As fate has it, we have no connection to FB's Prophet - we at Whitesmith have been working on unplugg for some time now and decided a few weeks ago that this week we'd share it on some communities to have more people testing it and more feedback. It seems that the folks over at Facebook decided something similar. You know what they say, great minds :p
Joking aside, as intimidating as it might have been to see FB releasing a related tool, we feel that we still fill a different segment. From what I've been reading today, Prophet is a tool tailored for timeseries forecasting with human interaction and input in mind - it can work like a black forecasting box but it seems that it is the most useful when paired with an analyst that can keep looking at the output and tweak the model accordingly. It is _really friendly_ as far as forecasting packages go and trust me, we looked at a fair amount of them. That and the use of ProbProgramming to infer their params is just awesome (I'm a fervent Bayesian at heart).
Unplugg on the other hand, fills the need for a "generic" forecasting tool for uses where you don't want/need much specific tailoring and want a really Plug&Play solution - it's an API that you can call from pretty much everywhere, with no dependencies or specific environments needed (so no need to deploy your own R/Python/Matlab - yikes - environment where your models live and run). One possible use case would be an energy monitoring portal that lives completely client-side and requests forecasts to our API on-the-fly directly from the client.
We are still actively developing and testing different forecasting models - the one running is just the one we feel most confident about - and will be looking at Prophet as a possible alternative (although I haven't seen their license carefully, so can't be sure).
The last time a start up tried to sell us a plug and play generic forecasting SAAS they made the mistake wanting to impress us and showing us their backend code. It was the first time in my life seeing spark code but it took only 10 minutes to find the spot being responsible for uncontrolled overfitting making their product useless. Every time I open a black box analytic tool happens the same.
Such a weird coincidence, but I definitely think you're in a different space. For example, per my previous comment where I needed it to be installed and more customizable, I'm going to use Prophet, but for other projects where it's not as important if Unplugg works I may use that.
As fate has it, we have no connection to FB's Prophet - we at Whitesmith have been working on unplugg for some time now and decided a few weeks ago that this week we'd share it on some communities to have more people testing it and more feedback. It seems that the folks over at Facebook decided something similar. You know what they say, great minds :p
Joking aside, as intimidating as it might have been to see FB releasing a related tool, we feel that we still fill a different segment. From what I've been reading today, Prophet is a tool tailored for timeseries forecasting with human interaction and input in mind - it can work like a black forecasting box but it seems that it is the most useful when paired with an analyst that can keep looking at the output and tweak the model accordingly. It is _really friendly_ as far as forecasting packages go and trust me, we looked at a fair amount of them. That and the use of ProbProgramming to infer their params is just awesome (I'm a fervent Bayesian at heart).
Unplugg on the other hand, fills the need for a "generic" forecasting tool for uses where you don't want/need much specific tailoring and want a really Plug&Play solution - it's an API that you can call from pretty much everywhere, with no dependencies or specific environments needed (so no need to deploy your own R/Python/Matlab - yikes - environment where your models live and run). One possible use case would be an energy monitoring portal that lives completely client-side and requests forecasts to our API on-the-fly directly from the client.
We are still actively developing and testing different forecasting models - the one running is just the one we feel most confident about - and will be looking at Prophet as a possible alternative (although I haven't seen their license carefully, so can't be sure).