Applications
Data Integration & Connectors
To set up the access to databases or third part applications, GoodData requires using command line, which is why you have to get familiar with its (fortunaltely well documented) CL language in order to run data loads. BIME wins in this area clearly - it offers intuitive integration screen, so even users without programmer skills will not feel any discomfort. Needless to say, GoodData acknowledges this weakness and has promised to come up with new and more comfortable integration tools soon.
Another point for BIME here is its Déjà vu functionality, which enables preloading data into temporary storage space and make them accessible anywhere anytime so it significantly decreases traffic to original databases and relieves connected applications from excessive load. We can even schedule these connection refreshes to run in predefined intervals to make our model always fresh and up to date.
In this section we would go for: BIME
Report and Dashboard Management Capabilities
One of the trickiest things while building data model is joining different data sources. GoodData offers well designed interface for merging all of your single data sources into one homogeneous model just by selecting relevant columns. When working with BIME, you will be little confused with joining tables at the beginning, however after few minutes of rifling through the documentation, you will find Composite Connection functionality, which ensures easy and comfortable merging of two previously loaded data sources.
When focusing on report editor, both solutions offer easy and quickly understandable drag and drop interface, with many chart functions and powerful metrics designers.
You definitely need to taste both of them and find out by yourself what suits you best.
In this section we would go for: Both
Pricing
Pricing strategy makes undoubtedly the biggest difference between GoodData and BIME. While BIME offers starting package with one developer for $60 month, GoodData forces you to purchase at least $1000 package with up to 25 developer accounts. It does not require advanced math to find out which one is better for a small startup company. You must have at least 15+ team to reach GoodData’s cheapest offer. When aiming at large BI solutions and complex reporting requirements, BIME’s 20 dashboards and 10 data sources ceiling could be a significant restriction. If this is the case of your company, you should go for GoodData’s customizable Enterprise version.
In summary, for small BI teams we would go for BIME, while for companies with an army of developers and bulky budget, GoodData will be the winner.
In this section we would go for: According size of dev team
Export preferences
Both solutions offer exactly the same exporting formats including JPG, PDF and XLS, however GoodData offers export at the reports level, while BIME analyses can be exported only at the level of whole dashboards. This might seems as no difference, but if you demand to attach your exported visualization to a presentation or a financial statement, single report per image will be more convenient. Of course that you could try a work around solution and pin only one report to each dashboard, but remember that BIME limits you only to 20 of them!
In this section we would go for: GoodData
Security & Collaboration
Among cloud based BI solutions BIME is definitely the “security star”. While GoodData offers only three predefined security groups with pre-set editing and managing rights and does not allow to create custom groups to share only selected content (such as sales or marketing reports), BIME offers full functionality here. It enables creating custom groups and sharing among them, publishing only for selected users or even setting cell-level security by attaching groups to every element within the dimension (set of elements with the same property). BIME also offers maximal collaborating power which will satisfy even the largest corporations.
In this section we would go for: BIME
Browser & Language Support
GoodData runs well across all major browsers experiencing small issues in Safari and Chrome and its interface is available in 12 languages including Chinese (Simplified), Danish, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Polish. French based BIME is built completely on Flash technology, and will thus run smoothly on every browser with Flash installed. Its user interface is localized only for English, French and Dutch languages.
In this section I would go for: Both