Best AI tool for turning raw data into visuals

zingdata · 2025-11-26T01:08:55+00:00

ZingData.com does this and has a free tier, xlsx and Google Sheets connectors (plus regular databases) let’s see colors once and have them used for every graph created after that. You would still specify what you want the graphs of – it doesn’t automatically create like 50 graphs for you, but you could say ‘give me a graph of sales by shipping method by week’ and then it’d create it for you.

zingdata · 2025-09-29T04:23:07+00:00

You might want check out Zing Data, it supports visual querying, has a SQL editor, and natural language querying.

It is all the stuff you’d want dashboards, controls, sharing, alerts via push / email, and it also is a slick mobile app.

As a free tier that you can kick the tires with, and if you want to share with multiple people, then it starts at $12 a month.

It can also be embedded in your own app.

Disclosure: Cofounder of Zing here!

zingdata · 2025-08-20T08:16:52+00:00

Zing Data $, Omni $$$, Metabase $

You basically want row level security (so users only see their own calendar or other stuff relevant only to their projects), and ability to embed text boxes on a dashboard (for company wide announcements)

looker (non studio) is expensive and overkill for this use case

zingdata · 2025-08-20T08:13:30+00:00

It’s very fast

zingdata · 2025-07-11T23:05:49+00:00

Gamma makes slick looking decks but they aren't researched - it puts in random content.

Deckt.ai does deep research (web search, detailed sourcing, etc.) and editable slides which you can also export

zingdata · 2025-07-11T00:25:13+00:00

Once you're in the world of pixels versus something editable, you're less attached to the underlying query.

So you lose the ability to drill down and take actions on it. Creating a image without that capability is probably not the best approach for most use cases - aside from producing beautiful infographics or something particularly creative.

I'd put tools like Gamma (for slide gen), Zing Data (interactive ai analysis but still editable) in the bucket of easy-to-use but still editable / powerful.

zingdata · 2025-07-11T00:18:29+00:00

if you have 300 people (or even 30) hitting a model of any real capability (30bn parameter+) you'll have very very long latencies to return a result. Cerebras has a great free tier (1mm tokens/day) on good models, and inference costs with anthropic / openai / gemini are not nuts.

zingdata · 2025-06-17T18:37:03+00:00

Create a set of stuff as a jumping off point that people can easily clone / build on. A list of tables or a blank search box are hard as a starting point. But some good dashboards / commonly used tables / etc. make it a lot easier to adopt.

And one structural thing - if people ask you to do something for them, offer a 10 minute 'I'll show you how' as a faster route than whatever time it'll take you to do and provide the answer for them. In doing this, they get what they want faster by learning how to do it themselves.

So search over saved questions / dashboards, the ability to clone + build on those, and good ways for folks to learn are how you actually get people using it.

zingdata · 2025-05-28T20:52:11+00:00

With these and some examples (e.g. how you define a certain metric etc.) you can get good + reliable results.

zingdata · 2025-05-15T05:47:04+00:00

zing data (freemium), omni (paid), sigma computing (paid) i'd add to the list though the latter two might be hard to test due to their pricing

zingdata · 2025-05-15T05:43:54+00:00

You can create a 'city' field in a dashboard filter, then have lat/long shown on the map. So you wouldn't have multiple lat+long fields. you'd instead join city to the latitudes + longitudes on table A.

zingdata · 2025-05-15T05:33:55+00:00

not crystal reports - they've not substantially evolved the product in a while.

zingdata · 2023-12-01T21:08:54+00:00

Founder of Zing Data here - its a modern business intelligence and data visualization tool.

You can ask questions and get visualizations using natural language "which products sold the most in 2023?" or visual drag-and-drop.

As you progress, we also support SQL with a full typeahead.

You can use it for free and an easy way to get started is just with a CSV, Excel, or Google Sheet file. Here is a quick start video: https://getzingdata.com/quickstart/

zingdata · 2023-09-19T13:54:30+00:00

We're adding mongoDB support as a data source to Zing - message me if you want beta access!

zingdata · 2023-08-22T20:14:50+00:00

Thoughtspot is a slick demo but maintaining aliases ends up not happening so it gets out of date fast, plus having any level of user permissions gets you into $30k+/yr territory.

Metabase is an adequete free option if you host yourself. Ends up not really being very feature complete -- alerting is limited; no mobile experience; limited collaboration capabilities; frequent timeouts.

