Grow

Grow is easy to get started with and is quite powerful with an intuitive, easy to use interface. It has automatic connections for the data sources our department uses and allows me to visually provide useful and insightful data to multiple teams. It is so easy to customize the metrics and I like the fact I can specify which users have access to which dashboards, and what their permission levels can be.

The connection with Marketo isn't as stable as I would like and I can't pull in as much data as I was hoping to. This has more to do with Marketo than Grow. I get around it by uploading weekly Smartlists for metrics that's don't need to be viewed daily, or only really need to be viewed on a monthly basis. For daily metrics, I restrict the pulls to 7 or 14 days and things work well most of time. Marketo is the only data source I have ever had problems with - all the other connections work flawlessly

Can do almost anything with patience and logic, no need to distract developers to assist with complicated data queries. Customer support is outstanding, always taking the time to properly understand and help address anything you throw at them - very solution-focused.

Can be a bit buggy at times, especially after big releases, requiring more attention than I would like towards "fixing" metrics that were previously working fine. Can also be very slow with large data sets, some of which are just too big for it to handle.

Their UI is awesome. I love the overall look and feel for the entire system. Graphs look updated, clean, and they are fairly easy to customize. Making the dashboards look good is fairly simple.

Not data warehousing the data is an issue. Long load times really get me frustrated with the software. It seems to take a minute to edit a metric, load a new metric, or even sometime update a metric. Updating a dashboard can take 2 minutes at times.
Drilling down and looking into the data is very underwhelming. Dashboard filters don't exist so you're stuck loading filters only to individual metrics, not the whole dashboard.
Email triggers that send reports on a set schedule are limited to only 7 am MT on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule.
Time zone offsets have been the death of me in the system. They use SQLite to format the data coming in but their out-of-the-box data filtering overrides all SQLite filters. It's been super frustrating trying to get the data we want.

The two biggest pros for utilizing Grow for our data visualization/dashboard needs is the ability to operate at scale and the accessibility and usability to employees with various technical abilities.
The general requirements of our firm included 200+ dashboards for both clients and internal use that provided extensive user permission options, did not require all users/architects to be extensively skilled at coding languages, and still provided the customization capabilities of higher dollar platforms.
Grow was a perfect solution to all of these challenges. Their transformation “apps” within their builder allow users with limited SQL knowledge to apply all manipulations needed to datasets. Their user permissions, with unlimited users model, allows for a scalable system that handles all internal and external requirements. Their new data explorer functionality empowers end users to further manipulate and analyze data. All this at a competitive price point made Grow a perfect solution for our business.

The two biggest one to utilizing Grow as our data visualization tool are its lack of true BI capabilities and some of the technical challenges we’ve faced. Though neither is enough to sway us from a “definitely recommend” stance, both are worth noting.
When compared to more expensive solutions built around BI (think Tableau or Looker), Grow lacks BI capabilities. The new data explorer functionality helps significantly close this gap, but it still is up to the architect and end-user to provide the “analysis” component. If your team lacks the ability to translate data into action, Grow doesn’t have BI/AI/etc capabilities like other platforms to bridge that gap.
Additionally, while Grow performs reasonably well, it’s not without its technical challenges. Being a smaller company than the titans of the visualization space, technical challenges stretch out longer than they seemingly should. Additionally, though their business model/pricing makes it incredibly scalable, large volumes of data sources (not necessarily a large data source; simply having many different sources connected at once) can lead to slower loading/building that can hamper my team’s efficiency.
Again, neither of these are deal breakers by any means, but are worth noting.