let me change this. Let me add a filter." It's all on-the-fly and very dynamic. 

So the biggest lesson is that, when you get something like this, don't turn it into traditional, stodgy, bureaucratic Waterfall. I had to spend very little time providing status updates. I had the risks and issues in Domo, using the project functionality that is free and that comes with it. The list of all of the things that we wanted to consider was in the Kanban and to-do backlog, and then in-progress, and completed. It was so easy to do it organically, starting small, versus, "Oh, what are all the 50 reports we want replace with Domo?"

IT is just there to support us when we need data from some huge enterprise system. They'll say, "Oh yeah. Let us set up an automatic feed into Domo."

You can tell I'm a big advocate for Domo. I'm not alone. Every time I show it to someone they go crazy over it and they want more. It's harder to find someone who is not excited about it, in terms of both the content users and the content creators.

There is competition because we're a global company. One division has been using Microsoft Power BI, another is using Sisense, and we have one plant using Tableau. I think it's going to evolve. I foresee that Domo will be around, unless there's some bizarre, unforeseeable event. I can't see Domo going away anytime soon.

Regarding maintenance, in terms of the solution itself, we don't need anyone because it's software as a service. In terms of the content, we have, for example, two people in the whole of the quality assurance and warranty group who are part of this core team. We have two people from the sales team who do all of the business planning content stuff. When we added to the credit department, we added someone in that department who maintains all of that content. Is it a full-time job for them? Not even close, but they're responsible for it. On the engineering side, it's mostly me, but I'm also leading the whole initiative.

Right now, the core team has six people, and then we have a stakeholders' committee that is going to start meeting once a month. We were meeting more frequently during the first year. There's a slightly wider audience of about 15 people who are going to be invited to update them on the status, what we're working on, and to find out if they have any questions. But it's a very small overhead. It's a resource-saving thing. The headcount that was creating all of this content before was a small army, because every director and senior manager had to do their own little flavor of the reporting.

We wanted to bring our data reporting from several different marketing vendors into one avenue, along with onsite company data, to create one customer-facing dashboard. It all falls under that, when it comes to the day-to-day reporting that I've been doing. It includes anything that we did on Excel and could convert over to a dashboard.

I was doing data transformation manually, on my own, for my reports. We were very Excel-based and updating formulas constantly. It helped by only having to build it and set it once. It has helped with productivity and efficiency. I would estimate it's saving me 10 to 15 hours a week.

It's also helped with pushing and sharing information among the team members, physically in the office and outside of the office, across the country. We're getting real-time data. We can refresh reports and not have to wait however long it would have taken. That has been an improvement and results in business decisions being made more efficiently and more accurately, based on accurate information.

The data transformation, the Magic ETL; the whole data cleanup side, where you're able to bring in all of your different sources and clean them up one time and then use that same data flow multiple times over. That's a valuable set of features.

Among the recent changes they've made, the data certification feature, where the admin user can put a certified stamp on a data source so that other users can know that that is the correct and accurate data flow or data source to use, is a good feature.

Also, the data policy permissions, where an admin can decide, based on that data set, who is able to access that data set without having to pull too many strings. That is also helpful. It gives a sense of greater security in what you're sending out and that it is only getting to the people who need it.

I would like to see more flexibility in their pricing structure. The trend is moving from database pricing to a user-license pricing model. That would be a benefit if they wanted to reevaluate their pricing structure. But as far as the actual functionality of what it does goes, I don't really see any improvements needed.

We've been using Domo for about two years.

The stability has been good, in my experience.

The scalability is also good. I think it lends itself well to a small business and can go as big as you want to go. There's scalability to connect to all of their applications and connectors. There is the ability to create custom API connections. The amount of data that can be pulled in is really unlimited. It lends itself well to the big guy and the little guy.

We're working on plans to increase our usage of Domo. As a company, we also have Microsoft Power BI. I'm working through trying to accommodate the two. I lean towards Domo but others are leaning towards Power BI. It's a conversation that's being had.

Domo's tech support is very responsive, very clear, and straightforward. If I had to rank it one through 10, I'd give it a 10.

The only other solution we have had is Microsoft Power BI.

The initial setup was very straightforward. Their team was very helpful in walking us through it and training us. They were willing to come onsite to assist. But the documentation available through their website is very user-friendly, straightforward, and geared towards someone who is a business user and not necessarily an IT-type person. I'm a businessperson and I found it pretty straightforward.

Aside from some structural changes that we've had, it was about a six-month process, but it really depends on what you want to get done. It's a matter of what you consider to be "fully deployed," because I'm still doing things now, years later. So it depends on the scope of the project that you want to implement. We were doing several things at one time so it was a larger project. But if you just want to connect things from one service over to another, I don't even think you need an implementation team for that. It's something that can really be done by business users on their own.

