Real-time dashboards have transformed how my team makes instant data-driven decisions
What is our primary use case?
My main use case for Firebolt is for BI dashboards and real-time analytics, which involves large-scale data processing.
I used Firebolt to power a real-time product analytics dashboard for an e-commerce platform, ingesting live stream data like user clicks, search, and add to cart events in near-real time, helping to build dashboards showing conversion rates, top products, and user journeys.
Firebolt really stood out in scenarios where low-latency, high-concurrency analytics were critical, especially for customer-facing dashboards.
How has it helped my organization?
Firebolt positively impacts my organization by enabling faster data-driven decisions, improving user experience in our analytics app, and reducing infrastructure costs through better performance efficiency.
What is most valuable?
The best features Firebolt offers are sub-second query performance and elastic scaling, available both vertically and horizontally.
Sub-second query performance and elastic scaling significantly help my team, as they have a direct impact on both decision-making and user experience. My team no longer has to wait for reports because insights are instant, enabling real-time monitoring and allowing dashboards to load almost instantly.
Sub-second performance improves speed of insights while elastic scaling ensures consistent performance and cost efficiency, even under unpredictable workloads.
What needs improvement?
Firebolt can be improved by enhancing UI/UX and tooling, as it currently has a smaller ecosystem compared to competitors.
There are a couple of areas where Firebolt can really improve, particularly its UI/UX, and Firebolt has a steeper learning curve for beginners.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Firebolt for a year now.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Firebolt is quite stable, offering elastic and multi-dimensional scalability, which allows for independent scaling of compute and storage, making it suitable for TB and PB scale workloads.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Firebolt's scalability is very strong and multi-dimensional, designed specifically for high-performance analytics.
How are customer service and support?
I find customer support to be quite reliable, and the community ecosystem is still growing.
How was the initial setup?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was quite smooth. Firebolt offers consumption-based, pay-as-you-use pricing, and the setup requires moderate data modeling and integration, with SaaS as the first option along with flexible deployment.
What was our ROI?
I have seen a clear return on investment with Firebolt, largely in time savings, cost efficiency, and productivity, specifically reducing overall inquiry compute costs by 30 to 50 percent compared to my previous warehouse.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing Firebolt, I evaluated other options like Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, and Google BigQuery.
What other advice do I have?
My advice for others looking into using Firebolt is to adopt it if your use case demands real-time analytics at scale, but to avoid it for small or low-complexity workloads where simpler tools may suffice. I gave this product a rating of 8.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
The Firebolt Experience
What do you like best about the product?
The Fantastic Customer Support, Helping us through out engineering changes and architecture. Observing improvements in the performance every new release. Getting started with Firebolt is very quick. Implementation of Firebolt was simple and quick.We were able to integrate Firebolt for our daily usage. it is used every day for our Analytics.
What do you dislike about the product?
Still undergoing maturity as new features are added everyday
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Processing the data every day and reducing Time to Market in ingesting large chunks of data from multiple suppliers in different formats.
Outstanding speed and features at very reasonable cost, especially the new platform
What do you like best about the product?
**UPDATED: I wanted to update this review to reflect current thoughts especially after migration to the newer platform. Speeds have been markedly improved over the already fast engines that we had been used to. Engines are now multi-purpose. The .Net SDK has been improved dramatically. Support through our platform migration was top notch. Basically all of the great things about Firebolt have been doubled down and made greater.
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Original review:
There are so many things but for starters, it's just how fast we are able to serve up query results to applications and end users regardless of the data set size. Hugely complicated queries run like lightning fast, so much so that we've pivoted from using Firebolt just for reporting and analytics to also including it in our internal tooling for our business. Things we simply couldn't pull off otherwise without a massive scaling of our infrastructure.
The cost is simply unmatched for the levels of feature and performance. We're a small company with big ambitions but cost is still a paramount consideration. We have flexibility in controlling our costs and scaling as we see fit, which is great.
I've found that my team has generally found the syntax to be pretty easy to pick up, it shares a lot of commonality with other SQL flavors we're familiar with. And even when it stumps us, the documentation is pretty robust (unlike many software vendors we use) and their support staff has been top-notch. They even share a channel in our Slack where we get quick answers to many of our questions. Firebolt goes so far as to proactively watch our query performance patterns and shares that with me and will help us fix them.
Simply put, I work WITH Firebolt to solve our problems and limitations instead of working AROUND them like we have to with some other vendors.
What do you dislike about the product?
UPDATED: Specifically, my top dislike listed here has been rectified in the new platform. Engines handle both reads and ingestion/data modification. This has allowed simplification of our code base that interacts with Firebolt as well as reduction of service interruptions.
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Original review:
The segregation of ingestion (or "general purpose") engines from read-only "analytics" engines is great from a granular control mechanism, especially as it pertains to cost. However that often requires bouncing of the read-only engine that services our applications to reflect changes made by the ingestion engine, causing a several minute outage. There are ways around it but this is often the case for us at this time.
Additionally, it would be great if there was a way to have stored queries accessible via the API access. Currently the query has to be passed to the API meaning that even where the same query could be used in our code, that is being duplicated and would necessitate an application deployment to make alterations. Compare that to a stored function/procedure model in our sql transaction engine and this is not ideal for a small shop that moves this quickly.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Firebolt serves us as our data warehouse, our primary ETL processing engine, reporting and analytics platform as well as our high performance query engine for internal tools built for the rest of our organization.
A cool data warehouse tool!
What do you like best about the product?
- It has an intuitive UI
- Its functions are clear and really easy to use.
- It has a cool API to send requests when using code
- It has customizables engines to adjust them to your budget.
What do you dislike about the product?
- You need to restart an engine to reflect changes made in another engine instantly. Otherwise, you need to wait up to 20 minutes to see your actions reflected.
- Currently, it doesn't allow updates on rows of tables.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We needed a data warehouse to store and connect our data to BI solutions like Metabase.
Firebolt so far has been a good solution to our current goals in our business.
Complicated queries in a speed we never saw before
What do you like best about the product?
Complicated queries in a speed we never saw before
What do you dislike about the product?
They still need to work on some bugs and the transition of existing assets
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We don't need to wait anymore for a long query results
