[chime]

Just signed up. I would love to have an alternative to Tableau. I will add comments/issues here as I find them:

1. Give me a demo. A real sandbox I can play with. If it exists, I couldn't find it. I took the http://chartio.com/product/tour and it wasn't mentioned in there. There is no mention of demo on the front-page either. EDIT: Took me forever to find a demo ( linked from: http://chartio.com/uses/excelcharts ). This should have been front and foremost because it is awesome!

2. No mention of Windows-based tunnel anywhere on: https://chartio.com/project/4095/settings/source/add/MySQL. Companies that don't mind paying $2500/mo for BI often use Windows.

3. No MS-SQL support. No ODBC/JDBC.

4. Export as XLSX, not just CSV. It's very easy to do these days. Make the columns pretty, auto-filter etc.

I will pay $20-30k easily to have a good BI solution within my own network that is easy for me to setup and manage and can handle a few tens of million rows of data (don't even need billions). Your site is not speaking to me. Your site is catering to eBay store owners and Wordpress site operators who embed Google Analytics. It's not the text-copy of the pages but the focus. Talk to me about a VM I can host locally. Mention Windows even though we all use OSX and Nix in our personal and web-app lives. Mention cubes. Speak to me as if you are in the same industry as I am (medical, pharmaceutical, manufacturing, communications).

Having just played with the dashboard for a few minutes, I think you have a great product and wish you best of luck.

[irrelative]

Hi there, CTO at Chartio here.

1. We've been keeping the demo link a bit hidden, but we're among friends here, so feel free to check out: https://chartio.com/demo/ for some sample data.

2. Absolutely -- we're going to be developing an SSH version for Windows in the future.

3. MS-SQL support is in the works, so stay tuned.

4. Very good point -- the CSV export is relatively basic, and will be more fully featured in the future.

Glad you enjoyed what you've seen so far, and let us know if you have any other ideas for us to focus on!

[tom_b]

Ugh, as a Linux BI hacker, I hate XLSX. I have to handle data imports from products that produce incorrect XLSX formats, apache POI blows up for the relatively small numbers of rows (<250K or so - I cheat by giving my JVM 16GB of memory to handled it and to be fair, I believe this is fixable but I have an ETL tool with POI embedded in a hacker-unfriendly way), but you are dead-on correct that you need some type of Excel output. Users love it. Particularly the kind of smart people who learn how to use the "Insert Function" wizard.

I actually rather like cubes, but find that simpler roll-up reports seem to satisfy most users. But I'm now in healthcare/research and remember in the finance world that cube slice-and-dice was more standard.

And I want to second the price range you mention - $20K to $30k per year is noise in the budget for groups that want an actual BI setup like you describe (not everybody needs hadoop). I have found that enterprises seem to have strong vendor preferences (e.g., they are OBIEE, Business Objects, etc shops and focus entirely on report devs with very narrow skillsets). So I am excited to see options pop up, but feel a bit of sympathy for a group that wants to crack the enterprise market nut.

[arohner]

> Speak to me as if you are in the same industry as I am (medical, pharmaceutical, manufacturing, communications).

Honest question: why is that appealing to you?

Whenever I see this on a website, I feel like they're asking me which form of bullshit I want to hear.

[chime]

Quite the opposite. It reduces the BS for me. Seeing 'FDA CFR Part 211' on a software vendor's site tells me they have spent time assessing the needs of my industry and I don't have to start from scratch. Dropbox.com doesn't need to do this. But http://www.mastercontrol.com/out_of_specification/oos_softwa... does. I care about HL7 and HIPAA when working with clients in Healthcare and need IFRS when dealing with accountant firms.

Now a lot of sites do a horrible job at this. Putting a stock photo of a nurse next to a patient does not make me feel any better. But mentioning in 'Healthcare' industry section that your data-logging software can export to a format usable by EPIC EMR makes my day. Or mentioning in the 'Process Manufacturing' industry section that the same software can import data from OHaus Defender scales makes me choose you over your competitors.

To put it simply, breaking down by industry is just organizing the list of features in a different way. If your software can do 1000 things, you don't want to put it all in one page. Listing them by software/technical taxonomy would not be useful either because then I'd have to go over all the categories to find which features apply to my project. Properly organizing them by industry shows me all the key features of the software AND the ones that best relate to my needs.

There is nothing wrong in not catering to specific industries. After all, the software should be flexible enough that anyone from aeronautics to zoology should be able to use it. But specifying that 'yes, it will work for you because X, Y, Z' where X, Y, and Z are regulations, standards, and requirements specific to my own industry, will make it an easy sell for all parties involved. And when you're talking about software starting in 5-figures, you want to make it easy for the tech guys to sell it to the management.

[kiskis]

you need tibco spotfire then:

http://spotfire.tibco.com/en/discover-spotfire/who-uses-spot...

[StavrosK]

Maybe you'd be interested in what I'm currently developing: http://www.instahero.com/

I'd love to hear some feedback.