We had a few projects on the table that we wanted to get up and running from the get-go. Because we had a couple of structural changes in our company at the time, my timeline probably isn't reflective of Domo. It definitely didn't have anything to do with them. It was more on our side, so it took a little bit longer.

From our side, it was mainly me involved, and I got some help on a few small things. But it only took me to get it done. On their side, there were four team members assisting.

I'm the only one who deals with maintaining it. The maintenance depends on how much you want to put in there. I could sit here and create new cards all day if I wanted to, but it's pretty straightforward. I set up all of the connections. The only time I have to go in there and modify something is if I think of a new way that I want to display it. It's very easy for one person to be the main admin and set up and monitor everything.

Aside from saving my own sanity, we're working on what the ROI is. I'm trying to equate a dollar amount for the ROI. I'm looking at the marketing information right now. Showing people the value of all the marketing efforts that we're putting forward will be where we see our return on investment.

We have a yearly contract and then we pay, as needed, if we need to add more seats. For about 100 users our cost is $95,800. There are additional costs if you want to have Professional Services hours. If you're going to do a data-shift or implement dashboards, you pay a one-time fee for additional hours to get you set up and running.

The main difference between Domo and Power BI is that Domo is more geared towards a business user to do all aspects of it: To make the data connections, clean up the data, and create the cards. Whereas with Power BI, you still want to have the assistance of Microsoft training and have a little bit more of an IT background to have it make sense or become second nature, without extensive training. Domo is really set up to help a business user accomplish the same goals, almost in "layman's terms," if you will.

Go all-in with it and really let Domo take over and fill it out for you. Don't hesitate. You may think it's a challenge or it's a lot of work to get it implemented. Don't sit on it, don't hesitate. Let them do the work with their implementation services. Ultimately, if you want, they can do everything for you. Get everything upfront.

In my department, Domo is used daily. I represent a small portion of the larger company and we haven't extended outside of our department yet. We're still flushing everything through us.

I rate Domo a 10 out of 10 because of the ease of use and the way that it's geared towards users such as myself. It's not really steeped in IT lingo.

Our primary use case is to use it to show all of the analytics for our retail stores and allow the managers to see their store numbers and compare them to the other stores.

And for employee performance, employees can compare themselves to the rest of the country. That was probably my biggest application of it and it's an interesting use case because we manage all of the data in the backend. We are able to get the users to see a very static view of how they are doing compared to the top ten percent of their region, their state, and the top ten in the country. It creates a pretty cool way for employees and store managers to compete, in a healthy way, with the rest of the stores.

The best improvement is the data availability. For an organization that has over 12,000 users, having data on the cloud for anyone, anytime, to see their live stats is really different. We didn't have that before. That completely changed the way we look at how a store performs and how employees perform.

We had limited visibility into the data previously so I can't tell you that we have seen huge improvements from the data standpoint. But the company really started to focus on performance metrics and, over time, we saw people improve their performance from the time that we got Domo and onward for the next two years. When people started to adopt it, we started to see performance increases, especially in the stores that were more focused on it.

The best thing is that the data storage is pretty much free. I can store as much data as I want, from different sources.

The ETL tools they have in Redshift are pretty awesome. They also have them in MySQL, but I find it really easy to gather data from AWS and work with Redshift all the way through the process. I can work in Redshift to get the data from AWS and work in Redshift, in Domo, to create Transforms and the data structure we need for the remainder of the users.

They could use more charts. They have had a very limited number of charts we can use. I believe, now, there are somewhere around 30 of them, but they could definitely use some more options.

I would also like to see improvements to their drag and drop Magic ETL tool. You can drag and drop your ETL tool, but it doesn't really work for a large amount of data. It struggles with that. In a real-world application, where you're working with 30 million rows or 100 million rows, it takes a bit longer to process the data. If you do it in the Redshift ETL tool, using your own code, it's much faster.

The stability is great. We have been down for maybe a few hours, once or twice, over the four years I've worked with them.

Most of the issues we had were on our side, with our data, rather than with them. That's why I was actually surprised to read other reviews that said that they were having trouble with loading the data or updating the data. I think that may be because of the way they implemented it because I've never had any issues with that.

I have worked with such large businesses with Domo that I think it could scale to any size. We have 12,000 users across the country, 600 stores, and hundreds of gigs of data.

The majority of the users are just looking at their numbers. They're not really doing much analysis or creating their own charts. But about 600 to 1,000 of the users are corporate users who make tables or their own charts or create their own metrics. But most of that runs through me, if they needed data changes.

