Ran into some limits one or two years ago when using it with Firestore and had to go with something else, but I can’t really blame it for having trouble dealing with relationships when using a non-relational database ^^’
We don't work with rest calls - just directly with databases and SQL, but do take a look at chartio.com! We aim to make it as fast and agile as possible to make and collaborate on charts and dashboards with your team.
I personally used Redash in the past, and found it very easy to create dashboards and even customize our instance. Not sure how it’s evolved though since being bought out by Databricks.
Take a look at https://anvil.works - it's not just "low code", it's a full web-dev platform so simple that you can build a dashboard with a few lines of Python - front end, back end and drag-n-drop design. (I'm a founder.)
The trouble with "low-code" is that you're stuck on rails - it's very easy to do a few things, but the moment you want something the creators didn't anticipate, prepare for a lot of pain.
Anvil is the opposite approach - it's a dev environment that happens to be simple enough to build a dashboard in minutes, but with a Real Damn Programming Language. It's basically Delphi for the web: It's got a drag-n-drop designer, Python in the browser and on the server, code editor with full-stack autocomplete, etc.
I love the value proposition of full stack w/ nothing but Python here. Backend has been cool enough with Python but for anything serious in the frontend, js and friends is almost always a necessity. Bridging that gap seems pretty lucrative, especially with your python → js compiler.¹
People still upgrade for editor features - eg we have several Business plan users who primarily deploy with the open-source App Server - but it's by no means required.
I want to love Metabase, I really do. But some of the UI decisions are mind boggling. Why is accessing reports and dashboards so difficult? Things are hidden away under poorly named constructs. Buttons don't do what I'd expect them to do...
Their embedding is pretty darn decent. You could do something like set up a key or key per role in Wordpress and embed them as a post type (or your CMS of choice) in an Intranet if you wanted a little more control over it.
You need to set up a signing key on the backend, which is a good thing. Many dashboard sharing schemes end up being public or with very weak security.
I didn't find this at all - it's great to be able to pin a bunch of dashboards to the main page that users see when logging in, and to allow them to drill down from the dashboard by filtering their own data, or downloading a CSV.
The UI for creating dashboards isn't the best, but it's really nice to be able to drop down to SQL so easily and share or embed results.
I second this. I used database about 5/6 years ago and it was amazing. But they started to add collections a d my collections and a bunch of stuff and now everything seems hidden.
I still use it (deployed it at my current company and the CEO loves h iui s dashboard). But I hate the way things are hidden in the current layout.
There are so many such solutions, that It depends on your use cases.
If you're looking for high-level dashboarding/monitoring that connects directly with your sources (REST, 3rd-party apps like Facebook, Adwords, etc), then tools in the realm of Klipfolio, Databox, Grow.com will suit you well. If you're looking for visualization tools that connect to your data-warehouse/SQL database, then BI tools like Holistics, Metabase, Redash, etc will likely work for you. And of course there's tools that can support both kinds of sources, like PowerBI and Google Data Studio.
A nondev should likely stick to the first group, which has a lot of integrations and the hardest coding will be around excel formulas at most
In my experience its best to do the following:
Have 1 dashboard specific to business finance and ads metrics. This dashboard includes klipfolio or simpler things like grow or fathom accounting.
Another tool connected to your bd, at the most basic starting with mode Analytics and then going full visual with looker or tableau (this is where things get expensive)
I looked into this recently, when I started writing the software to analyze my selftracking data.
After researching available options for a while and consulting everyone I know in this field, I settled on building on top of the Plotly Javascript library:
I picked plotly in 2019 to build kind of a low-code-dashboarding at my company and got to look into it again few weeks ago, noticing there in fact is an aggregation capability.
Grafana is pretty great. There are a lot of built in connectors, but its ability to query arbitrary REST, JSON, oData etc endpoints along with databases makes it super flexible for what you mentioned.
It has a great GUI for building queries, plus solid RBAC, great charting, and a very flexible alert system. Configure in their GUI, then get your dashboard's code in as JSON for deployment. You can also define dashboard in actual code, ie grafanalib in Python and others- which is great for DevOps. https://github.com/weaveworks/grafanalib
They have nice stylesheets ready for TV displays, but it gets really fun when users get their hands on it and can zoom in and drill down on time-series data, filter with dynamic parameters and such.
I have liked it for what it's worth. My only pain point is bulk editing (no way to add something to every graph on a dashboard) and copying graphs across dashboards didn't seem so easy last time I tried it.
I wouldn't exactly call its charting abilities great, for example something as simple as aligning the Y axis over multiple charts can't be done, and for BI(-like) charts you need to go through a bunch of hoops to get them right. Also the alerting system is not flexible at all, it's primitive (but functional). All and all it's only through the flexibility of the database we use (Postgres) we're able to massage the data enough to display it the way we want.
It doesn't have the functionality to perform custom REST calls yet but it's definitely on the list. For now you can get the basic metrics from Google Analytics, Search Console, Facebook Pages, Instagram, and Stripe. It's still very much in beta but you're welcome to try it.
You can give https://chartbrew.com/ a try if you wish. You can make the API requests in a Postman-like interface directly on the platform. So you can have live-data coming in as the tool makes the requests automatically for you.
