

Ask HN: Why is there no good business dashboard creation tool?  - hajrice

I've tried Geckoboard, and a couple hosted options aswell. They all seem to be rather simple, but are too much work if you want it to display and work your way.<p>What (hosted/open source) tool do you use for your business dashboard?
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tom_b
I think there are a variety of vendor front-end tools that are basically fine.
Pentaho, whatever Corda is these days, even the YC start-up chart.io

Then you have all the enterprise-y stuff, Crystal, Oracle's Warehouse Builder,
Business Objects, blah, blah, blah.

After a long time, I have kind of come around to the idea that lots of
dashboard/BI value is really provided by the implementor, who both intuits
what would be valuable to, you know, the business and that it is a "high
touch" service. So online providers of just the dashboard designer/data
integration are limited in what they can do in a cool, automatic fashion.

You might try Pentaho, particularly if you have db servers in-house. They have
a free, community open source edition.

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vijayr
I suppose this space of hosted business dashboards is fairly new (2-3 years?)
and services will improve. Last time I checked, Geckoboard wasn't allowing
tables and arbitrary HTML. I also played with ducksboard and leftronic. Each
of them have some strengths and some weaknesses. GB doesn't store your data
while ducksboard does, GB is cheaper than other dashboards, leftronic has
better maps than others etc.

Does anyone know of a dashboard that I can host myself?

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caw
If you've got a Microsoft stack at your business, the Microsoft BI system is
actually pretty good. I've seen some fantastic graphs come out of it. My only
problem is data resolution, and that it's high touch to create the dashboards.

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dgudkov
QlikView. It's not free generally, but they have free desktop Personal
Edition.

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revorad
What are your data sources?

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hajrice
Mostly from the database, created by the application. Other than that,
Mixpanel and perhaps Stripe, Google Analytics.

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revorad
How do you look at your database metrics now? I'm building something for my
Rails app, which I'll be happy to share.

