ThoughtSpot Reviews

The solution is used primarily for three things. One is for internal operations such as operational reporting, and business intelligence. The second is self-service BI, where people can create their own reports and do their own analytics. The third is we completely whitelist the product and serve it to our customers. We embed it into our other applications, so it looks like a Verisk application and we even have our customers doing self-service analytics, as well.

The most valuable feature is probably the core functionality itself, which is the ability to search and drill down into any data right out of the box. Of course, there's data modeling needed, and things like that, but I can throw it at a set, and I can get up and running in a matter of hours. If a new group comes to me and says, "Hey, I've heard about ThoughtSpot. I have some data and I want to be able to do some analytics, do some profiling, do some BI against it." In a couple of hours, I connect to their source and I just do it. Now for a production product, we have to model and perform it over time, but at least I can get people up and running extremely fast with a tool that's intuitive and easy to use.

The one area of the solution that I do hear needs improvement is on the visualization front. In my mind, I'd rather just get to the data and get to the actual values or get to the thing that drives the business, but there is a certain segment of customers, particularly marketing and external facing where they want additional visualizations. They want the ability to do geospatial reporting, more maps and latitude, longitude, and things like that. 

From a marketing standpoint and look and feel and harmonization across your product, you want visualizations that look like your product.

I have been using the solution for four years.

The solution has been running very stable for a number of years and we rarely have to do anything on it other than upgrades. We spent most of the time learning early on what our usage would be and our loads and things like that, but the product itself was fine. 

There are two ways to do scale. One is scaling ThoughtSpot itself and the servers that it's on. We initially started there and that has other challenges. One is complexity and cost. We wound up using the ThoughtSpot Snowflake Partnership and all of our scaling is pretty much automatic, because of the combination of ThoughtSpot and Snowflake.

In all instances, their team was great. We gave them access from outside, they guided us through the deployment. They've always been very responsive and helpful.

The technical support team is responsive, knowledgeable, educated about the product, and very proactive.

Positive

Before using the solution we used Tableau. One of the reasons we migrated away from Tableau was their inflexibility and unwillingness to come to the table and negotiate. I think their size killed them over time.

The initial setup was very straightforward. I have to say one of the key differentiators for me with ThoughtSpot is their customer service. They sent a whole team of people and we didn't even pay for professional service. 

The implementation was completed in-house with the assistance of the ThoughtSpot team. We wanted to make sure that the proper security was in place and its performance-tuned and everything else. They definitely helped with that. Then the other piece of that, when we originally installed ThoughtSpot, and this is how far back our relationship goes with them, we had what was called an appliance. Rather than just installing a piece of software, we actually had their appliance put in our data center. They sent a whole team of people to help us and to guide us, and that's really what made them stand out.

We were early adopters of the solution so we got some really good deals. Right now we have enterprise, all-you-can-eat deal with whitelisting and everything else. I think it's competitive and it's certainly less than some of the competitors on Tableau. Obviously, it's more than Power BI, which Microsoft gives away relatively cheaply as part of Office 365, but the three main people in that space, I would say it's less than Tableau, more than Power BI, and about on par with let's say TIBCO Spotfire.

I think, being a smaller company, ThoughtSpot is a lot more flexible and that's where there's another advantage in their pricing model. I think they're willing to work with you a lot more than let's say a Tableau.

I give the pricing a six out of ten.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

Four years ago we deployed the solution on-prem but now it is deployed in the cloud.

The deployment is normally easy but in our case, we had an additional whitelisting requirement. If you're familiar with whitelisting, it's basically removing the ThoughtSpot logo everywhere and replacing it with our own. That was the only piece that took us a little bit longer than a standard setup and because of that, I would give the setup a four out of ten.

We have about 200 people that use the solution actively where they're in there every day or several times a week. Then we have another 200 people that will play with it for a little bit or go in and out once a month when they need it.

I would say Tableau excels at the visualization piece. ThoughtSpot exceeds at pure self-service in English like Google querying. It also excels at developer efficiency. What may take a Tableau developer five hours to do, I can do or a developer can do in an hour and a half, two hours on ThoughtSpot just because it's more intuitive, it's simpler, and has fewer bells and whistles and they can just turn things out faster. If your aim is to simply get out analytics, if you need operational numbers or need some financial figures and just need the figures and don't need the absolute picture-perfect view of it, then ThoughtSpot is perfect and fast.

I would suggest before using the solution make sure that your data is modeled well. Right from the start for consistency, for good performance out of the box, for data quality reasons. Make sure that you don't skip the upfront data modeling work. It's not that ThoughtSpot couldn't handle a dirtier set of data, it's just that your results are going to be better and faster from the beginning than having to go back later on and work on that technical debt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I rate ThoughtSpot nine out of 10 for stability.

I rate ThoughtSpot eight out of 10 for scalability.

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

I rate ThoughtSpot six out of 10 for affordability. 

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

To help the business with the latest metrics, KPIs, and important insights, we source our data from various data sources into one golden source. Then we push the data to ThoughtSpot and create worksheets and visualize the data in ThoughtSpot in such a way that it is easy for the business to consume. So they see the metrics that they want to seeto drive insights out of the data to make meaningful insights. 

In addition, our business users and sales representatives who are not exactly technical people use ThoughtSpot to easily move around and help themselves with the data available through simple queries. They can also create a small pin board to extract data in an Excel format that they can then use for their PowerPoint presentations or other purposes. With just a simple query they can find out things like what the revenue earned by a certain client for this month was or what the highest-selling product for this period of time was.

ThoughtSpot is like a beautiful melding of Google's search engine and Pinterest's pin feature. It is very easy to go to the ThoughtSpot search bar and then search by not only a field name, but also by a data element. For example, I can say what was the highest revenue earning client this month or which product that I sold brought in the highest revenue? These simple searches are very valuable. You can then pin those searches to your pin board and then create a pin board of your most important KPIs that you'll be visiting very often.

Those features are very useful for our end users. 

I would like to see more flexibility in adding the pins. Currently, we have four different sizes in which I can add pins, but I would like to be able to resize my pins. 

Additionally, when I add a pin, it goes to the bottom of the screen and I have to drag it all the way to where I want it. So I would like to have a little more flexibility in that. I would also like to have a larger color pallet. A simplistic look is important to me.

I would be happy to see automatic emails for when volume falls below a certain threshold. Right now, I'm sending those out by hand. This would be a wonderful feature to have and I think they are rolling it out in the next version.

I have been using ThoughtSpot for a year and a half.

My impression of the stability of this solution is that there have not been any crashes or issues in the platform. We have not had any data loss. There is some downtime, but that is the case with every application.

I would rate the scalability of this solution an eight out of ten, with one not being scalable at all and 10 being very scalable. There are around 300 users of ThoughSpot in my company right now and we have plans of expanding further.

The ThoughtSpot customer service team is very supportive.

Positive

I previously used Tableau and Power BI.

I currently work on both Tableau and ThoughtSpot. Some of my reports are still in Tableau while others are in ThoughtSpot. I use both tools interchangeably depending on the requirements because Tableau is totally different from ThoughtSpot. Tableau basically boils down to dashboards. You have a lot more features where we can toggle between two different datasets and it has its own limitations. It is always better to use more than one BI tool. Over the years, I have used other solutions and then moved to Power BI and then Tableau and then ThoughtSpot, and a little bit of Click.

The initial setup was not very complex. I would not call it straightforward, but it was not complex either. The team responsible for deployment was no larger than three to five members, which is why I think you don't need a large team for the setup and I know we received a lot of support from ThoughtSpot.

I would say the return on investment is good. Whatever we invested, we got results. We have been finding it easy to use and onboard new use cases.

As a general solution, I would rate ThoughtSpot a nine out of ten, with one being the worst and 10 being the best. 

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

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

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

We can do pinboards and save our queries.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm also familiar with Tableau and Power BI.

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

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

I was not involved in the initial setup process. 

We do have a separate team that handles the maintenance. 

I have not witnessed any ROI at this time. 

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

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

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

I became interested in the solution after seeing a demo. We carried out an internal POC with ThoughtSpot and generally the use cases that we show our clients are related to retail scenarios, FP&A, and sales. We are consultants and customers of ThoughtSpot. 

The most important feature is the query-based search. One of the main things I find with clients is that they always have new requirements, and we don't want to keep changing reports just to fit in one additional requirement. ThoughtSpot gives that power to the user, taking the modifying of existing reports out of our hands.

A few of our clients have found it really helpful not having to write SQL queries and not needing an expert on their team in order to generate reports or get the data they need. You can search, for example, sales in North America, and get a table with different categories of products. The winning point for ThoughtSpot is that all the power is in the hands of the people that actually make the decisions rather than in the hands of an analyst who really doesn't know a lot about the strategic use cases for the data.

