It’s been a while since tech companies understood that having a good data strategy is the biggest competitive advantage. We had seen how all those tech companies are leading today’s economy and now everybody else wants to join the party. Is a fact that been able to gather data and make data-driven decisions based on it is the way to go for every kind of business.

In order for you to get there, you need to have a good tech stack to take care of your analytics pipeline and talented data experts to make best use of those platforms. One of the things you will need in your stack is a data analytics platform. These platforms come in every shape and color and have gone from just visualizing data to execute deeper statistical analysis. This time I’m focusing on platforms with users interfaces were coding is not required. Here are some recommendations based on platforms I had played with and how could they fit depending on your needs.

You are a marketer that want to measure your digital marketing efforts

Photo by Adeolu Eletu on Unsplash

The main thing here probably is to find a platform that have as many pre-built API connectors as possible and that uses as low code as possible since that’s usually not the main skill for a regular marketer. One of the big challenges in marketing analytics is to be able to have a 360 view of a marketing effort active in multiple digital channels and be able to attribute those executions to both online and offline conversions.

Recommendation: Datorama or Domo

Salesforce bought Datorama last year while Domo shook the tech landscape by claiming unicorn status after a 2billion valuation before its IPO last year as well. Both have a huge amount of pre-connectors that most likely will cover most of you digital marketing needs and have good ways to receive data coming from other sources via email or FTP export. What is also cool about these tools is that they include an internal data storage solution that simplifies creating an analytics pipeline if you don’t have a data storage solution or don’t feel like you need one. Both of them also focus on the non-coding life, were anybody can make a lot without using any code. I personally prefer Datorama because of it’s overall better user interface, better looking visualizations and features, including lots of help from machine learning algorithms for data mapping and AI for campaign’s insights. In addition, I believe the road looks brighter for Datorama since been acquired by Salesforce, and many upgrades are already taking form. Still you should evaluate both based on your needs and budget and make the best decision.

You are a big corporation with lots of 1st party data and 3rd party tools

The main thing here is to use a tool that can process big amounts of data coming from all areas of a corporation with queries that won’t take forever to finish. Is important that the platform have a good service support since any problem here could be big and spread through the whole corporation.

Recommendation: Tableau or Power BI

This two are the main players in the big corporate world. Tableau is probably the most popular visualization tool in the market, been running since 2003, a time when big data and analytics wasn’t the main topic in every business. They won a big market share until Microsoft and other companies started to get aggressive and look for ways to get a piece of the pie. So far, Microsoft, and its product Power BI, have done pretty well even passing Tableau in Gartner’s famous Magic Quadrant for BI tools. Now, is Power BI better than Tableau? Personally, I prefer Tableau since it has a better interface, more integrations with 3rd party tools and better-looking dashboard results. Now it comes with a price since Microsoft will almost give Power BI for free if you are an Office 365 user or have any kind of corporate relationship with them, something that is very common in legacy corporations. You could notice some legacy vs younger clients when you check each other list, where Tableau’s list includes Spotify and Netflix while Power BI clients include Dell and Coca Cola. Yet both tools are great at managing big amounts of data and running difficult queries without taking that long of a time and are very tight in side-by-side feature comparison.

You are a low budget business, freelancer or just learning:

Sometimes you need to keep it simple. Maybe you don’t have the budget, the clients or a big database to work with. Maybe you are just curious about data science in general or about its good job opportunities. Maybe you are just a data nerd that want to build visualizations and share them with the community via blog or other web space. Whatever fits you, there are free tools that are good enough to learn and get ready to whenever you hit the big time.

Recommendation: Google’s Data Studio or Tableau Public

Tableau has its free version that you can download and work with most of the features available in the premium version. Also they probably has the best community and data viz gallery in the business. There are some awesome people that got great jobs just by sharing their work in Tableau’s forums. On the other hand, who doesn’t love Google products? They are so easy to use, and usually have a lot of integrations, not limited to Google tools. Data Studio has been upgraded frequently to a point that it’s been used in some digital ad agencies and small businesses. My prediction was that at some point Google would promote a premium version of Data Studio but they surprise me with the announcement of acquiring Looker, another good analytics tool that I haven’t used yet.

So there’s a bunch of other tools, both premium and free, but these ones are the ones I have experience with. They all are becoming more similar and the no coding UX is becoming more prevalent, something that we see happening in all things related to data since there’s more users that want to get into it and usually not having coding skills is the biggest obstacle. AI driven recommendations and machine learning help to clean data are also in high demand. So more tools and more data to play with will keep us all entertained and most importantly employed for a while. All good news so far.