Chartio vs SAS Visual Analytics

Chartio is a SaaS BI tool that rates quite highly with its user base, thanks to a myriad of unique benefits and features that help companies save time and increase productivity. Most significantly, many reviews focused on its ease of use — not only is the platform user-friendly and intuitive, with a clean, drag-and-drop interface, but it’s also designed to help users build SQL queries without coding knowledge. Easy to pick up, it’s also easy to master, with a remarkably short learning curve due to built-in tools and tips, as well as an abundance of vendor-provided documentation, online resources and proactive customer support. Many users reported that this tool increased organization-wide data literacy and reduced reliance on their IT, R&D and analyst departments by providing truly self-service BI. In addition, it facilitates smooth collaboration and painless sharing of insights. Users also praised its data analysis functionality, which gives insight into overarching trends while inviting deeper exploration at a granular level through flexible filters, slice-and-dice tools and drill-down capabilities. This tool’s data visualization and dashboarding features, while lacking in some customization compared to competitors, help users track KPIs and see metrics from all of their data sources in one place. However, some reviews mentioned that this solution suffers from slow loading times and refresh rates, especially with larger data sets. Another con cited by several users is its cost: while some say that it’s affordable, others say that it’s too expensive for what it provides and that the price hike associated with adding embedding to pricing plans is too high. For businesses specifically looking for a mobile app, this tool may not be the right fit, as there is currently no mobile app. Though it lacks some advanced features needed by power users or provided by other alternatives, some reviews said that this is a trade-off for its ease of use with business users. Overall, Chartio is a great fit for businesses seeking to empower all their employees with data-driven decision making and encourage them to discover their own insights, while reducing the burden on their IT department.

SAS Analytics is a versatile business intelligence and analytics tool that empowers users to explore and understand data through interactive data visualizations. Many users who reviewed data analysis said that, coupled with the power of predictive analytics, the platform offers a plethora of graphics options — charts, graphs and dashboards — with deep-dive capabilities, such as filtering, to zero in on pertinent business data. Many users who reviewed functionality and data preparation said that, possibly because of its capable ETL engine and in-memory architecture, data processing speed is very high and reports load faster. A majority of users who reviewed data connectivity said that the tool is efficient in pulling data from multiple sources for data modeling and analysis. On the flip side, quite a few users who reviewed functionality said that the platform’s integration with Python and R is still in the development stage and this limits its functional scope. Some users who discussed user-friendliness said that the processes are not the most intuitive — errors and warnings in logs are misleading, and new users may find adoption difficult. Though the industry scope of user tutorials is limited, a majority of users said that the steep learning curve of the platform is sufficiently addressed by training. For many users, its cost-prohibitive licensing plans caused them to not consider it their first choice when it came to purchasing a BI solution. Overall, SAS Visual Analytics is a versatile tool with fast data processing capabilities and strong visualizations to generate reports for insightful data analysis.