The majority of issues we have are similar to those every visualization tool faces in the initial phase. Something like a customized visualization, which a lot of companies build for Power BI or Tableau isn't available in ThoughtSpot, or there are minimal options. That's something that I'd like to see in the next release.

ThoughtSpot is essentially a query-based search engine where you can type your query and get the answer. If you don't have your data prepared well, your user won't understand what this search engine is for, or they won't get the right answer. So, it doesn't have that powerful query. We usually create models in DBT and then get that into ThoughtSpot as a worksheet. 

The solution is stable and doesn't crash but we still have issues with things like resizing a column or a table on a lightboard.

I think the solution is highly scalable. ThoughtSpot's entire model is that you don't have to create custom tables. You can directly connect to your data warehouse to get as many products as you want, and you can scale it to get the tables you want.

We have access to a lot of technical support and we're happy with what we get. 

It's usually the system integrators that carry out the deployment, so ThoughtSpot partners with companies like ours to provide that kind of support. Our team generally comprises two to three people, five at most. It's usually two or three data engineers, a project team lead, a Scrum master and then a couple of people from the client side, usually in the IT space where they can help with server setups, encryption and logging in, the single sign-on setup. Based on projects we've done, it usually takes around two months for some of the use cases that we were handling. The maintenance aspect is usually handled by the client team. 

The biggest return on investment would be the time saved by whoever is making the critical analysis or making the strategic decisions for the business team.

I think the licensing costs are fine. There are three or four licensing models. 

I think one of the important things you need to consider is whether ThoughtSpot is the right tool for you. It's amazing at providing answers but if you have a big business intelligence team, you don't want to bring ThoughtSpot in thinking that it's going to solve all your issues. It can be used in areas where the level of support or expertise in SQL is lacking.

ThoughtSpot still has a way to go to catch up with other solutions in the market. The tool is still developing, and they're pushing out updates quickly and creating a lot of integrations with other tools. They'll get there eventually. Basic issues like reloading pages because a window has been resized, is a little buggy, but we make it work. I rate this solution seven out of 10. 

It's mostly for front-end widgets that we have in our applications and for some of the teams that do ad hoc reporting. We have some scheduled jobs also. So the data is consumed mostly by the stakeholders so that they can view things.

Compared to the other experience that I have had with other reporting tools, it is faster. That load time for the dashboard to open is way faster, no matter how big the data is. That is something that I found really helpful.

The scalability is good.

The most difficult thing I found is that it only deals with the files and does not have direct connectivity to databases. If we have 10 million rows in the data and every time the only option we have is to do a selection on the database and dump it into a file and then load that file, that's not ideal. There should be another way around it. It causes redundancy of data.

There are many other tools and they do have other connectors for other legacy systems or other databases. That functionality should be there in ThoughtSpot. There should be direct connectivity to the database. That would reduce a lot of redundancies. 

The stability could be better. It takes up to 24 hours for a change to register. 

I've been using the solution for ten months. 

Most of the time it is stable. That said, I have faced a few incidents. For example, I was making a change in one of the reports where I introduced a new column, introduced a new table, and joined it. After that, the indexing stopped, and it took 24 hours after the indexing engine was restarted to get going. And after that, users were only able to pull that particular column that was introduced using a join. That is a very common issue that we face every day. It is kind of weird. It is really time-consuming just to wait for 24 hours before that column becomes available due to indexing being an issue in ThoughtSpot.

If someone is making changes on a daily basis, it may not be that stable. 

I am not working directly on the front-end development, I'm doing the development of the back end, adding the columns, new tables, and new joins. Consumers are the end users. If it is taking 24 hours for a change to go live, then that is a really serious issue.

I have yet to face an issue scaling the data. 

We have about 5,000 people using the solution. It is a combination of end users, stakeholders, and developers.

The solution was set up well before I joined the company, and therefore I was not a part of the initial setup. 

I don't have any experience with how long a deployment would take. 

I don't have any details in relation to pricing. 

I'm not sure if other solutions were evaluated or why this solution was chosen. I was not at the company when the decision was made. 

We are end-users. 

I'm not sure which version of the solution I'm using. It is the latest version.

I'd recommend the solution. It's a fast business intelligence tool. However, they should now expect the same functionality as they would in other reporting tools. 

I would rate the solution six out of ten.

