Databox Alternative – a Detailed Analysis

Many businesses find Databox to be their lifesaver in terms of data visualization. They appreciate it for the smooth setup, the multitude of available integrations, and the ability to put up a good-looking dashboard within minutes. It won’t work for everyone, though. Many users stumble upon its limitations and, sooner or later, end up looking for Databox alternatives.

And there are plenty of them – dashboard builders, BI tools, spreadsheets, data integration services, and more. Ultimately, it comes down to your specific needs, the resources you already have, and the outcome you’re aiming for. 

Let’s look then at some viable alternatives to Databox.

Why do users search for alternatives to Databox?

Although Databox generally receives rather good reviews, there are several recurring complaints you’ll often come across:

• Limited visualization options – Databox offers a limited amount of visualization options, most of which are basic charts, graphs, tables, and scorecards. If you want to build more advanced visualizations – for example, detailed map charts or histograms – you’ll need to do so elsewhere.
• Restrictive pricing – Although Databox offers several pricing tiers, many users complain that to get the most value out of the product, they would need to upgrade to its highest tier (currently, $289 when paid monthly, $231/month on annual billing).
• Subpar support – According to many reviews online, the support Databox offers leaves much to be desired, and the same-day response isn’t often an option. If your issue is simple, such as fixing a chart on a dashboard, you may be able to resolve it rather quickly. If it’s more complex, you may have to figure it out on your own or look for an answer on the forums.

Top Databox competitors

Because of these and some other Databox pitfalls, many users choose to go with Databox competitors. Most commonly, these people seek more flexibility, more customized reporting, or a cheaper alternative. 
We’ve handpicked 7 excellent platforms that can easily replace Databox and offer just as much or even more. These are:

• Coupler.io – a data analytics and integration platform with a full ETL toolset built into a straightforward, no-code interface. You can use over 200 integrations to fetch data automatically, transform it, and then load it – for example, to a data visualization tool. Give it a try now with a free 14-day trial.
• GoodData – a low-code/no-code platform for querying your data sources and self-service reporting for business users.
• Dataddo – a data integration platform with ETL and Reverse ETL capabilities that can take care of all your data flows.
• Trevor – a platform that allows anyone to tap into the data stored in your databases, even without any SQL. 
• Dashthis – a reporting solution that connects to various marketing sources and lets you build beautiful dashboards within minutes.
• Looker Studio – a data visualization platform from Google with 800+ connectors to virtually any app.
• AgencyAnalytics – a solution for combining all clients’ data into a single place and creating automated reports.

	Databox	Coupler.io	GoodData	Dataddo	Trevor	Dashthis	Looker Studio	AgencyAnalytics
Automated data integration	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Data transformation	⛔	✅	✅	✅	⛔	⛔	⛔	⛔
Built-in dashboards	✅	⛔	✅	⛔	✅	✅	✅	✅
Can connect to any Dataviz tool	⛔	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	⛔	⛔
No-code environment	✅	✅	⛔	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Dashboard templates	✅	✅	⛔	⛔	⛔	✅	✅	✅
Data consultancy services	⛔	✅	✅	⛔	⛔	⛔	⛔	⛔
Sources	100+	70+	200+	200+	7	30+	800+ *	70+
Pricing starts from (monthly)	$0	$49	$1,000	$0	$0	$38	Free	$12

* Note: While Looker Studio offers over 800 connectors, many of them cover the same sources. The actual number of supported apps is unknown but is probably somewhere in the range of 100-200.

Coupler.io

Coupler.io lets you connect to all your business apps without coding. You can set up automated importers that will run according to the schedule you choose, for example, daily or hourly. The available integrations include Airtable, