GoodData Offers Free Embedded Analytics

If you’re in the market for an embedded analytics solution, you might want to check out the new “freemium” offering unveiled by GoodData today.

GoodData is one of the leaders in embedded analytics, with over 100,000 organizations using its software and more than 1.6 million individual users around the world. The company primarily sells to software as a service (SaaS) providers that want to include business intelligence capabilities, such as dashboards, reports, and metrics, in their own SaaS offerings.

With the new freemium tier, any organization can embed GoodData’s analytics software in up to five workspaces, which could be the organization’s own customers, franchises, or separate departments and subsidiaries. The freemium offering enables users to build dashboards and reports using a simple drag-and-drop interface, while users can consume analytics via Web and mobile interfaces.

All of GoodData’s software, including the freemium offering, works with cloud-based data warehouses, such as Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, and Snowflake (as well as via a simple CSV upload). Each workspace in the freemium tier can hold up to 100MB of data.

The goal of launching the freemium tier is to increase the awareness of GoodData’s embedded analytics software, particularly among smaller firms, says Zdenek “ZD” Svoboda, co-founder and vice president of platform of the company.

“We were focusing primarily on enterprise and large product companies, but we realized that it’s quite interesting to market to smaller companies,” Svoboda says. “So we decided that we could create a free tier of the product, which is essentially marketing for us. It’s not a free trial, so it doesn’t expire. People can use it as long as they’re compliant with the rules of the free tier.”

If GoodData’s customers exceed the terms of the freemium tier (such as by wanting to share it with more than five of their own customers, franchises, or subsidiaries), they can move up to the “growth” tier, which allows users to store up to 1GB per workspace and costs $20 per workspace per month (users are charged extra if they exceed 1GB per workspace). The growth tier also provides more centralized management capabilities, as well as automated provisioning of new workspaces and users, which is lacking in the freemium offering.

Customers can also choose the enterprise version, which adds more tooling, such as 150 data connectors for ETL, better customization of data models, enterprise security and backup, access to GoodData’s cloud-based data warehouse, and the capability to create branded (or white-labeled) dashboards. For each of the three tiers, GoodData supports an unlimited number of users (although the number of distinct organizations using the software is limited to five with the freemium version).

GoodData is betting that it can convert a number of the freemium customers into regular paying customers once they see what its software can do. “Once we get a customer on board, we see pretty fast growth,” Svoboda says. “We are pretty confident that they will outgrow these five workspaces and essentially convert to the growth tier.”

Svoboda says the freemium tier will help GoodData differentiate itself from competitors, specifically Looker and Tableau, which were acquired last year by Google and Salesforce, respectively.

“They have free trials, with an option that expires after a month or three, depending on the competitor,” he says. “Also, they charge on a per-user basis. That makes our pricing seem very attractive for this embedded scenario, since we do not charge per user.”

GoodData built a multi-tenant platform that allows it to ramp up its clients’ analytic environments quickly and affordably, without making extensive modifications, Svoboda says. That’s its main advantage over competitors, he says.

“I think the biggest differentiator is the ability to distribute the analytics to many different organizations and maintain the distributed analytics as a product,” says Svoboda, who works out of GoodData’s office in the Czech Republic. “We have more than 1.6 million users on that platform, so for us it’s very cheap to essentially create another workspace with many users. We are leveraging our cost efficiency.”

GoodData supports an array of cloud data warehouses with its software, which features Web and mobile front-ends. Lately, the company has been building more advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities into its software. GoodData’s customers are using those capabilities to power decision-making in their own applications.

“Many of the decisions that users are doing in their application are backed by analytics,” Svoboda says. “So all the recommendations, such as what they should do as the next step of the process or what they should offer to a customer in CRM or the actions in those products, are all being driven by analytics algorithms, whether it’s ML, recommendation, or other algorithms.”

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