You can also have multiple requests made to different services gathering data on the same chart.
Disclaimer: I'm the creator of the tool, so feel free to ask any questions about it and I'll be happy to answer
Appsmith would work great! It’s an open source project with cloud hosting and self-hosting options. You can query any REST endpoint and use JS to aggregate the outputs to connect it to charts, tables or text components. Also use JS to change the query params when you use date or search filters.
(I’m a founder).
We didn't get in (this time), but we are about to launch a beta soon. If someone is interested please send me an email at <username>@gmail.com - Thanks
68 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 70.7 ms ] threadRan into some limits one or two years ago when using it with Firestore and had to go with something else, but I can’t really blame it for having trouble dealing with relationships when using a non-relational database ^^’
The trouble with "low-code" is that you're stuck on rails - it's very easy to do a few things, but the moment you want something the creators didn't anticipate, prepare for a lot of pain.
Anvil is the opposite approach - it's a dev environment that happens to be simple enough to build a dashboard in minutes, but with a Real Damn Programming Language. It's basically Delphi for the web: It's got a drag-n-drop designer, Python in the browser and on the server, code editor with full-stack autocomplete, etc.
(And unlike "low-code" tools, the runtime engine is open source, so you're not locked in: https://github.com/anvil-works/anvil-runtime)
[1] https://github.com/skulpt/skulpt
People still upgrade for editor features - eg we have several Business plan users who primarily deploy with the open-source App Server - but it's by no means required.
It lets you define your dashboard logic in a spreadsheet & then drag/drop the dashboard UI and publish it for end-user consumption.
It's great but it comes with a few drawbacks.
You need to set up a signing key on the backend, which is a good thing. Many dashboard sharing schemes end up being public or with very weak security.
The UI for creating dashboards isn't the best, but it's really nice to be able to drop down to SQL so easily and share or embed results.
I still use it (deployed it at my current company and the CEO loves h iui s dashboard). But I hate the way things are hidden in the current layout.
If you're looking for high-level dashboarding/monitoring that connects directly with your sources (REST, 3rd-party apps like Facebook, Adwords, etc), then tools in the realm of Klipfolio, Databox, Grow.com will suit you well. If you're looking for visualization tools that connect to your data-warehouse/SQL database, then BI tools like Holistics, Metabase, Redash, etc will likely work for you. And of course there's tools that can support both kinds of sources, like PowerBI and Google Data Studio.
P/s: This post does a good job at laying down a framework for evaluating these sort of BI tools: https://www.holistics.io/books/setup-analytics/navigating-th...
A nondev should likely stick to the first group, which has a lot of integrations and the hardest coding will be around excel formulas at most
In my experience its best to do the following:
Have 1 dashboard specific to business finance and ads metrics. This dashboard includes klipfolio or simpler things like grow or fathom accounting.
Another tool connected to your bd, at the most basic starting with mode Analytics and then going full visual with looker or tableau (this is where things get expensive)
Have a great new year!
I work at Grow, happy to answer any questions.
I use it for my dashboards. It's super simple to prototype apps and it's under rapid development.
After researching available options for a while and consulting everyone I know in this field, I settled on building on top of the Plotly Javascript library:
https://plotly.com/javascript/
It does nice interactive charts out of the box. All you need to do is throw data at it.
What it lacks are more high level operations like:
- Interactively switch between different chart types (lines, scatter, box plots, bar charts etc)
- Aggregate time series by hour/day/month/week/year
- Extrapolate data to the rest of the current time period
So I built this functionality on top of Plotly and I am happy with the result.
It looks like over time I will turn this into a mix of data studio and jupyter notebooks. But it runs in the browser and is simple and blazingly fast.
https://plotly.com/javascript/aggregations/
Pretty cool!
Definitely on my watch list though!
https://grafana.com/grafana/plugins/simpod-json-datasource
It has a great GUI for building queries, plus solid RBAC, great charting, and a very flexible alert system. Configure in their GUI, then get your dashboard's code in as JSON for deployment. You can also define dashboard in actual code, ie grafanalib in Python and others- which is great for DevOps. https://github.com/weaveworks/grafanalib
They have nice stylesheets ready for TV displays, but it gets really fun when users get their hands on it and can zoom in and drill down on time-series data, filter with dynamic parameters and such.
https://grafana.com/get
You do not need to use the hosted offering in that case.
Creating dashboards is so freaking painful.
It doesn't have the functionality to perform custom REST calls yet but it's definitely on the list. For now you can get the basic metrics from Google Analytics, Search Console, Facebook Pages, Instagram, and Stripe. It's still very much in beta but you're welcome to try it.
https://trevor.io/
It has nice gui for data exploration, clean charts and integrates really well with gsheets.
If you save the API calls in a database could use this?
You can also have multiple requests made to different services gathering data on the same chart.
Disclaimer: I'm the creator of the tool, so feel free to ask any questions about it and I'll be happy to answer
https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith www.appsmith.com
We didn't get in (this time), but we are about to launch a beta soon. If someone is interested please send me an email at <username>@gmail.com - Thanks