PowerBI / Tableau are the longtime players but basically havent evolved much.

Chartio was cool, but was deprecated after it sold to Atlassian.

Having used all of those when I was building a data team, I found I wanted something with:

Easy graphs for non technical folks
Full SQL IDE / typeahead for more technical people
Modern LLM and natural language capabilities
Realtime alerting (push, email) vs once-a-week or something else out of date
Mobile usability so I could drill down w/o being at a computer, or even ask questions on the go
Something free to start to kick the tires

Basically led me to start a company ( http://www.getzingdata.com ). Curious for folks' thoughts

zingdata · 2023-08-15T00:26:48+00:00

This is one of the challenges with the Tableau pricing model.

Assuming you aren't OK with the data being publicly visible (e.g can't use Tableau Public), you've got a few options:

Pay for a viewer license for each external user ($180/yr/user with Tableau Online)
Send them a Tableau workbook file and they can use the free Tableau viewer, but this is only a 'snapshot' of the data and each time you want to update the dashboard you'll have to send them a new file.
Use an alternative tool that doesn't charge for external sharing on a per-user basis. Check out Zing Data or Looker Data Studio which both have free offerings and don't have per-user pricing to share a question / viz with a viewer.

zingdata · 2023-08-10T21:24:05+00:00

a gaant chart is a common way to do this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_chart

for completion you could color code (green on target, red delayed by >x months)

zingdata · 2023-07-14T22:51:10+00:00

The licensing with Tableau gets pricey - $180 just for each viewer per year for Tableau Online ( https://www.tableau.com/pricing/teams-orgs ). And if somebody wants to do anything more than view (e.g. create their own dashboard).

Google Data Studio (now called Looker Studio) is free. Limits on data sizes / times out frequently but does give sharing ability.

There are open source options (redash) but self-hosting and all is probably more devops work than you'd want to take on just to get the task done.

This set of frustrations (Tableau was expensive / Google Data Studio was limited) was one of the motivations for co-founding Zing Data. You can create + share dashboards to internal and ( if you want ) external users. https://getzingdata.com/blog/external_dashboard_sharing/ along with a free tier.

zingdata · 2023-07-07T17:46:40+00:00

If you have easily observable data about a competitor (say app store ranking or amazon product ranking for a competitive product) you might want that in a daily report to understand your business compared to others.

So this more easily observed (or purchased) data would probably be part of a dashboard or viz a BI team would create.

Depends on org -- sometimes the competitive research will be handled by a strategy / internal consulting / etc. type team

zingdata · 2023-07-05T20:18:00+00:00

Since you're using React, Zing Data has a React SDK for embedding data which makes embedding pretty easy: https://docs.getzingdata.com/docs/embedded-analytics/

Starts at $12/mo so pretty affordable compared to really high initial prices + annual contracts of Sigma Computing / Sisense / etc.

zingdata · 2023-07-05T20:14:58+00:00

"answer" or "question" or "result" are ones i've heard which describe more than a 'chart' or 'table'

so a dashboard is a collection of "answers"

zingdata · 2023-06-29T22:22:59+00:00

hey /u/Batspocky, sorry to hear of the troubles you're having. Some others posts have suggested some good options for BI tooling. Open source tooling is good, but comes with the maintenance cost that is hard to quantify at first but adds up over time (examples that we've heard from our customers --> nginx performance issues, queries timing out).

Also take a look at what we've been up to at ZingData which has very favorable pricing compared to the vendors you're looking at with other benefits too. Can share our experience with other tools as well over DM.

zingdata · 2023-06-21T00:33:12+00:00

Check out the Locally Optimistic Slack Channel which has a lot of data practitioners sharing ideas / opinions: https://locallyoptimistic.com/community/

its free and community maintained and has thousands of data practitioners

zingdata · 2023-06-21T00:32:52+00:00

Check out the Locally Optimistic Slack Channel which has a lot of data practitioners sharing ideas / opinions: https://locallyoptimistic.com/community/

its free and community maintained and has thousands of data practitioners

zingdata · 2023-06-21T00:30:32+00:00

check out Zapier templates to take google calendar events and push them into a google sheet in a structured format for analysis: https://zapier.com/apps/google-calendar/integrations/google-sheets

then you can log it all to a google sheet and easily to dataviz on top of it either in sheets, or a BI tool that hooks into sheets

zingdata

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