We needed a way to connect the Marketing, Finance and Program Management Teams in order to have intelligent discussions around the planning , promotion and budgeting for our programs. Grow has allowed us to do that! Programs understand the impact of marketing efforts and the marketing team can see, on a daily basis, the impact a new campaign or online promotion has had. We are able to be more agile as a department. These dashboards get people talking and thinking!
Pros
Grow is easy to get started with and is quite powerful with an intuitive, easy to use interface. It has automatic connections for the data sources our department uses and allows me to visually provide useful and insightful data to multiple teams. It is so easy to customize the metrics and I like the fact I can specify which users have access to which dashboards, and what their permission levels can be.
Cons
The connection with Marketo isn't as stable as I would like and I can't pull in as much data as I was hoping to. This has more to do with Marketo than Grow. I get around it by uploading weekly Smartlists for metrics that's don't need to be viewed daily, or only really need to be viewed on a monthly basis. For daily metrics, I restrict the pulls to 7 or 14 days and things work well most of time. Marketo is the only data source I have ever had problems with - all the other connections work flawlessly
Thank you so much for the review, Christine! And we'll send the feedback to our integrations team on Marketo :)
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 10/10
Overall, this has given us the metrics platform we needed to be able to build and maintain the reports we require to monitor and gain key insights to our business. The team at Grow have always been outstanding to help us solve everything from simple to very complex problems in our to achieve our reporting goals.
Pros
Can do almost anything with patience and logic, no need to distract developers to assist with complicated data queries. Customer support is outstanding, always taking the time to properly understand and help address anything you throw at them - very solution-focused.
Cons
Can be a bit buggy at times, especially after big releases, requiring more attention than I would like towards "fixing" metrics that were previously working fine. Can also be very slow with large data sets, some of which are just too big for it to handle.
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 9/10
We rely heavily on Grow for our business decisions every day. It gives us insights that we were really missing before getting set up with Grow
Pros
Native integration with our CRM, which is surprisingly hard to find. The report building UI is second to none. Also need to mention customer support is super helpful. Having access to a BI engineer has saved me on multiple occasions.
Cons
The dashboard filters are limited. The dashboards are also not as customizable as Data Studio
Thanks for your feedback, Matt! We'll be coming out with some dashboard updates in the next couple of months that you guys are going to love.
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 9/10
We use the tool to eliminate some of the data silos we have in our operations. It has wonderful functionality of bringing in multiple data sources - from social media, website analytics, POS data, etc. - into one dashboard. We've been able to get important data, from multiple sources, into the faces of our managers every 5 minutes (that's the least amount of time between data updates). Which has allowed us to be more agile when it comes to saving money and reducing risk. It has great flexibility and the team at Grow definitely works hard to impress. They build an integration into one of our software to make it easier to work with their system.
Pros
Their UI is awesome. I love the overall look and feel for the entire system. Graphs look updated, clean, and they are fairly easy to customize. Making the dashboards look good is fairly simple.
Cons
Not data warehousing the data is an issue. Long load times really get me frustrated with the software. It seems to take a minute to edit a metric, load a new metric, or even sometime update a metric. Updating a dashboard can take 2 minutes at times.
Drilling down and looking into the data is very underwhelming. Dashboard filters don't exist so you're stuck loading filters only to individual metrics, not the whole dashboard.
Email triggers that send reports on a set schedule are limited to only 7 am MT on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule.
Time zone offsets have been the death of me in the system. They use SQLite to format the data coming in but their out-of-the-box data filtering overrides all SQLite filters. It's been super frustrating trying to get the data we want.
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 6/10
Overall we are incredibly satisfied with Grow as our visualization tool of choice. Though there are minor limitations on performance and BI capabilities, it still provides an incredible solution at a very reasonable price with a low barrier to entry. If you’re going for a platform that can be easily scaled at a palatable price and don’t have substantial teams of coding experts, Grow is the perfect sweet spot for your organization.
Pros
The two biggest pros for utilizing Grow for our data visualization/dashboard needs is the ability to operate at scale and the accessibility and usability to employees with various technical abilities.
The general requirements of our firm included 200+ dashboards for both clients and internal use that provided extensive user permission options, did not require all users/architects to be extensively skilled at coding languages, and still provided the customization capabilities of higher dollar platforms.
Grow was a perfect solution to all of these challenges. Their transformation “apps” within their builder allow users with limited SQL knowledge to apply all manipulations needed to datasets. Their user permissions, with unlimited users model, allows for a scalable system that handles all internal and external requirements. Their new data explorer functionality empowers end users to further manipulate and analyze data. All this at a competitive price point made Grow a perfect solution for our business.
Cons
The two biggest one to utilizing Grow as our data visualization tool are its lack of true BI capabilities and some of the technical challenges we’ve faced. Though neither is enough to sway us from a “definitely recommend” stance, both are worth noting.
When compared to more expensive solutions built around BI (think Tableau or Looker), Grow lacks BI capabilities. The new data explorer functionality helps significantly close this gap, but it still is up to the architect and end-user to provide the “analysis” component. If your team lacks the ability to translate data into action, Grow doesn’t have BI/AI/etc capabilities like other platforms to bridge that gap.
Additionally, while Grow performs reasonably well, it’s not without its technical challenges. Being a smaller company than the titans of the visualization space, technical challenges stretch out longer than they seemingly should. Additionally, though their business model/pricing makes it incredibly scalable, large volumes of data sources (not necessarily a large data source; simply having many different sources connected at once) can lead to slower loading/building that can hamper my team’s efficiency.
Again, neither of these are deal breakers by any means, but are worth noting.
Thank you so much for being such a great customer and taking the time to leave a review. Also thank you for the product feedback! We've sent that on to our product team.
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 9/10
Plans start at $1500 per month. If you'd like a specific price quote reach out to our sales team.