I'm not sure there's much need for us to grow into it. We have adopted it close to 100 percent of the time. All of our company employees are on it.

I have to give tech support a really good score. They've been great with me. If I have a question, I call them and they answer the phone. They are able to walk me through from the most minimal thing. If I need help with something really complex, something I developed which is customized, they still give me a hand. But ultimately, whatever you build is on you.

I have had to escalate a few things, mostly because I wanted to get them done faster or there was a problem I didn't understand. I just go to my sales rep and he gets it taken care of. He gets someone to call me right away.

We had a custom tool. It was proprietary and it wasn't that great. It was mostly scraping the data and pasting into an Excel-style sheet in the website. I wouldn't say it was a business intelligence tool at all. Rather, it just showed you flat numbers for reports.

The CEO brought Domo in. He saw that we were growing and he thought it was an interesting tool. He showed it to us, we sampled it. We used it for a few demos and we decided to go with it because there wasn't anything else that gave you the cloud space without charging you for it. They're really good about that. You can take up as much space as you want for data and they don't charge you for it.

We needed something more versatile than what we had and something that was managed on the cloud that we didn't have to touch too much. They were able to provide that for us.

The initial setup really depends on your native structure and what you have built previously. If you already have a really good understanding of your data setup, and you have flattened your data a bit for it to be absorbed by any other tool, it's going to be really straightforward, really easy. Users are going to be able to take advantage of it really quickly. 

If you have to go through the process of flattening out all the data and getting everything correct, the prep work could take a couple of months. They do provide a lot of help from their side, if you have questions or for getting the data in. They provide a lot of hands-on from their team. That was good.

For our deployment, to get it out to the 12,000 users, it took about three to four months.

We didn't have an implementation strategy at first. About a month into it, we got a new CIO and he implemented a strategy for us to get it done. A lot of it was guided, before that, by our CEO. He wasn't necessarily great in that area; he was more of a finance guy. Domo also helped a lot, getting us onboard and running as soon as possible.

It was hands-on for me. I had to do a lot of collecting of ideas and what they actually needed. I had to do a little bit of the project management myself, as well. I had to do some pulling of strings everywhere to collect everything that they really needed so we could translate it to what the user needed to see. Half the time I was developing, the other half I was chasing down what exactly was needed.

I was the main developer. We used Big Squid Consulting as extra resources, but I guided most of the actual developmental work.

The Big Squid guys are really good. They provided two consultants and I was able to offload a lot of the work, where I needed help. They took care of a lot of code that, otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to put my hands on as fast.

The deployment was done by the three of us. I worked on it 40 hours a week for three months, and we had each of the other two guys for about five to ten hours a week.

We have seen ROI on the retail side. It brought an openness to the associates who are trying to sell at the storefront. It made them compete a bit harder, being able to see what their commissions were on the fly, live. That really returned most of the investment. I would say within six months of having it implemented it returned its full value.

Domo is expensive compared to some of its competitors but it is well worth it, mostly because the competitors either want you to store the data yourself, or they have similar pricing that isn't really worth it when you compare some of the features that Domo gives you.

We looked at Power BI, but there really weren't any others that gave us the deal that we got on the amount of data we could store and the support that we needed at the time. When we made the decision, Domo was fresh into the market, and there weren't really many competitors. Looker wasn't around. QlikView was around, but they came in a little late to try to get our business. We had already made our decision.

Don't complicate it. At first we thought it was going to be a lot more complicated. It just wasn't. Knowing that, next time, would help me a lot, instead of trying to plan so much for every detail. It was a lot easier than I expected and we spent a lot of time testing stuff and figuring out if the tool was updating. If we had trusted what they were saying, we would have finished a lot faster.

If you don't have a lot of data changing, if your structures are not changing - some companies keep changing the way they structure their data and that will take a lot of time - maintenance isn't that bad. I spend about ten hours a week on maintenance of the solution, and we are running a really big implementation. It's mostly answering user questions. There haven't really been any problems. I am able to work on that and on other projects at the same time. I am able to maintain it with very minimal work.

Overall, I'd give it an eight out ten. From easy usability to documentation to pricing, it's pretty much all there.

Our primary use case for the solution is creating operational reporting to help us make decisions that go live executive dashboard. We deploy the solution on cloud.

We find the ease of using the solution valuable.

The price of the solution can be improved.

We have been using the solution for three years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable, and 40 users are currently utilizing the solution in our organization.

The customer service and support team is responsive. They answer our questions once we submit tickets. I rate them an eight out of ten.

Positive

I was not involved in the initial setup.

The solution has a standard license with some embedding. It is expensive so I rate it as three out of ten.

I rate the solution a seven out of ten. The solution is good, but the price can be improved.