The dashboard platforms below all have direct connectors for Salesforce, and allow powerful visualization of data in ways that Salesforce native dashboards might not support (particularly additional data sources). They are not heavy duty BI platforms, but focus largely on graphics, charts, and tables displayed in a dashboard. Many of them are low cost, and so an ideal complement for understanding Salesforce and other data.
Bittle supports the creation of online dashboards specifically for the SME user. The free package restricts data storage and data sources, and comes with a standard graphics library (instead of a more advanced one). Bittle also supports report creation.
ClicData is a cloud based dashboard platform that successfully delivers an easy to use, drag and drop graphical interface, while providing the tools for power users to deliver high levels of sophistication. Business users are able to produce dashboards almost immediately, and as they become more familiar with the platform, so they can deliver dashboards that incorporate a wide range of charts and graphs, conditional output, pivot tables, calculations and many other features. It is ideal for smaller businesses, but has also found enthusiastic uptake in larger firms as they become familiar with its power and flexibility. The good news for very small businesses and single users is the free version of ClicData. This essentially supports CSV and Excel data, and data refresh once a week.
Dashzen supports the creation of both private and public dashboards in the cloud. Private dashboards can be shared with nominated people. A variety of gadgets make up a dashboard, some of which are connected with various data sources (salesforce, Twitter, StackExchange etc).
Dundas BI provides dashboard and reporting capabilities with connectors to most data sources. Because it is based on HTML5 technology it is easy to use on mobile devices. It supports all the needed facilities such as filtering, grouping, sorting and drill downs.
Dynistics is a browser based dashboard platform that supports real-time reporting. A variety of templates are provided for standard business reporting tasks and it can be used within both intranets and websites. It runs on a server loaded with Microsoft IIS and .NET Framework 4.
iDashboards provides surprising flexibility in its licensing and deployment models. The on-premises Enterprise Suite is suitable for large organisations and can provide dashboards for internal consumption and for external agents such as customers and trading partners. The cloud deployment is suitable for smaller organisations, but provides pretty much the same functionality. Mobile devices are well supported with native apps.
Klipfolio is an online dashboard platform that pretty well connects with everything and will display data in whatever visualisation is most appropriate – and the pricing is very reasonable indeed. The list of dates sources that can be accessed is too long to provide details here, but includes native support (XML, JSON, Excel and CSV), web services, databases (MSSQL, MySQL, Oracle, Sybase etc), cloud storage (Dropbox, Google Drive etc), applications (Salesforce, Facebook etc) and a wide variety of other formats.
MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop is a free application for data analysis and visualisation. It is downloaded and installed on a PC and provides access to data in various formats including CSV, Excel, text file and database. A wide variety of visualisations are available (including graphs, heat maps, network diagrams, maps and image layouts) and resulting dashboards and datasets can be shared via an interactive PDF.
QlikView Personal Edition is a free edition of QlikView – an extremely powerful data visulization, exploration, reporting and dashboard platform. It supports a wide variety of data sources, automatically creates associations between various data sources and the creation of dashboards. Runs on Windows.
EspressChart Service is an innovative and powerful web-based tool that allows you to easily make dynamic charts to visualize data on your website or blog. It is provided as a completely free Software as a Service (SaaS).
Quadbase EspressDashboard (EDAB) allows organizations to build highly actionable, self-service, KPI (key performance indicator) dashboards. It allows users to easily query key performance data, develop charts, reports, maps and incorporate them into self-service business intelligence dashboards for immediate web-based publishing without programming.
Zoho Reports is an online reporting and business intelligence service that helps you easily analyze your business data, and create insightful reports & dashboards for informed decision-making. It allows you to create and share powerful reports. The free service limits users (2) and data, and has cut down functionality.
The entry point for many Tableau users is the free Tableau Public. This supports the creation of attractive visuals specifically with web publishing in mind. The enterprise version of Tableau is called Tableau Server. This is a in-house hosted version accessed through a web browser, and supports the features usually found in a product of this nature – dashboards, graphs, charts, tables and so on. Tableau Desktop runs on PC and Mac and can process data in local memory and/or go to other remote data sources.