Top 5 Free or Affordable SQL Reporting and Dashboard Tools

Your startup needs analytics! From Product, Marketing to Finance, Sales… analytics helps you build your startups on better decisions.

Most of the time, you will just know when your startup needs a Reporting and Dashboard tool for business intelligence (BI). However, choosing a cost-effective BI solution is challenging, as a lot of powerful BI tools out there are not startup friendly. $1000+ analytics platforms wouldn’t make any sense for your startup at the early stages.

To help you determine not only affordable but also scalable SQL reporting tools for your business, we’ve curated a list of 5 of the best affordable online tools to do it.

Holistics.io

Pricing: Starting at $50/month

Holistics is a BI platform that empowers analysts with SQL to build a data warehouse and automated reporting routines that deliver data to everyone. With Holistics, not only data analysts become heroes, but any non-technical users can also get insights themselves with Holistics’ strong self-service analytics features.

Pros

• Can process ETL and varied integrations (Import Data from Google Spreadsheets, CSVs, MongoDB, Google Ads, PipeDrive, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Python…)
• Drag-and-Drop interface for Non-Technical Users
• Great support team
• Powerful Delivery capabilities: Email/Slack/Google Sheets Schedule and Alerts, Shareable Links, Embedded Analytics
• Advanced SQL Editor: Version History, Autocomplete, SQL Snippet, Highlighting, Auto-formatting, Query History, Custom Advanced Logic…
• Unique data modeling for scalable organizations
• Flexible and scalable pricing for both startups and enterprises

Cons

• Young product, sometimes has bugs
• Drilldown feature is not fully implemented
• There are some features still in progress (PDF Dashboard,…)
• Strong permission control but complicated for small companies

Metabase

Pricing: Free

Metabase is the easy, open source BI tool for everyone in your company to ask questions and learn from data.

Pros

• Open Source
• Simple, Neat UI
• Free
• Light weight
• Allow non-tech users to query from data

Cons

• You have to setup on your own server and need to mantain the infrastructure
• Limited Integrations
• Limited variety of charts and settings
• Weak permission control

Mode Analytics

Pricing: Community version

Mode is a web-based SQL data analysis platform that brings SQL, Python and R together to help your team analyze, visualize and share data.

Pros

• Advanced SQL Editor: Autocomplete, Highlighting, Query History…
• Python, R Integrations
• Customizable HTML Notebooks
• Shareable Links
• Online SQL Course

Cons

• Limited in visualizations and sources
• Limited in access control
• Business users can’t get insight by themselves
• No data modeling layer

Redash

Pricing: Starting at $49/Month

Redash helps provides companies tools to democratize data access. Connect to any data source, easily visualize and share your data.

Pros

• Simple
• Good query editor: Highlighting and SQL Snippets
• Has open source version
• Zapier integration
• Supports 30+ data sources

Cons

• UI doesn’t allow non-tech users to explore, everything needs to be written in SQL
• The dashboard and visualization features are not advanced
• No way to email daily / weekly reports to clients or team members
• No data modeling layer

Cluvio

Pricing: Free and Starting at €99/month

Cluvio is a data analytics platform that lets you run SQL queries against your database, process data in R, visualize the results and create beautiful, interactive dashboards.

Pros

• Support R
• Good SQL editor: Highlighting, autocomplete, SQL snippets…
• Support Embedded Analytics
• SQL Alerts

Cons

• Limited in visualizations
• No data modeling layer
• UI doesn’t allow non-tech users to explore

Originally published at holistics.io on November 12, 2018.