Omni Analytics

What do you like best about the product?

For non-technical users, soft landing after using Looker for many years; for technical users, the deep integration with Snowflake and dbt. Support has been A+ with quick responses from knowledgeable individuals.

What do you dislike about the product?

Bit of a lag in documentation; new features are released often and there's a delay in explicit instruction on how to customize. Can be confusing because the demo and changelog provide some help so we spin our wheels fact finding.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We have three main reporting problems: implementing AI that works directly with our semantic layer, an improved visualization experience for end users and support to reduce resolution times for our small team of BI Engineers.

Omni has been enormously helpful in delivering AI that leverages the documentation we are already consolidating within dbt; the baseline experience is much improved by our normal operations. On visualization, end users enjoy the breadth of options, the ease of customization through drag and drop and particularly the chart types (KPI, Trellis) that generate multiple graphics to tell a compelling story. Support, currently provided to us via a Slack channel, has been a game changer: all conversation on Omni is directed to the channel and requests external to that have been limited to administrative asks (access requests, groups, etc).

What do you like best about the product?

The best thing about Omni is how flexible and versatile it is, both in terms of visualizations/ways of interacting with the data, as well as how it allows you to manage things in the backend to make the end-user experience as smooth as possible. I think they've nailed the approach of different logical layers and found the right balance between needing to declare everything explicitly vs. sensible defaults to get you up and running ASAP. The cherry on top is the excellent team behind the product, and the speed at which they ship new features and updates.

What do you dislike about the product?

Honestly there isn't much to dislike. I occasionally wish their documentation was a bit more thorough/up-to-date, although given the pace at which they release new features this is somewhat inevitable.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We use Omni for all internal analytics, supporting the entire organisation (both Product and Go-To-Market) with their reporting needs. It's also been very successful in enabling non-technical stakeholders to self-serve data to a good extent.

What do you like best about the product?

For users of Looker, picking up Omni is an easy process, and our business users have also found Omni to be intuitive and powerful. Omni's visualization options are powerful, and they are constantly adding new features. It's a 100% upgrade from Looker. The Omni team is also easy to work with, easy to reach, and extremely helpful.

What do you dislike about the product?

As with any great BI tool, there is a learning curve to using Omni, but Omni's is the shortest I've experienced among modern BI tools.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Omni is our single source of truth for business KPIs, descriptive dashboards, and insights about the operation and success of our business. Omni makes data easy to access and easy to interpret for our business stakeholders.

What do you like best about the product?

Omni gives us the very sweet spot between providing good Governance for the data team to maintain some order within metrics, but also enough flexibility to allow ad hoc versions for users. Their team is also always working very hard to provide us with new features and great support. We had a very smooth implementation, we used to work with Looker and we were able to full transition within 2 months.

What do you dislike about the product?

While they have lots of very cool features, some minor details are a bit "annoying" (but not deal breakers), like not providing contrast colors for graph labels, some important features being a bit "hidden", like filtered measures, etc.These are all small details, nothing major.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Provide our users with high quality data so they can independently build their own reports and take good decisions based on data. Implement governance of metrics and adata across the company, making data in Omni the source of truth.

What do you like best about the product?

Design philosophy: Omni pitch themselves as the balance between flexible BI (think notebook-style BI tools like Power BI, Metabase, Tableau) and governance (think semantic layer based BI tools like Looker), and they've absolutely nailed it. Tables in BigQuery are automatically reflected in Omni's "schema" layer, governance is then through a "shared" layer (yml defined joins, measures, custom columns), but the real differentiator is their "workbook" model - each dashboard in Omni acts as a git branch based off the "shared" model. This allows you to have reusable measures / joins / custom columns etc. defined just inside a dashboard, without editing the company-wide "shared" model (but it's easy to promote changes if you want). It's a really nice balance of shared definitions across the company, but with necessary flexibility on top.

Features: To call out a few - Excel-style calculations on table results, filtered measures (a UI based approach to doing things like "SUM(IF(column="x", y, NULL))" without having to write SQL - much faster and far safer), and generally the overall speed due to their caching / using duckDB. They've also launched spreadsheets that can be powered by multiple workbook queries - which cuts out a lot of copy/pasting into Google Sheets.

Team: Tons of experience in the BI space which shows in the product - and frequent product updates with quality of life improvements, plus they've been excellent to work with over the past ~1.5 years with any questions or requests that we've had.

What do you dislike about the product?

Some initial rough edges: We were a fairly early customer of theirs so there were naturally going to be features not yet in the product, and UI nits / occasional bugs we came across - but they've been very consistent in shipping updates.

Charting: Most of their charts use Vega-lite, so if you want to customise them further than you can in the UI it involves digging through JSON with some trial & error to get it right. You can also build an incredibly broad range of visualisations using their markdown visualisations (e.g. a table of embedded Gong calls, or a kanban board for Sales opportunities) - but this is quite fiddly to set up. Their native visualisations like their KPI tiles feel really polished, so I'd love at some point for all of their chart types to be similar. This isn't a frequent blocker for us - more a quality of life improvement.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We use Omni for all of our internal BI & reporting across everything from monitoring product launches through to tracking customer health and giving Sales leadership visibility into pipeline.