I'm not very actively using it. That said, sometimes it's the requirements, so that's why I have to use it.

I'm basically the Power BI developer, however, our company recently purchased ThoughtSpot. I had to make a shift from Power BI to ThoughtSpot. I use it mostly for reporting purposes for higher management. That's why we're using it.

ThoughtSpot is mostly good for showcasing matrices.

It is easy to set up the solution.

The solution is stable.

It's scalable.  

There is more flexibility in Power BI than in ThoughtSpot.

In the matrices, for example, the size is very limited and the ratios are fixed. It would be better if they could be adjustable. The formatting for rows and columns separating could be more flexible. 

If I want to order columns, this feature is not there. 

I have just recently started using the ThoughtSpot. It's been over a month.

It is stable. The solution is reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash and freeze. I'd rate the stability nine out of ten.

I do find the solution to be scalable. 

There are more than 200 people using the solution.

I've never reached out to technical support. Whenever I have had an issue, I'd reach out to the ThoughtSpot team I deal with.

I've also used (and prefer) Power BI. In terms of creating visualizations and formatting backgrounds, it is better. It's also more flexible. 

Our senior management has exposure to ThoughtSpot. They were comfortable with it, so they decided to go with ThoughtSpot.

It's very easy to implement the solution. It's mostly drag and drop. There is not much required to learn in the case of using it and doing the setup, which makes the process fast and simple. 

I'm not sure exactly how long the deployment takes. 

There was a ThoughtSpot team, and they did the installation.

I can't speak to the exact cost of the solution.

If your work is senior management type and you need only matrices, then I would advise you to use ThoughtSpot. That said, if your work is a very creative thing, and you want to do analysis and show it in proper formatting or in a very themed presentation, then I would say Power BI is better.

I am an end-user.

I'm not sure which version of the solution I'm using. 

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. It can handle a lot of data.

We make use of Thoughtspot in two ways. Firstly, there are various dashboards and answers that different users can put together and refer to on an ongoing basis. Secondly, we use it as a means of exploring an unfamiliar data set or to answer new questions.

The best way to start using this solution is first explore the data and filter it in different ways. Try to develop new insights as you go along. This will help you decide exactly what kind of dashboards you need.  

The great advantage of ThoughtSpot is that you can explore data in a new way with very little effort. You don't need anyone's help to build a dashboard or to configure a visualization. You just enter the terms you're interested in, add the filters you need and ThoughtSpot will give you insights.

I've set up dashboards that are designed for use by a few hundred people in our organisation. In terms of future usage of this solution, we're contemplating the move to ThoughtSpot Cloud because that is necessary given our backend migration away from an Oracle data warehouse to Snowflake. On the other hand, there's competing products such as Looker from Google, which our IT team is evaluating. 

The ability to do ad hoc explorations of data has been most valuable. 

The dashboards could give you more ability to fine tune the appearance. You get a great deal more control over how something looks in Power BI than you do in ThoughtSpot. If they wanted to compete with PowerBI, they would need to improve in this regard. The second thing that could be improved is their SpotIQ. I've tried to use it and is not intuitive. 

I have been using this solution for four years. 

This is a stable solution. We have not had any outages or problems. 

The challenges that I have involve scaling. Managing roles and security for hundreds of users would be a full-time job. 

I would rate the technical support for this solution a four out of five. 

Personally, I'd been using Tableau prior to starting to using ThoughtSpot. I continue to use Tableau for certain things where control over the appearance of visualizations is more important than speed. I haven't used a product that is comparable with ThoughtSpot before.

Our IT team has been responsible for most of the heavy lifting when it comes to the initial setup. Some of the challenges have included figuring out how to get data from our data warehouse into a table in ThoughtSpot. 

Setting up this solution in a cloud based environment is more straightforward. We've got one IT resource dedicated to the solutions maintenance but this is not a full-time job for one person. It doesn't require a ton of support which is a great thing.

ROI is a hard thing to quantify, particularly since the costs are born by one organization and the benefits are reaped by another. In general, we get a lot of value from this solution. 

For those who are responsible for choosing which tables to feed into ThoughtSpot and setting up the tables and worksheets, I would recommend figuring out your role level security strategy from day one. Role level security is implemented via joints and in some instances, joints were set up in the opposite direction from what they should have been. This reduced the efficiency of some of the worksheets. Unfortunately, once implemented you can't make a change and have to start from scratch. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.