Domo vs. Grow

Wondering whether Domo or Grow is the best tool for your business? Read our comparison here.

Domo vs. Grow

Domo is a market leader in the BI space, and has been for the last decade. Many institutions have depended on Domo for their business intelligence needs for years, and many companies that want to buy a business intelligence solution look at that institutional trust and select Domo as their BI tool. 

However, the BI space is quickly becoming much more competitive. There are many smaller players in the space that want to outcompete established players by providing a more valuable service to consumers. Grow, a relatively recent entry into the BI space, is one of these smaller vendors. 

This gives potential buyers an interesting choice: should they go with the established industry player, or should they go with a newer vendor that offers a more unique product? This guide attempts to show the similarities and differences between Domo and Grow, to help you buy the tool that's best for you. 

The most important metric that most buyers will judge their BI tool on is its feature set. Businesses want to know that the BI tool that they purchase will be able to do everything that they need it to; they don't want to get halfway through integration and then find out that the tool they bought can't be used in the use case they need it to. 

Established players like Domo often have the most fully featured tools in the industry, while smaller, newer vendors often have to play catch-up. In many ways, Grow is still trying to catch up to Domo and other fully-featured tools. 

In most relevant ways, Domo is a more powerful tool than Grow. We'll go feature-by-feature to see how each tool stacks up - 

Data connectors: Data connectors are the foundation of any good BI tool. They're what the BI tool uses to connect to other pieces of software and collect their data. A BI tool needs a connector for each other tool that users want to connect to their BI software. If a business's BI tool is missing a connector for some key software, data won't flow as easily and it'll mean headaches up and down the stack. 

Domo is the clear winner on data connectors. Grow has about 60 data connectors, while Domo has over a thousand. Domo also allows its users to build custom connectors on top of Domo, and then they can share those custom connectors with other Domo users. Grow, to our knowledge, doesn't have that same functionality. 

Data visualization: If data connectors are the foundation of a BI tool, then data visualization is a BI tool's ground floor. It's the most basic use case for a BI tool, and the way in which the average user will interact with the software. Robust, powerful, intuitive data visualizations are essential for every BI tool. 

Grow has good enough data visualizations; they'll be enough for many businesses. They're simple to figure out, and it's fairly easy for the average user to build out dashboards and ad-hoc visualizations. However, its tools are fairly basic; if a business wants to build a more complex visualization or drill down into their data in a unique way, they might be out of luck. 

Domo's data visualization suite is much more powerful. Grow has about 25 different types of data visualizations; Domo has over 150. If a user wants to build a complex or obscure data visualization, it's far more likely that they'll be able to do it in Domo. Domo's tools are just as user-friendly as Grow's, if not more; they're designed for users that don't have any data experience. 

ETL and data transformation: These are the tools within BI solutions that help to turn raw, unsorted, unfiltered data from external sources into clean, valid, actionable data that can be used to draw insight. These tools need to be powerful, so that the data a BI tool uses to build its visualizations is valid and doesn't lead to errors; however, these tools need to be simple, so that the average user can upload and utilize data. 

Grow and Domo both have very good data transformation suites. Grow, specifically, helps its users to transform their data using no-code SQL presets. These presets help users to filter and transform their data without interacting with any code at all. If users want or need to do something more complicated that the presets don't cover, Grow users can build their own code solutions for transformation. 

However, Domo's data transformation suite is still more powerful. Domo has a drag-and-drop data transformation suite called Magic ETL. This tool is extremely simple to use; employees just need to select the transformations they want to use, and then they can build a workflow visually, helping them to figure out how the transformation will work in the real world. Domo also has more no-code presets than Grow does, and Domo allows users to save their code solutions as presets for the future. 

These three main categories are about the limit of Grow's functionality. To be clear, these features are useful; but it's somewhat limiting that these features are pretty much all that Grow offers its users. Domo offers many features beyond the ones above that are useful as well, that Grow can't even compete with. 

For instance, Grow doesn't do any sort of embedded reporting. Many businesses are looking for BI tools that they can embed in their own sites and apps; it's one of the fastest growing sectors of the BI space. Grow doesn't have any sort of embedded functionality, but Domo is a market leader; for businesses that want to embed their BI tool, Domo is the only choice between the two. 

In general, Grow is a less powerful BI tool with a smaller feature set than Domo. This doesn't mean it's a bad tool; it just fills a different market niche than Domo. Many businesses, especially smaller ones, won't need Domo's power or advanced features to handle their less complicated business intelligence requirements. For companies like these, Grow's simple tools are a good fit. 

Grow is also a clear winner in terms of price. Business intelligence vendors usually don't post their prices publicly, and neither Grow or Domo are exceptions to that. However, based on the experiences of those who have used both tools, Grow is usually a cheaper option than Domo. Given the same sort of project, it'll be cheaper for a business to invest in Grow than Domo. 

Of course, that's not a hard and fast rule. The price of a given BI tool will depend on how complicated the implementation will be, how much data the business plans to store in the BI tool, and any number of other factors. Be sure to do your research and consider all your options before you decide on one BI vendor on the basis of price. 

In general, if you're going to decide on a BI tool on the basis of price, Grow is a better option than Domo. 

The Bottom Line - 

Grow is a less powerful tool than Domo, and has fewer features as well. For most features, Domo's version of the feature is more powerful and easier to use than Grow's version. There are some things, like embedded analytics, that Domo can do and Grow can't. However, Grow is usually cheaper than Domo. 

Businesses that want a good BI tool for basic, day-to-day tasks that won't break the bank will be best served by Grow, while businesses who need the most powerful solution possible, regardless of price, will be best served by Domo. 

For more information on Domo and Grow, contact our team of experts today. They have real-world experience with these tools and can help connect you with the tool that best fits your business and use case.