Grow reviews

Grow is a user-friendly, advanced tool that has allowed our company to fully understand metrics from every department. It is incredibly powerful in its ability to pull in data from every platform we use and compare the data against each other in every imaginable style of metric. The customer support is very helpful, and they will not only help you solve your problem, but advise on best practices - helping you learn how to work better in the software.

The new feature releases they make are very powerful, however they require quite a bit of manual work to implement. We almost have to overhaul all our dashboards & datasets in order to utilize the new features.

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.

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.

Grow.com has a great team supporting its customers. They have most of the integrations that most people need, but if they don't, they have some great recommendations for warehouses. They're very smart, and I enjoy working with them.

Although it promotes itself as a BI tool, I believe it doesn't have all of the BI qualities. It's a tool that allows you to create your own analytics, and metrics and has it refreshed often throughout the day. The tool does not do the thinking for you.

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.

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.

I've never used a dashboarding tool before and with a little bit of training, I've found Grow to be a powerful and simple tool to use.

A small nitpicky thing, when you create a new metric the charts don't snap to fit in a grid system - you have to drag all of your charts around to accommodate anything new or just drag your new one to the bottom.

What made Grow ideal for a small(er) business like ours is the fact they provide all three components of a traditional data warehouse solution under one roof: warehouse, ETL, and BI. We were able to engage a single company to handle all of these services without any prior knowledge of cloud computing, business intelligence, etc.

The BI interface is much cleaner and easier to work with than another service that we have worked with. We have used Amazon Quicksight in the past and it always left me wanting more. I have not gotten that with Grow.

I will occasionally encounter some user experience or user interface issues. For example, some of the SQL syntax highlighting/auto-completion will not work. Sometimes text widgets will just "disappear" after I have dragged them onto the canvas. I haven't been able to establish a pattern, but it's kind of inconvenient when it happens.

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.

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.

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.

The dashboard filters are limited. The dashboards are also not as customizable as Data Studio

Love the ease of use, and how efficient the software is. Still a start up when we joined, but definitely going to be a top contender for all other BI Analytical tools.

A few UI/UX features could improve in their dashboarding (like drag and drop). Also, a few more features (like data alerts) aren't available yet but are coming!

Grow.com is very easy to learn and use. It offers great solutions for tracking and visualizing data, providing an effective tool for increasing business performance and efficiency.

I only have one very specific application that Grow does not connect well with, and I would be far more apt to blame the source of the data than to blame Grow, itself.

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.

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

I like the look and feel of grow. It looks really now and not outdated. It really is a great looking product.

a) Some of the metrics are sometimes not as manipulative as we would like. Where we would like to move around a number or something. They are more static.

b) The real big one is the full screen mode. We love the look and feel over it but for us where we would use this the most would be in a presentation. Where we would present the different dashboards. We dont like how you cant click to the next dashboard. The only option is to wait a minute or exit out.

Grow makes displaying data from multiple sources very easy. We have many different data points that stem from multiple locations and user interfaces, and Grow displays this data all in one place and on many different customizable dashboards for the different departments that may want to look at the same data, but in a different way or combination. The charts, run rates, goal trends, and simplification of data presentation has streamlined our operation and made all of us extremely competitive! It's great seeing our teams' performance lift simply by giving greater insight into the business in an easy-to-interpret interface.

It would be a nice addition to layer in some gamification. This may already exist and I am unaware of it.

The team constantly works on making everything easier and more powerful as it already is! By offering connections to dozens of external tools and the most used Database Providers you can join together your data in a matter of no time.

They had a big update not long ago which totally changed the way you can analyze your data. By offering dashboard filters you are now able to leave your data as granular as possible and filter all metrics inside a dashboard with just a few clicks. That way you don't need to create new metrics for every question you get asked but instead just deep dive into your already existing charts by adding more filters.

The support is always super fast and helpful and they are happy if you tell them which features you'd love to have in the future. If you are looking for a tool that is both suitable for super-experienced users but also for people who didn't work with data by now I'd definitely give it a go and get a free trial version.

Overall I can't tell you anything negative!

What separates Grow from the other players in the SaaS BI reporting software space is three fold.

1) Price. I had a call with DOMO and actually laughed when they told me what their platform would cost me each month. Grow is affordable for small agencies, startups and small to mid sized companies - especially when you factor in the ROI it generates.

2) Ease of use. We looked at MSBI but it's complexities - especially around Google Analytics made getting our reporting up and running extremely expensive. Grow makes connecting data sources super easy. I was up and running with basic reporting the day I signed up.

3) Data scientists. In my experience with SaaS software, their onboarding calls can be a big time waster, simply because the people performing the onboarding, are not experts in the field but rather lower level employees who were trained to follow a predetermined onboarding process. My onboarding at Grow was presented by a real data scientist! Not only did he provide excellent training on the software, he made suggestions on how to tweak my reporting needs to show greater value to my clients.

The combination of these three elements come together seamlessly to create a truly viable alternative to Microsoft BI, DOMO and Tableau. Watch out big guys! Here comes GROW!

