“We chose ClicData Business Intelligence over Tableau & Power BI”
François de la Jousselinière, Co-Founder of InSighters for Decision. 
Can you introduce InSighters for Decision and your industry?
InSighters for Decision is a start-up specialized in the predictive. Our SaaS software imagined by the 3 founders simplifies and automates the generation of forecasts and is positioned as a hyper-profitable alternative to existing solutions often too complex and too expensive to implement. The added value lies in the combination of rendering service and prediction. With our solutions, we are able to bring results and value at day one. The stake of the company is to help the medium size companies obtain a reliable forecast and vision of their activity (sales, purchases, costs, …), for a minimal cost and in a few minutes. Our solutions are aimed at non-experts in mathematics and statistical forecasting. We are positioned on the services and applications sector in decision support. This sector represents billions of dollars invested each year around the world. This growing sector is only accelerating by the uses and applications that now allow the integration of AI. The need for decision support on forecasting increases as soon as a new market opens, as soon as a new competitor appears and as soon as the needs of customers change, so basically every day.
What are your selection criteria for your Business Intelligence tool?
We started by identifying our needs, and we determined two uses. First, we need it internally during the development phase: we will use a BI solution to render the results and validate our robots’ performance. Then external use: share with our customers’ dashboards displaying the results of our solutions. In terms of functionality, InSighters for Decision was looking for a powerful, 100% cloud-based business intelligence tool that could connect to our MongoDB database and JSON files. Besides, we wanted to go further than data restitution and use predictive algorithms to improve our decision-making process. To do that, we were looking for data calculations and management capabilities in our Business Intelligence software and to be able to send certain data to our Artificial Intelligence tool. We sincerely believe that AI combined with BI is the key to make smarter decisions and take the lead on our market. To find the tool that corresponded to our needs, we followed a 5-step process:
- We have identified a number of uses cases.
- We have modeled these uses case in several pre-selected BI solutions: connection and preparation of our data, creation, and sharing of dashboards.
- We defined a functional points evaluation grid with a rating scale.
- A pricing comparison versus our needs has also been realized.
- A final ranking allowed us to choose the ClicData solution.
You compared ClicData to Tableau and Power BI: what was missing in the last two?
We have actually tested several Business Intelligence applications: Power BI, Tableau Software and ClicData. We preferred ClicData to the other two competitors for several reasons that seemed important to us, such as accessibility, connectivity, and price. Our conclusion with Power BI was that the cloud solution is less rich than the local solution, and this local version is not compatible with the MacOS environment we are working on. The Power BI cloud solution does not include integration with JSON files either. As far as Tableau is concerned, the price has been a huge no-go for our small structure. On the other hand, ClicData offered a great quality of service, with the features we needed and at an affordable price for a start-up:
- 100% cloud-based: ClicData is accessible online on any browser (Edge, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari).
- Intuitive: ClicData was designed on the principle of plug-and-play and has an intuitive interface for a fast learning curve.
- All-in-one: in addition to interactive and up to date dashboards, ClicData integrates a data warehouse. The software also offers data processing and prepping features such as standardization, merge, transformation, data cleansing. Go beyond restitution with predictive analytics: we found a way to feed our AI software with calculated data with the direct connectors that ClicData offers.
Interview of François de la Jousselinière, Co-Founder of InSighters for Decision