Domo Reviews

I was building executive dashboards for project management offices. I would have a portfolio of projects. Mainly, it was for opening new units and new markets. I would have project plans and action item logs, and I would use those in Smartsheet, and then I would ingest those up into Domo and I would be able to run statistics and metrics to track the progress of any given project. I would be able to calculate things like percent complete according to the calendar, percent complete of the budget, percent complete of the scope, number of tasks, percentage of tasks against total tasks, et cetera.

I could, for each project, if I wanted to drill down, go in, and see the detail of the tasks. I could also go see the action items, the risks, the issues, and the action items associated with the project. Therefore, I could see how many of those there were, what were critical, high, medium, or low, and which ones were late in terms of the due dates and things like that. I could run both a general project status meeting for a given project and also, at a high level, show a swift health check of a set of projects. That was very helpful for the executives.

Domo is very strong.

In general, Domo is very powerful and very easy to use, relatively speaking. And so I didn't have a lot of complaints. I'm unsure if I was fully tasking it and stressing the Domo system.

There were very few cases on some of the tables, the data tables, where I wish there was an additional feature or two. However, they were particular. What I wanted to see was the ability to collapse when you group a set of rows, let's say when you group them by status or health, so you have your red projects grouped up top. I wanted to compress or collapse that group of red and then open the yellow projects and then the green projects. There were a bit more features in the tables than I wanted to see.

They have a widget that you can use either in Microsoft PowerPoint to pull over data into your PowerPoints and refresh graphs or charts or metrics or tables. I would love to see that available in Google Slides. I used it successfully in PowerPoint; however, at one company, they were only using Google products, and so that widget didn't help with reporting in slides. Therefore, we had to do a bit more manual work for our quarterly business reviews or monthly business reviews to produce our executive presentations.

Sometimes the fonts were difficult to read if you're trying to put a lot of data in a table and show a lot of rows. Sometimes the fonts got too light, and you had to really play with it to try and figure out how to make it readable.

One thing I had to do, and I don't know if it's necessarily a bad thing, was when I was running a meeting, I would have to go turn off the data jobs. If I was running a meeting and a lot of times people were scrambling in the background to do their updates even as the meeting was occurring, it would cause the page to render very slowly. It would sometimes pause or freeze. I found that if I went and turned off the status, the data update jobs that we're pulling data from Smartsheet, then the meetings would work more smoothly, and there were no interruptions or delays.

I started using the solution since 2019. I just finished a job and used it up until this month.

It is stable. I never had it crash or go out of service.

I’ve never witnessed performance problems like graphs taking a while to render, things like that, only when there were data updates going on in the background.

I never saw any scalability problems. There’s probably not a scalability issue. It’s just if you've got multiple processes hitting the same data source. Sometimes it has to wait for the data to update. Perhaps maybe there's a way in bigger organizations where there's a lot more going on where that could become a problem, and you might have to schedule how that gets done.

I had everything set to real-time, meaning if a database update was made over in Smartsheet, it would immediately notify Domo and start to pull the data over. However, if I had set it to do it every hour or two times a day or something, then that wouldn't have interrupted the project meetings.

It scales pretty well. My data set was not big. I didn't have millions of records or billions of records, so I never really stressed the system. I had 100,000 records or less across all my entities.

At one company, it was being used across all the major teams. There's a data engineering team and a finance team that was using it for the general ledger reporting. Operations were using it, and those operations encompassed a large number of things. That included procurement, construction, hospitality, training teams, and HR teams. So it was fairly broad. However, we were a small division in the company, so it was less than 100 users.

At another organization, I was the only real power user. However, there were 35 people when I left that was given access and were using the reports or had access to the reports. It was not that many in the grand scale of an enterprise or big business.

I don't remember opening a ticket. I did at one company when we had a professional services team helping us set up the instance, and we had a success manager, who were all very skilled. For most of my time there, I was able to work with the implementation team that was able to answer any of my questions, or if there was any logic I was trying to work out, like to take daily snapshots is something that you need to be shown how to do, they could help. That said, once you have the model, you can copy it and replicate it across to other data sets.

I’ve never had a bug and do not remember saying "This system's not working."

We had Tableau. However, the problem with Tableau is it was part of the corporate team, and you had to wait a long time to get at least the way they set it up, where you had to make a request to get your data into the data warehouse. Then, it had to get loaded and cleaned and architected and then approved and pushed out to the production instance. You could start to run your reports after that. They might have to structure it so we just gave up on Tableau since it was such a heavy enterprise system, the way that the one company was using it.

That's the reason why the chief technical officer for our division brought in Domo, as it was a rapid solution that users could get in there, and analysts could start working right away and running reports and analyzing data. That's the only comparison I have. We were a Microsoft shop, and I don't know why we didn't consider Power BI. However, Smartsheet was the tool that was being used, so it didn't really come up as an option. My guess is if I go to my next Microsoft shop, I'll use Power BI instead of Domo since it's probably already in-house and cheaper, and it's pretty flexible and fast.

A company that I used to work for switched over to Power BI.

