Lightdash

What do you like best about the product?

I love the ease of use with Lightdash, especially being able to easily view reports. It saves me time with its super helpful feature of having all data in one place and creating easy reports. The automated reports for metrics are also something I value a lot.

What do you dislike about the product?

I really like Lightdash and can't think of any improvements.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I find Lightdash super helpful for keeping all data in one place and creating easy reports, which saves time. I love the ease of use for viewing reports and how automated reports simplify metrics tracking.

What do you like best about the product?

I like how specific you can be when pulling data, which really helps to narrow down exactly what you're trying to understand or look at. I also like the ability to translate metrics into graphs and share links with other team members. In general, it's a great tool to use for reporting.

What do you dislike about the product?

It can be a bit clunky and confusing at times due to the naming of things, for example, 'region' is actually named 'store', which doesn't feel that obvious to me. The naming of fields can feel confusing and needing to constantly refresh data without it doing this automatically when you pull something new in. Also, not being able to copy the table easily the way you would in an Excel spreadsheet.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I use Lightdash for pulling data and metrics, which is good for reporting and analysis. It helps understand problems by narrowing down exactly what you need. I like translating metrics into graphs and sharing with the team, making it a great tool for reporting.

What do you like best about the product?

It is built on top of dbt and combines the best of all worlds:
- it is 10x faster to compute visualizations than Tableau
- it is much easier to built data models than in Tableau or Looker
- data models are directly "verified"/they break if they are not compatible within dbt (in Tableau/Looker, similar tools -- these are two separate worlds)
- the Lightdash team releases new features (also upon request) at lightning speed
- I can build new dashboards/charts via prompting in Cursor

What do you dislike about the product?

Honestly I don't see any so far: If at all, it requires relatively high technical skill. It cannot be used effectively by a "plug-n-play" BI Analyst.

If the price is an issue, one can consider self-hosting.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I started off liking Tableau as a BI tool better than PowerBI.
Then, I could see the compute downsides and missing git repo in Tableau compared to Looker.
Then, I can see the issue that Looker is very expensive and that Looker is not dbt integrated, i.e. you constantly need to maintain two disconnected repos and make changes in two places.

Lightdash is by far the best BI tool out there today.

What do you like best about the product?

The fact that it's so intuitive (with some initial training) allowing all members of the team to create their own dashboards.

What do you dislike about the product?

I think the initial setup took the team some time to implement.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Allowing us to make data-informed decisions for marketing.

What do you like best about the product?

Lightdash has been an absolute gamechanger, its eliminated shadow semantic layers and the disconnect from business driven insights and those from the data team.
It has very strong inituitive seperation of dashboards and charts which is all validated through DBT.
Therefor every element of a dashboard is answering a business question and stakeholders and pick & mix different charts that are governed and semantically correct for their personal usage.

This was one of easiest tools tio implement and we were up and running within less than 2 days. We've depreciated Tableu, PowerBI, and GoogleLooker for Lightdash and we've noticed a higher usage amongst our business stakeholders since.

What do you dislike about the product?

I struggled to fill in this section. Theres not much in terms of functionality or engineering that is missing at all.

I think the area of improvement may be scope and breadth of visualisations such as geo-spatial ones and clustering maps which are common dashboards outside of the pure BI arena

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

-Answering Business Questions
-Collating and governing thematic data accesses
-Better data story telling
-Novel ways of managing alerting and native testing of dashboards

What do you like best about the product?

Lightdash is our primary BI tool. It is very simple to get started on, and has all of the features needed to run a BI team.

It's also part of the 'semantic layer' community of BI tools, that do much more than create pretty charts. It allows for lay people to explore data, and get rich insights, based on pre defined logic that the analytics team creates in the tool. Too often in the past, I would give a business user access to a BI tool, and they created dashboards with incorrect conclusions because there was no way to pre-define calculations/joins/metrics/etc. Lightdash solves this problem in a big way.

I like how lightdash is fully integrated with DBT. In previous roles, using other BI tools, there was a gulf between our database logic and the BI tool. It was almost impossible to scope changes across the systems, and determine how upstream changes would effect BI. Because Lightdash is built on top of DBT, this is much easier to understand.

The ability to create a report, that any user can explore, filter, group etc. while within the guard rails set up by our analytics team is also very nice.

The team is very responsive to bug/feature requests and support.

What do you dislike about the product?

Lightdash is still relatively young, and there are some features missing that would help us tremendously. None of these missing features are dealbreakers, but we find ourselves looking for work arounds quite often. All of these feature requests are in their backlog/roadmap, so I am expectantly waiting on their arrival.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Databases are mostly just collections of tables with rows and columns. When you hook a database up to a BI tool, you then need to create metrics/charts/dashboards. In the past, it was almost impossible to create a well curated set of metric/kpi definitions, based on pre-defined rule sets. This led to business users who either: had such limited access that they could not reasonably dig into data deep enough to get needed insights, or business users who created dashboards/charts based on incorrect calculations/joins/etc.

This put a ton of strain on analysts to create 100's of cuts of the same metric. Lightdash solves this problem by allowing analysts to define metrics/joins/dimensions that business users use to create their own charts.

What do you like best about the product?

- comprehensive documentation + support from the team from implementation to day-to-day use! spoiled with the rate of reply from the LD team

- fantastic for lean teams as it keeps

What do you dislike about the product?

- the tool is still relatively nascent so some visualizations and complex analyses are not yet available, but the team has been incredible in adding to their product road map as a direct response to user requests!

- does not cache

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We use LD as our primary UI for business stakeholders to receive metrics and data to make better informed decisions.

What do you like best about the product?

I like that their product is so flexible, and their team is so hands on with their partners, offering advice and listening to feedback while implementing so quickly.

What do you dislike about the product?

Nothing to say here. My experience has been nothing but pleasant with their team and their product.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Lightdash solves the problem of having too many places to define our analytics (metrics / dimensions etc.). They work so well with DBT and help streamline a lot of our definitions.

They also aid in solving for or improving data literacy and trust throughout the organization.

What do you like best about the product?

Version control & linkage with dbt. Self-service made easy! New features rolling out fast.

What do you dislike about the product?

Visuals are still a bit in development when compared to legacy tools.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Making data available.

What do you like best about the product?

The seamless integration with dbt is outstanding. Previously our companies only BI was limited to Google Sheets, but Lightdash has made it possible to visualize over 150+ models in under 6 months.

Being developer first and having that tight integration into dbt has made standing up this tool with a small team seamless.

Additionally the customer support has been top notch as the team is very responsive to all our questions.

What do you dislike about the product?

There have been growing pains along the way as Lightdash has gone from an alpha product to something ready for prime time. But they are catching up with other tools at a rapid rate. The mobile solution could be much stronger.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

They address both internal and external customer issues