Choosing InetSoft StyleBI over ThoughtSpot
Selecting Business Intelligence (BI) solutions for any organization is hard, risky, and inherently biased. It is made easy by the G2 Crowd review platform with its real-time, transparent and unbiased user reviews. This helps an organization to objectively assess what is best by leveraging the wisdom of the crowd, limiting the risk, and finding out what works. The reviews are validated by G2 Crowd thereby helping organizations make better buying decisions.
G2 Crowd recently compared InetSoft StyleBI and ThoughtSpot over various parameters. InetSoft won strong ratings across the general categories of Reports, Self Service, Advanced Analytics, Building Reports, and Platform. Each category had various parameters detailed below.
A ThoughtSpot Alternative with Maximum Self Service
InetSoft has done extremely well in general usage ratings - Meeting Requirements, Ease of Setup, and Quality of Support. The speed with which dashboards and reports can be churned out swiftly had been a great reason for the reviewers to recommend StyleBI.
Dashboards, Scorecards, and Graphs and Charts were the parameters where StyleBI was lauded for its robustness and described as a complete and powerful go-to tool for visual data analysis. These parameters were evaluated under the Reports Category aimed to strengthen an organization's reporting by balancing the visual images and the reports in the right proportions to gain valuable insights into critical decisions making.
StyleBI uses the same metadata layer for its reports and dashboards. The advantage of this is that the users can put formulas in one place and the dashboards and reports will show the same results providing a single version of truth. This was evident in the Self Service category where the parameters Calculated Fields, Data Column Filtering, and Cllaboration/Workflow favored InetSoft. Self-service reporting is the natural and prudent evolution of information management. The benefits of decreased time to information and the broadening of information access are key drivers for competitive success of any organization.
List of Areas Where InetSoft Ranked Higher than ThoughtSpot
The detailed list of categories & parameters of how InetSoft StyleBI scored over ThoughtSpot is presented below. Please click here or the G2 logo to go over the individual reviews.
- Meets Requirements
- Ease of Setup
- Quality of Support
- Data Visualization
- Big Data Services
- Graphs and Charts
- Score Cards
- Dashboards
- Data Transformation
- Data Modeling
- WYSIWYG Report Design
- Integration APIs
- Calculated Fields
- Data Column Filtering
- Collaboration/Workflow
- Customization
- User, Role, and Access Management
- Internationalization
- Sandbox/Test Environments
- Breadth of Partner Applications
Make Better Decisions with Predictive Analytics
Another major category win against ThoughtSpot is in the category of Advanced Analytics, InetSoft won in Data Visualization and Big Data Services. StyleBI's data caching technology enables the management of large volumes of data. The tool also offers various data displays like tabbed interfaces, sliders, calendars etc. Prediction (proactive) rather than reporting (reactive), will be the focus of any organization in the current times where analytics of customers' spending behavior are of vital importance.
The Building Reports category saw InetSoft's StyleBI win big over ThoughtSpot's solution. The parameters for comparison - Data Transformation, Data Modeling, WYSIWYG Report Design, and Integration APIs clearly exhibited InetSoft's capability to mash up disparate data sources and schedule reports automatically. Why is this category of reporting critical? This will help any organization to change reports on the fly. The benefits and flexibility of the StyleBI platform result in enabling an incredibly powerful and distributed development environment that allows all levels of the organization visibility and access to data.
InetSoft helps Organizations with Fact Based Decision Making
G2 Crowd also revealed that InetSoft offered better value in Cutsomization, User, Role and Access Management, Internationalization, Sandbox/Test Environments, and Breadth of Partner Applications. These parameters were studied under the Platform category.
StyleBI helps any organization to become better at fact based decision making without too much reliance on IT to access critical information. InetSoft helps eliminating costly delays in decision-making and thereby the unnecessary strain on the IT department.
StyleBI offers a business environment in which business users no longer need to rely on IT, but instead can access and manipulate data on their own. With InetSoft's connectors, the users have the flexibility to mashup any new data on the run with ability to do business user level data mashups. This solution allows users to rapidly add new sources from disparate data locations and analyze data side-by-side through both dashboards and reports.
Case Study: Switching from ThoughtSpot to InetSoft's StyleBI
A mid-sized software-as-a-service company migrated its analytics platform from ThoughtSpot to InetSoft StyleBI and realized measurable time and cost savings. The migration reduced infrastructure and licensing costs, shortened dashboard delivery cycles, lowered operational overhead, and improved embedded analytics capabilities for the product team. The customer achieved a six-figure annualized savings in total cost of ownership within the first year while increasing developer productivity and reducing time-to-insight for business users.
Background and Challenge
The company supported a multi-tenant application with 1,200 active customers and relied on ThoughtSpot for self-service search and analytics. Over two years they experienced rising cloud costs, longer development cycles for embedded dashboards, and growing demand from product managers for tightly integrated, white-labeled analytics. Customization requests required complex mashups and recurring professional services, and internal BI operations spent significant effort administering the environment and governance rules.
Decision Criteria
The selection criteria emphasized lower operational cost, lightweight embedding, quick dashboard templating, granular UI customization, and straightforward data connectivity. The company needed a platform that supported multi-tenant embedding without heavy retuning, allowed developers to apply CSS-like theming and JavaScript hooks, and offered flexible data access patterns including cached datasets and direct queries for specific tenants.
Migration and Implementation
Migration occurred over three months in a phased approach. The team first rebuilt 12 high-value dashboards in StyleBI to validate embedding and performance. They used StyleBI’s SDK and APIs to embed dashboards directly into their product, replacing prior iframe-based mashups. Data connectors were reconfigured to use a combination of cached tenant datasets and direct SQL queries for large transactional sources. Deployment used containerized StyleBI instances scaled by tenant load, enabling cost-efficient horizontal scaling.
Time Savings
Dashboard authoring time dropped by an average of 45 percent. Reusable templates and a widget library cut the creation time for tenant-specific dashboards from 10 developer-days to 4 developer-days. Embedding white-label dashboards that had previously taken 3–4 sprints to integrate were completed in a single sprint because of StyleBI’s granular UI controls and theming. End users reported time-to-insight improvements as manual report requests fell by 60 percent.
Cost Savings
Licensing and infrastructure costs decreased significantly. The company negotiated a predictable StyleBI licensing model and consolidated multiple ThoughtSpot instances into fewer, containerized StyleBI nodes. Combined licensing and compute savings were approximately 35 percent annually. Reduced reliance on professional services and fewer developer hours for dashboard customization produced additional labor savings, totaling an estimated six-figure reduction in annual spend.
Operational and Business Impact
Operational overhead shrank: patching and upgrades for the analytics platform were completed in hours rather than days, and BI operations headcount devoted to analytics fell by one full-time equivalent. Sales and customer success teams gained access to embedded, tenant-branded dashboards that improved renewal conversations, contributing to a measurable uptick in customer retention for accounts using the new analytics features.
Lessons and Best Practices
Key success factors included starting with a small set of high-impact dashboards, leveraging StyleBI templates, containerizing deployments for cost control, and involving product engineering early to define embedding requirements. Tracking developer-days and infrastructure costs before and after deployment was critical to quantify ROI and validate the business case for the switch.
By switching from ThoughtSpot to InetSoft StyleBI, the company reduced costs, accelerated dashboard delivery, simplified operations, and improved embedded analytics capabilities. The move delivered both hard savings and improved product differentiation, demonstrating how a platform focused on embedding, customization, and lightweight deployment can create tangible business value.