Free data analysis & visualization tool for startups
In an ever-developing digital era, tech startups face a multitude of diverse challenges. They include financial management, surviving in a competitive environment, going into partnerships, setting up robust security systems, earning the trust of customers and analytics.
Business founders need time, money and resilience to deal with the risks they carry.
And it won’t be a revelation to say that businesses are incredibly limited in their finances at the very beginning of the lifecycle. Therefore, the founders pay attention to free tools available on the market.
Today I want to concentrate your attention on the analytics and data visualization. Their value for the company should not be overstated: analytics helps to monitor the overall picture and keep tracking different business indicators: marketing, sales, social media, financial metrics and others.
After measuring them and collecting the unique insights, you need to present the latter to your team or investors in reports and charts.
That is why I am going to show a free tool which tackles at least two challenges:
- performing the internal analytics for tracking metrics of all areas of business
- providing developers with an embeddable data analysis tool
I will use WebDataRocks — a free JavaScript component which is designed to give real-time insights.
Challenge 1
As a first case, let’s take a look at an example of building the report based on the data from the marketing department.
This web pivot tool allows you to load the data to the pivot grid and organize it in the most meaningful way — put fields into rows, columns, set necessary measures and aggregate them.
For example, suppose you want to check the incremental sales over a year:
You can also:
- Filter the report to focus on the specific data area (e.g. the country which audience brought the highest levels of revenue by a marketing campaign).
- Make a heat map based on the values of sales
- Drill-through to see the raw data of which the cells are composed
As the result:
You may use this data for a statistical analysis and building predictive models for the following year or quarter (or any other KPI’s you need to track for your business).
Challenge 2
Let’s look at the component from the perspective of a developer.
Integration process
As a developer, I should say that I know how challenging it is to find a tool which will be easily integrable with any framework.
WebDataRocks provides ready-to-use tutorials for different frameworks (React, AngularJS or Angular 2+).
Web reporting features include
- A connection to CSV & JSON data sources. They can be either local or remote.
- Aggregation functions for all occasions
- Multiple filtering options, sorting and grouping for data transforming
- Built-in exporting to PDF, HTML and Excel
Visual customization
If you need to fit the component into the design of your application, the customization can be achieved via:
- Localization
- Cells colorizing & formatting
- Changing the Toolbar appearance and functionality
- Changing themes or creating custom ones
Charting integration
If you need not only the pivot table report but also another kind of visual analytics like charts, you can integrate the component with Google Charts, Highcharts or other charting libraries. Thus, you can create such dashboards:
As a result:
You extend your application with the additional analytical feature. Fully customize it according to your the look & feel and business logic of your application.
Summary
As shown above, this free data visualization tool can be used both as a component for delivery to end-users and a tool for internal analytics of a startup.
Though it is free, the functionality is nice and you don’t need to invest your personal savings in any maintenance services.
I do hope you will enjoy the experience of web reporting and empower your project with strong analytics.
Bring your ideas to life and let your business flourish!
This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +383,719 people.
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