In February, Chartio announced it had been acquired by Atlassian, with a plan to add data visualization to Jira. Blog posts celebrated with SQL puns: JOIN teams ON data anyone? Journalists reported without emotion, and Twitterers tweeted muted congratulations.
For hundreds of thousands of Chartio customers, this announcement was more than just another tweet. The death knell was buried in the third paragraph of Chartio’s blog post: the “…team needs to be singularly focused on delivering powerful cross-product analytics and visualization to the Atlassian platform”. The convenient migration guide spelled it out in greater detail: “…the product will be shutting down on March 1, 2022”.
Cue sharp intake of breath from those who’ve spent years charting and migrating their dashboards to Chartio. While there were certainly accolades, some felt less than excited. The tweets began piling up: “Good for you guys! We have invested a lot in our Chartio dashboards. Time for a fun migration project.” and “A lot less excited about the transition plan.”
Migrating from Chartio
One year is not a lot of time. While implementation differs drastically depending on the complexity and scale of the data, it typically takes three months to deploy a new BI platform. Plus, deployment cannot even start until vendor selection, purchase, and user training are complete. Given the number of people typically involved in a software purchase, it can take up to three months to complete the vendor selection. The bottom line: if you want to be up and running by January 1, 2022, now’s the time to talk to new BI companies.
Here’s some quick advice for everyone who invested in Chartio’s SQL, cloud-based BI platform. While Chartio’s migration guide may help you on your journey, you still have to migrate years of your company’s dashboards and datasets.
First, pause. The clock is ticking, but you have time to reassess your needs. Grab a cup of coffee and take a look at our thoughts on choosing a new BI platform. Second, while a simple like-for-like replacement maintains your status quo, it doesn’t move you forward. Complex, ad-hoc, real-time (without data refreshes or extracts) reports and visualizations have become the norm.
Consider this - a lot of cloud business analytic tools promise insights by helping you write and organize SQL queries. These tools are great for single-use reports and analyses by technical users who can write SQL. The downside is they are overly simplistic and don’t allow for ad-hoc analyses and reports by business users.
Five Reasons to Add bipp to Your BI Platform Shortlist
We know bipp is a new kid on the BI ‘block’ - but we’ve been building our platform for more than three years. And in a world where data, workflows, and collaboration are intersecting, new is a good thing. Now is a great time to think about a future-proof, innovative, and modern BI alternative to Chartio. Here are five things to smooth your transition from Chartio to bipp (and make you happy with the move!)
1) bipp Visual SQL Data Explorer Gets You from Database to Charts in Minutes
bipp’s interface makes SQL visual, letting users query or explore data through a point-and-click interface and creating and sharing charts in minutes, all without programming.
It includes powerful visualizations and lets you create interactive dashboards. In addition, the Visual SQL Data Explorer removes bottlenecks by making BI exploration easier and more intuitive for all users.
2) SQL-First
Both bipp and Chartio are SQL-based BI tools. We love SQL, have a built-in SQL editor integrated with Git, and have enhanced query writing with one-click queries and code completion. You can debug multiple databases in the same editor. Our commitment to SQL makes it easy for current Chartio customers to quickly get up and running. If you get stuck, our user community and professional services team are here to help.
3) Self-Service Reporting and Visualization
Like Chartio, we want non-technical users to run and manage their reports and queries. They can drill-down into row-level detail, and slice and dice data in their sales funnels or HR dashboards with real-time updates. Our visualizations are interactive and act like applications. This means your business users can monitor and measure performance in real-time - or simply be alerted by email when a threshold or KPI is met.
4) Fair and Flexible Pricing
Change is hard. And expensive. bipp believes enterprise-level business intelligence should not come at enterprise prices. Our pricing model starts at $10 per user per month. Our always free trial can help you start to compare vendors. Also, if you’ve read this far, take a look at our special offer for Chartio users.
5) Data Modeling Included for Free
The most significant - and most important - difference between bipp and Chartio is our data modeling layer. It lets you create data models with a powerful point-and-click visual interface - without training or writing any code.
Once you’ve defined the data models, business users can explore data on their own, create dashboards, trust their visualizations and easily filter them.
This is a stressful time for Chartio users and we want to make it just a little bit easier. Set up a demo today to learn more.
