If you’re ready to leverage your business data and integrate a fully operational business intelligence system cost-effectively, you might have discovered ClicData and Klipfolio, two feature-rich data analytics and BI platforms that deliver metrics and data insights for making better business decisions—faster. Both are scalable and designed for small to medium-sized businesses expecting to grow rapidly.
But how do they compare? And which is the best fit for your business needs?
What is ClicData?
ClicData is a cloud-based BI platform with a comprehensive set of powerful features, yet it is easy to set up and easy to scale. It includes a holistic data warehouse, data management services, and visualization tools that deliver up-to-date metrics and insights in real-time to facilitate fast and effective strategic business decision-making. Here’s an overview of ClicData.
What is Klipfolio?
Klipfolio’s PowerMetrics is a scalable analytics and visualization tool “without the complexity” of traditional BI platforms. It allows you to connect to a large number of apps and data sources, develop calculated metrics, and create custom dashboards. Here’s an overview of PowerMetrics.
Set-Up and Connectivity
ClicData
ClicData was built from the ground up as a 100% cloud-based BI platform. That means:
- You can access ClicData from any device and network.
- You don’t need to install it.
- There are no hidden installation or maintenance fees.
ClicData allows you to connect data from more than 250 data sources, regardless of format, into your business intelligence solution. That means that data from your cloud-based and on-premises applications and databases can be used to see the bigger picture of how your business is performing.
With ClicData, you can import entire tables regardless of the number of columns.
Klipfolio
PowerMetrics is also a cloud-based platform and is also easy to set up without installation or maintenance fees.
The platform lets you connect to files on your computers, servers, and external data warehouses. It has built-in connectors with integrated authentication for many of the most popular services and, like ClicData, provides connectivity to an extensive list of apps and database.
Klipfolio only allows you to select 5 columns to build your metrics (datasets).
Data Warehousing
The foundation of any comprehensive BI platform is data integration. From the data, metrics can be generated, combined, calculated, aggregated, merged, and ultimately transformed into meaningful insights and metrics. Finally, they are delivered to the user via intuitive, user-accessible dashboards. To integrate all of the data you have accumulated and continue to generate in your business, you have two choices:
- Use a BI tool that includes a built-in data warehouse with native connectors to a wide variety of data sources, or
- Connect your BI tool to the external data warehouse(s)
For a business to grow quickly and efficiently, it will inevitably need a data warehouse to centralize its ever-increasing volumes of data. Centralizing allows you to integrate your data from disparate systems into a seamless whole so you can see key performance indicators and metrics to manage your business from top to bottom.
Centralizing data is also critical for the security, control, and performance of a business’ data resources. It also allows you to create relationships between different data sets and different systems to explore, analyze, and display in dashboards.
Data warehousing is where the ClicData and Klipfolio BI solutions diverge significantly. ClicData has an integrated and seamless data warehouse built into its BI platform, while PowerMetrics does not.
ClicData
In addition to building your centralized, cloud-based data warehouse, ClicData allows you to import data from other data warehouses and databases such as Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, and MongoDB into your ClicData data warehouse. Here’s ClicData’s list of current connectors.
But you can also pull data directly from your systems: CRM, eCommerce platform, social media accounts, VoIP applications, cloud storage, or even spreadsheets and flat files.
Klipfolio
PowerMetrics does allow customers to connect with local systems and data warehouses and databases such as Amazon Aurora, Amazon Redshift, DB2, Firebird, Google BigQuery, MongoDB, and Snowflakes.
The connectors work well, but if you want to use them, you will need additional resources to buy, configure, and maintain your data warehouse. This approach, however, can affect the performance of source systems and can impose limits on the volume and history of the data sources. Here’s PowerMetrics’ list of current connectors.
Data cleaning and management
ClicData
In addition to its built-in data warehouse, ClicData offers extensive data management and ETL features allowing you to:
- Cleanse data to spot duplicates, incomplete data, and remove bad data.
- Create joins across multiple data sets from multiple data sources to enrich your data and derive better insights.
- Fusion similar datasets from multiple sources. That’s especially beneficial when trying to consolidate sales data from multiple POS, stores, or business units.
- Aggregate and add custom formulas to your datasets to make them ready for analysis.
Klipfolio
PowerMetrics doesn’t offer native data cleaning or data management features. However, you can access those services potentially through the data warehouse that you’ve integrated with the platform, or with another ETL tool like Talend or Informatica – another third-party tool to integrate and maintain.
Automation
ClicData
Beyond automated data refreshes, ClicData allows you to automate when you want to publish your dashboards and schedule notifications and alerts based on when your custom criteria are met. These automation features can be applied to any data source and any calculation.