Surely I could find something bad to say right? Not really! I guess if forced I would say that they need to be easier to find on the web. I would have started using Grow months ago - had I known it was out there. So, get those marketing guys to work! Hey - I'm a marketing guy - put me to work!

As a marketer who tends to geek out on performance data, it's been great to have a solid dashboard solution that allows me to connect multiple data sources, aggregate all the data and slice and dice to create visual charts, graphs and tables that paint a clear picture of how our marketing initiatives are performing.

Again as a marketer (vs. a data analyst), there is a bit of a learning curve at first when figuring out how to leverage Grow's data manipulation and filtering tools. But the Grow team has continually made improvements to these systems, which have dramatically improved the metric/dashboard building experience. My main criticisms, which are probably not unique to Grow, just revolve around the integrations that they provide. They are still missing some popular platform connections that we need.

Ease: because 100's of the most common data sources are pre-integrated you can quickly get past the headache of secure access and onto the business of working with data. Because you can do most analytics without deep sql knowledge more of the business staff can participate in developing the graphs and knowledge.

Pace of Innovation: Grow is launching new features every month making it increasingly easy to develop the metrics you need.

Pricing Model: Because this isn't a "pay per seat" model and instead a per metric model the value delivered is aligned with cost - occasional users, heavy users all can leverage the full power of the platform without breaking the bank.

If you want super advanced visualizations on par with the highest priced BI tools this isn't for you - this tool is rich but has made appropriate tradeoffs for the purpose of simplicity. For example, you can't have multiple series on the second axis of a 2-axis graph.

This software allows for the majority of your data to be accessible within Grow's platform. The abilities to transform the data and present it in a professional, and aesthetically appealing way is critical. I've enjoyed the ability that Grow has to leverage a lot of the functions and abilities available in Excel and other database querying languages inherently in their builder.

Without a knowledge of SQL, many data sources are rendered useless or very cumbersome to retrieve meaningful data. Many of the lesser know data sources do not (understandably) have metrics pre built and ready to add to dashboards, therefore, inspection of the data sources and knowledge of SQL transformations and joins are required to achieve the right data for what's needed.

I have been using Grow for over a year now and I am in it every day. When initially researching realtime dashboard systems I was drawn to Grow because it offered all of the integrations I needed as a digital marketer. It was extremly easy to learn how to setup the metrics and to integrate multiple data sources such as advertising spend versus customer data from Salesforce. The recently added a variety of new capabilities to allow for the user to modify the data present using filters which has come in very handy when presenting to clients.

The only drawback I can think of is I would like to have more flexibility with customizing the visuals with the size of the fonts and having a few more options with the types of charts.

We were a somewhat early adopter of the platform, so I've seen a lot of change and improvement over the years from the software. They add useful features on a regular basis and have an amazing support team that is quick to help with any issues that arise. There is a large array of outside connections that can be pulled into the platform, making it easy to aggregate all of our data in one place.

It can be a bit tedious to overhaul metrics once they've been created if we want to update them to use the newest features.

Grow has been great for presenting a lot of complicated data from different sources in ways that make the results clear. While sometimes the software is limited, that is made up for by the excellent support. They understood their products strenghts an current limits and were able to provide me with the code that I needed. At the same time, they were working to improve the software so that I could easily do what I wanted in the future without the extra help.

At times, it isn't clear how to get what I want. Also, while they are working to improve this, Grow doesn't always take data from external sources in the best format so I have extra steps to manipulate the data to work with Grow.

The list is long, this product has so many nice features, I was told when we signed up that they have a 90+% retention which doesn't surprise me. I'd just give it a shot if your looking for dashboard, visualization software.

There are some really basic things missing from this product that would make it a lot better. There is no "pivot table type" feature which for ETL is a basic feature and I'm surprised they don't have it.

The application runs slow. Given the complexity of the visualizations and dashboards I'm not surprised, the amount of javascript that must be under the hood... But still its really frustrating to work with at times due to speed. For all the criticism salesforce gets its super fast and reliable and that just counts for so much.

Easy to use, great design, flexible, excellent integrations, fast customer service.

Doesn't include a few features, like sparklines with hovers for point in time data, that I with it did.

It connects different data points very easily and its power is awesome. It creates a simple dashboard that makes viewing the data easy and clear.

Anytime I've had a need, customer service is very helpful.

I would like to see Facebook and Shopify specific pre-made templates. Maybe gather the top 10 dashboards most eccommerce and Facebook marketing owners want to see and then make an attractive dashboard that you can just plug n play. Then with 1 dashboard let the viewer be able to change what the date ranges are.
Thank you for all the value you've created!

How easy it is to import information from so many sources; and that setup of metrics is easy but we have the option to be as complex as we want/need.

We use our metrics from laptops to TVs displayed around our offices. There is no way to know how large or small the metrics are on any given device. I wish that we had a grid or template so that the dashboard can be customized for a specific resolution or screen size without hours of trial and error.