Comparison: Rakam vs Tableau and BI solutions
Occasionally we get questions about the similarity between Rakam and Tableau or other BI solutions, so I wanted to add a comparison page for BI solutions. To make it clear, Rakam is not a BI product, instead a full-stack analytics platform. There are two products under the Rakam platform: Rakam API and Rakam UI.
Rakam API allows you to collect data from multiple sources, enrich your data and collect it in your data-warehouse. It can be installed on your cloud provider or on-premise servers or we can manage your Rakam API cluster for you. Your data is stored as part of the Rakam API product, you send the data and execute your queries on it.
Rakam UI is our user interface solution for Rakam API. It allows you to run your queries with a simple interface, visualize the data, create custom reports and dashboards. Similar to other analytics services, you can visualize segmentation, funnel and retention reports, search users or see the timeline of a user. You may think Rakam UI similar other BI solutions such as Tableau since it allows you to visualize the data and create charts but in fact Rakam UI is a complementary product just for Rakam API unlike other BI solutions where you connect it to external data warehouses and the main point is exactly as follows:
Rakam UI a tool for creating user interface for your custom analytics service.
The default interface of Rakam UI is similar to other event analytics services such as Mixpanel and Amplitude. It doesn’t know anything about your data, it just knows that there are events with at least two attributes; _user and _time.
If you’re familiar with Google Analytics, you may already know the metrics you have in web analytics. You can just create an analytics service similar to Google Analytics with Rakam UI if that’s what you need. The recipe mechanism is built for pre-defined analytics solutions, if you’re a mobile gaming company and we have the recipe for your industry, we can give it to you so that you can import it and use Rakam as gaming analytics solution.
You can also use Rakam API without Rakam UI, similar to Keen.io. It exposes an API for you so you can develop a custom interface using the API for your users, it’s up to you. You can even plug your BI solutions with Rakam API and use it as a data warehouse.
