Lightdash Reviews & Product Details

Lightdash has been an absolute gamechanger, its eliminated shadow semantic layers and the disconnect from business driven insights and those from the data team.

It has very strong inituitive seperation of dashboards and charts which is all validated through DBT.

Therefor every element of a dashboard is answering a business question and stakeholders and pick & mix different charts that are governed and semantically correct for their personal usage.

This was one of easiest tools tio implement and we were up and running within less than 2 days. We've depreciated Tableu, PowerBI, and GoogleLooker for Lightdash and we've noticed a higher usage amongst our business stakeholders since. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I struggled to fill in this section. Theres not much in terms of functionality or engineering that is missing at all.

I think the area of improvement may be scope and breadth of visualisations such as geo-spatial ones and clustering maps which are common dashboards outside of the pure BI arena Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Few years ago we went for ThoughtSpot over Looker. Wish back then Lightdash (LD) was as great as it became now. Fixed this now and moved to LD few months ago.

Main highlights:

- Open-source or flat low level priced cloud offering. Very clear price calculation approach as it's not consumption or user licenses base. I heard people saying "Lightdash is an open-source Looker", if team keeps the pace and dedication to the product then I bet in few years we will be mostly hearing: "Looker is a closed-source Lightdash"

- dbt project as a backbone. You keep all your data logic in the same repo. Convenient ci/cd.

- advanced LD specific modeling functionality. Not as mature as LookML, but getting there.

- Pretty intuitive for non-technical users with minimal onboardings. Unlocks them with self-service capabilities. At our company small BI maintains models and only few top level reports, the rest of the content created/maintained and communicated by stakeholders' data champions.

- Bonus item that I realized only after committing to Ligthdash. There's no limit for the number of projects and user sharing. We started using it extensively to segregate reporting areas and share reports with our clients. That's normally considered a premium feature in classical enterprise BI platforms. That feature allowed us to retire DataStudio reports that were maintained solely due to ease of external sharing.

- Very transparent requirements/issue tracking

- Supportive, approachable, and reactive Lightdash team.

- All communications are slack driven, with a great community. No tickets to create for question, no enterprise portals that get your stuff stuck for weeks. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- some advanced modelling challenges are not yet possible. But team is aware and working on improving the logic.

- missing multi-tab reporting capabilities.

- as I got spoiled by them replying to me in an hour max, it's getting annoying when they take a few hours to reply to my multiple unreasonable questions :-) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The speed of iteration and helpfulness of the team, and their aptitude to prioritise the most useful features they add to their product.

Being able to deploy to Lightdash via CI-CD was a massive time save for our team compared to existing solutions, and really upped the amount of engaged BI users within the company with all the extra content deployed at speed.

The bonus aspects of the CLI and API make it a great developer experience, and allow us to integrate it into multiple parts of the analytics workflow, as well as control versioning/ compatibility from a central location.

The low barrier to entry for business users really helped shift a bunch of workload from our data team. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There aren't really any things to dislike as such! but if I were to dream of future features, they may be things like improving the search/ discoverability aspect of the tool, to help guide new or existing users to content that's relevant for them.

Beyond that, charts as code, removing the step of creating a chart/ dashboard for a new metric (or even just version controlling the core ones for the business) would be mega Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Lightdash is our primary BI tool. It is very simple to get started on, and has all of the features needed to run a BI team.

It's also part of the 'semantic layer' community of BI tools, that do much more than create pretty charts. It allows for lay people to explore data, and get rich insights, based on pre defined logic that the analytics team creates in the tool. Too often in the past, I would give a business user access to a BI tool, and they created dashboards with incorrect conclusions because there was no way to pre-define calculations/joins/metrics/etc. Lightdash solves this problem in a big way.

I like how lightdash is fully integrated with DBT. In previous roles, using other BI tools, there was a gulf between our database logic and the BI tool. It was almost impossible to scope changes across the systems, and determine how upstream changes would effect BI. Because Lightdash is built on top of DBT, this is much easier to understand.

