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Looking for a business intelligence tool in 2024 can feel like looking for a weight loss product. There are many of them out there, each making grand promises, and trying it out requires hefty investments and a likelihood of disappointment. One of those choices is Domo, a tool that promises real-time insights that lead to better decision-making.
Today, we take a look at Domo for data analytics and investigate its pros and cons.
Domo is a cloud-based BI tool that makes it easy for business users to connect and visualize their data. Their business analytics offering includes a variety of tools: visualizations and dashboards, reporting and self-service analytics, AI tools, data science, and machine learning, as well as the ability to embed dashboards in different software applications.
Over the years, Domo has become well-known for its advanced analytics capabilities, a wide selection of data sources and integrations, and mysterious pricing.
Data visualization is a huge part of the product and unfortunately, this is not an area where Domo shines. According to their website, Domo has a choice of over 150 different chart types and visualizations.
But it’s not the variety that users complain about. The biggest issue is the level of customization and how much the user can tweak those visualizations to get the desired results from their data pipelines.
Most Domo customers state that heavyweights such as Microsoft’s Power BI and Tableau by Salesforce do a much better job at customizing visualizations.
Many users compliment the ability to have real-time access to data in Domo. And while the datasets fetch pretty fast, it seems like the analytics capabilities of Domo leave much to be desired. Primarily, many users complain that the tool is very sluggish when loading visualizations such as dashboards and reports.
The bigger the underlying datasets, and the more complex the queries, the longer it will take for the data to load in a visualization.
While this may not be a huge deal for on-premise, in-house use cases, it makes Domo a poor choice for self-service analytics applications, such as embedded dashboards in different apps.
One area where Domo is unparalleled compared to even the biggest BI players is the number and quality of connectors and data sources. If data integration is crucial for the choice of your next business intelligence platform, you’re in good hands with Domo.
It integrates with more than 1,000 different platforms, from cloud business systems, data warehouses, on-premise systems and proprietary systems you can connect with through API.
We won’t mention all of them, but for example, let’s take a look at cloud data warehouses. You can connect to Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, Databricks, Google BigQuery, Dremio, Azure Data Lake, and others.
Data platform integrations include AWS, MongoDB, Hadoop, Snowflake, and many others, while databases cover names like Amazon Athena, SAP Hana, MySQL, Postgres, etc.
If you’re not sure if something from your tech stack is supported, simply head to the Domo Appstore to find out.
Much like their competitors that offer automation with AI, Domo launched their own natural-language conversation AI app that helps business users unearth KPIs and metrics and do predictive analytics on their own, without any knowledge of languages like SQL or involving data science teams.
And much like their competitors (like ThoughSpot), the idea is great but in reality, it seems half-baked. To get the AI workflows to produce the output you need, there needs to be significant data modeling and preparation done beforehand.
In other words, your AI microstrategy needs some data science talent to work for the regular business user properly.
One of the most common complaints about Domo is their secretive pricing. Finding out how much you would pay requires a conversation with sales because the website does not tell you much. And even when you do some research online, figuring out Domo pricing is not easy.
The one thing we do know is that there are four plans in total. The free trial gives you full access to the platform with unlimited users, but you have to do your own onboarding.
Paid plans come in three levels, from Standard to Enterprise and Business Critical. On the face of it, the biggest difference is in the level of support and the type of collaboration (account team) that you have access to.
The plans are just the starting point. The most important thing about pricing in Domo is that it’s consumption-based. This means that you pay for the credits that you use.
As you can see from the screenshot above, you spend credits for everything, from storage to ingestion and ETL services. You can check up on your credits at any time in the Domo user dashboard.
After a bit of research, we found that individual licenses for Domo cost up to $700 per year and the rest is, well, consumption-based. One user mentioned that their yearly Domo invoice is around $96,000 for 100 users.
In other words, Domo is priced similarly to enterprise tools such as Looker, and the pricing is not well suited for small businesses with small budgets.
Once you’re a paying customer, you will be contacted and offered add-ons and upsells. According to some users, the sales team can be pretty aggressive with their offers.
Many user reviews state that Domo’s cloud-based platform is very powerful but comes with a steep learning curve. For example, if you’re building interactive dashboards and looking for help with data sources, you can turn to… Googling.
Domo customer support is reportedly really hard to reach. And once you do reach them, getting help for any tech-related issue is going to be a problem.
This means that for the most part, you’re left all alone to troubleshoot this analytics platform.
Maybe Domo is too complex, expensive, or slow for your team or you just want to shop around before dropping six figures on your next BI tool. Here are some Domo competitors worth your time.
Luzmo: the better choice for embedded analytics. If you want a quick and easy way to create, embed, and share dashboards in your software, Luzmo is a significantly better solution than Domo. It is fast, easy to use for developers and end users, and comes with a free trial.
Looker: the better choice for visualization customization. Get data-driven insights from hundreds of different chart types that you can customize according to your unique needs. The ease of use is on par with Domo, as well as the pricing.
Microsoft Power BI: if you need Excel on steroids and you’re already in the Microsoft ecosystem, this is the logical choice. Compared to Domo, it offers better performance, more customization options, vastly better customer support, and significantly better and more transparent pricing.
Qlik Sense: get this BI tool if you need superior performance through associative data models, somewhat lower pricing, and dashboards that look and feel great on mobile devices. Customer support comes in various shapes, formats, and materials and the tool is just as user-friendly as Domo. The price is not cheap, but it is better than Domo.
Sisense: just as expensive as Domo but equally easy to use. Create ad-hoc dashboards and reports quickly with the built-in drag and drop dashboard builder. It comes with a better embedded analytics offer too.
Should you get Domo or not? It depends on how big your team is, how familiar you are with data analysis and visualization, and of course, how deep your pockets are.
It has many benefits, including ease of use, access to real-time data, connectivity with thousands of data sources, and more.
But at the same time, it does not handle complex data queries well, you can’t customize visualizations fully for proper data discovery and data exploration and it’s prohibitively expensive.
To sum up, get Domo if you have extensive experience with data analytics and a team of data engineers on board that can solve any data management, modelin, and visualization problems. Also, set aside a good chunk of cash for your annual Domo invoice.
On the other hand, if you’re looking for an easy-to-use, fast, fully customizable embedded analytics platform, Luzmo is the right choice.
Don’t take our word for it - grab a free trial and get started with Luzmo today.
Experience the power of Luzmo. Talk to our product experts for a guided demo or get your hands dirty with a free 10-day trial.