Klipfolio
Klipfolio does provide data refreshes, but, to date, you can’t customize the frequency. For Pro Plan, you can have your data refreshed every 15min. You need to subscribe to the Custom plan (with custom pricing) to get more flexibility for your data refreshes.
Besides, it’s not possible to notify a user or to set up automatic alerts on data changes.
Visualization
No BI solution is complete without a visualization tool—a way to design clear, informative, and insightful dashboards for users up and down the org chart. Data visualization is what allows you to transform data into graphs, tables, charts, gauges, and icons in order to allow your users to get the information they need—fast. It helps your business turn metrics into actionable insights that move your business forward.
ClicData
The ClicData platform features a simple yet powerful Dashboard Editor offering more than 70 widgets to express your metrics—from charts, tables, gauges, buttons, and maps to images, diagrams, and input fields. Its drag-and-drop dashboard designer lets you create a dashboard quickly, in just a few minutes. ClicData dashboards are fully interactive, so you can zoom in, filter, or drill down to sharpen your performance analysis. The company offers numerous modifiable templates tailored to a wide selection of industries, or you can create your own dashboards from scratch.
Klipfolio
PowerMetrics offers a solid visualization tool, providing numerous components to represent your metrics visually, including buttons, maps, gauges, and a variety of charts. It also provides pre-built templates for you to work with, or you can build from scratch.
ClicData and Klipfolio have two very different approaches for building a dashboard. With ClicData, you can pick a template and rebind the charts with your own data, or you can start from a white canvas and drag-and-drop widgets and customize them.
With Klipfolio, building a dashboard is done in 2 steps: first, you need to build all your charts one by one, then add them to your dashboard.
Collaboration
ClicData
ClicData offers live links which are simple URLs that can be password-protected to securely share your dashboards with customers, clients, or teams. You can choose among three types of permissions to ensure the level of privacy that fits your needs:
- Private: Only the owner of the dashboard and the people in the associated security list can access the link
- Public: Anyone can access the link
- Password: Anyone can access the link, but they will be asked for a password
There’s no limit to the number of links you can share.
Klipfolio
Klipfolio allows you to share links with or without passwords. However, there is a cap on the number of links you can share, depending upon what user plan you’ve signed up for.
White labeling
White labeling allows a company to publish a dashboard that displays its business name, logo, and other branding information. Agencies and consultants that want to offer an analytics tool to their customers without having to own it or maintain it find great value in white labeling. Both ClicData and Klipfolio offer a white label option.
ClicData
ClicData’s white-label features allow you to:
- Remove any mention of the ClicData brand and replace it with the brand information you choose, such as your logo, links, support email, and product name.
- Integrate ClicData into your application, such as ERP or CRM, or website.
Klipfolio
Klipfolio’s white-label options include:
- Remove any mention of the Klipfolio brand and replace it with the brand information you choose, such as your logo, links, support email, and product name.
- Setting up a domain alias
- Applying a custom theme
Klipfolio white labeling pricing: $497 USD, includes everything
- $299 to remove Klipfolio branding
- $99 to use your own domain name
- $99 to upload custom CSS and Javascript
Pricing
For ease of comparison, here are the higher-priced plans from each brand— ClicData’s Business Plan and Klipfolio’s Pro Plan
ClicData | Klipfolio | |
---|---|---|
Price per month | $481 USD | $229 USD |
Users | 20 total users, including editors, admins, viewers | 8 editors Unlimited viewers |
Data warehouse | Included | Not Included |
Connectors | Unlimited | Limited to 8 |
Dashboards | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Metrics | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Data refresh | 20,000 per month | Every 15 minutes (approx. 2880 per month) |
Shared links | Unlimited | Limited |
White Label | Yes ($49 USD) | Yes ($497 USD) |
Free trial | Yes, with all the features | No, only a free plan available |
Time to test and choose the right BI for your organization
Both Klipfolio and ClicData are valuable data analytics and BI platforms for SMBs wanting to leverage the insights and power of their data. While the two share some key features, their scope is quite different. ClicData offers a complete BI platform that includes a built-in data warehouse, data management tools, and a powerful dashboard designer, while Klipfolio only allows you to connect to data from a large variety of data sources, apply a selection of calculations and filters, and produce a dashboard with insights and metrics.
To help you choose the right platform for your business, try ClicData for free. Your free trial gives you access to the full ClicData solution for 15 days.
Be sure to check out our BI Buyer’s Guide, which comes with a checklist you can use to make sure you check for every feature that’s important to you!