I was able to have my PMO executive dashboards up and running in a couple of weeks. It's straightforward. If what you want to do, it's swift and easy. Like my data is projects, the tasks, the projects, and the action items. If I have budget data, I pull in budget data as well. Then, I just need to make sure I know how those three link up on the keys. And if that's done correctly, then you can immediately start building the dashboards and linking in all the data. To get it to work out what the executives want to see is just iterative, but you can have something that an executive can see very rapidly, just in a couple of weeks, if not sooner. If that was the only thing I had to do, I could get something up and running very quickly.

I had an enterprise license.

It started out at about $600 a seat. However, then as we started to grow, it scaled that down to about $330 or 3$50 a seat, if I'm not mistaken. Obviously, it's scaled pricing. When I was using it previously, they had the full enterprise license, and they'd negotiated an even lower price.

I don't know if I know the cost when you compare it to all other types of software that are being used across the business. Perhaps it's cheaper than Tableau. However, I don't know all that. However, it was a tricky part of the approval process for me to get that approved due to the price tag. It wasn't tricky at the other organization I worked for, as the CTO knew what he wanted it. He's a very senior member of staff and has a big budget. He was able to get that approved.

I am just an end-user.

I’m not sure which version we’re using. It's a software as a service solution, so it's the latest one. I wasn't using all of the capabilities of the tool.

I’d advise other users that it goes much faster if you really have a sense of what your data. I have an immaculate, apparent picture of my data in my head. It's straightforward. Its projects, tasks, its action items, and budget information are great. As long as you know how you're going to link that up and what you want to be able to analyze. For example, I want to be able to see over time that my issues are coming down. They're shrinking by the day. I want to see a daily snapshot of the total number of issues on my projects. If you have that type of clarity, you can set up your system and data routines reasonably quickly.

After that, it's really just, how do you want to display it? That's just iterative and working with some fairly straightforward widgets. To get your data nice and clean, ensure you understand how it will all hang together. That’s what's nice about Domo. You don't have to formally create a data model behind the scenes, as long as your data from one table to the next has the same column with the same name, then when those. When you put different widgets on the page, you can configure the page to each all of the widgets on that page to respond to that same key.

They'll all filter on the same key even though one data type may be tasks and the other one might be action items. If you have the project ID in both of those data sets, then they'll both filter. Therefore, you don't have to go through a lot of complex data modeling or formalized data modeling. Just knowing your data is probably the key - or at least it was for me. My data set wasn't as complicated as perhaps others.

I’d rate the solution eight out of ten. It was pretty expensive.

The cost didn't justify keeping it around when you look and compare it to other existing tools in the business. That's why I might give it an eight. However, from a feature and functionality perspective, it's just a really straightforward, elegant tool. I like it.

We use Domo to implement our end clients' KPI dashboards and various metrics.

All our client SLAs and daily and weekly dashboards are tracked on Domo. Since all our SLAs are available on Domo, we use it to predict whether we will meet our SLAs. The solution has the flexibility of using multiple connectors. We write our custom code to integrate with Domo and then generate insights. The solution's integration is very easy and friendly, and anybody can learn it.

If Domo had a Copilot feature, you could interact with the graphs and talk to the graphs and tables.

I have been using Domo for two years.

The solution has good stability.

We previously used a different solution called Tableau. We switched to Domo because it was better than Tableau in customization and ease of deployment.

The solution’s initial setup is very easy.

The solution’s deployment took a few weeks.

The solution is deployed on the cloud in our organization. The solution's visualization feature is good and meets whatever most of our customers want. It has all the standard charts and typical drill-downs, and it's quite easy. I would recommend the solution to other people who are considering using it.

Overall, I rate Domo a nine out of ten.

The solution was an aggregation of accounting information across the entire organization. Most of the controllers and accountants were using Excel or Access on their desktops in order to create the reports that they were generating. First of all, we parsed and imported all of the Oracle ERP and the other, JD Edwards ERP information into one, into Domo. And then we even imported some of the access database information from the other accountants into Domo and we generated the dashboard and KPI reports out of Domo.

The dashboarding itself was pretty easy. So both the front and the back end were positive in this case. Domo focuses very heavily on being able to get data out of the Microsoft domain which is helpful as it was automated.

I would like to see improved data intake. You have to work into being the tool that helps you do a really good job of data ingestion. So having a good data lineage, having the semantic layer and ontological model development in there, making the ingestion part of the tool really, really robust. Because in the end, data science is almost always held up by poor data tagging and unclean data. So the ability to really do good data ingestion is important.

I have been working with Domo for the past five years.

I think that it is a fairly elastic and extensible application that I would scale to as big as you needed it to be based on how much computing you put behind it. I do not think it has a problem there.

Technical support was very good, especially during deployment.

It was fast. I would say it only took four weeks. And two of the weeks were because of the customer, not because of the Domo implementation. So if you really had your act together and you were doing just what I was doing, which is linking data sets and generating standard monthly financial reports, which were already part of a template in there, it goes real quick. I imagine if you were not using templated reports it would not go as fast.

I think the ROI was a month and a half. It was really fast. Not only did I get seven people in the day-to-day aggregation of financial data, but they went from quarterly reports to real-time data. So that is something we could not measure.

I think it is reasonable. I will say that all of the competitors right now I think are a little pricey, but I am cheap.

Pay very close attention to your data catalog development. Do your best to drive towards a common data catalog across the entire enterprise. So you do not have data that is tagged similarly from different data sets. I would rate Domo a seven out of ten.

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.