The ability to create a report, that any user can explore, filter, group etc. while within the guard rails set up by our analytics team is also very nice.

The team is very responsive to bug/feature requests and support. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Lightdash is still relatively young, and there are some features missing that would help us tremendously. None of these missing features are dealbreakers, but we find ourselves looking for work arounds quite often. All of these feature requests are in their backlog/roadmap, so I am expectantly waiting on their arrival. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Lightdash is very similar to Looker in terms of user experience, which made it really easy to adopt given the familiarity.

Particularly like the fact that you can define your metrics in your dbt project, which makes it simple to get started. This combined with their CLI tools make it very developer friendly.

Also, there's an open source version but even if you're using their cloud product, it's a fraction of the price vs Looker. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's still a new tool so there's some small things where they're still catching up with Looker in terms of visualizations (e.g. freezing columns in charts) but the team is quick to ship and very customer-centric so imagine they'll be at par and then some relatively quickly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The seamless integration with dbt is outstanding. Previously our companies only BI was limited to Google Sheets, but Lightdash has made it possible to visualize over 150+ models in under 6 months.

Being developer first and having that tight integration into dbt has made standing up this tool with a small team seamless

Additionally the customer support has been top notch as the team is very responsive to all our questions Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There have been growing pains along the way as Lightdash has gone from an alpha product to something ready for prime time. But they are catching up with other tools at a rapid rate. The mobile solution could be much stronger. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Specially with the managed cloud version, you're able to get Lightdash up and running probably in less than 1 hour when integrating with an existing dbt project and supported cloud warehouse. That removes a lot of friction and enables data teams to focus on what's important: modelling, metadata, data quality. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The ability to monitor user activity in depth is still to become more mature. Admin users can't yet investigate granular data for which users are accessing what content, which limits the ability to fully understand your users' behaviour in deployment. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

1. Simple user interface for data exploration and dashboard creation

2. Fixed, reasonable pricing for unlimited users - creates the right incentives to build a data-driven culture at your company.

3. Seamless integration with dbt - allows a truly end-to-end developer experience for data team members.

4. Library of github actions for CI/CD workflows - allows preview environment for testing integrated with PR reviews

5. A collaborative team that really cares about solving user pain-points and prioritizes based on community input at lightning-fast speed. 10/10 customer support Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Lightdash is at the time of writing an early-stage company, so there are definitely features missing - mostly in the viz UI and report customization. However, I feel confident that any features that I might highlight at this time will be deployed by the time someone reads this given their pace of development! The Lightdash team makes it a point to collaborate with their customers to fulfill any requests that are urgent for their use-cases and I've witnessed several examples of this at my company! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Lightdash is a powerful platform for enterprise data analytics. Its OAS-compliant API provides a comprehensive framework for building custom integrations, while its role-based permissions and user attributes ensure that sensitive data is protected. The product's clean and responsive UI makes it a joy to use, and its scheduled delivery integrations with productivity tools like Email, Slack, and Google Sheets make it easy to deliver content where it is needed outside the UI. Lightdash's modeling language and it's Developer Project Preview features are both impressive. The language is powerful and intuitive, while the Project Preview allows users to test new models, charts, and dashboards without affecting production. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

One area for improvement would be the implementation of a default filter mechanism within charts. This functionality would allow users to set predefined filters for charts, which can then be overridden at the dashboard level. The absence of this feature could lead to resource-intensive unfiltered queries being inadvertently executed when charts are opened. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Lightdash sits directly on top of our dbt project and therefore abides by the same governace principles, including version control. It's easy to deploy new fields and tables by making updates to the schmea .yml files. Our stakeholders generally find the interface easy to navigate and are able to self-service for core data needs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It took some exploration to fully integrate Lightdash deploymnents to our CI/CD workflow, but that's been working well since we invested the time to stand up a solution. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.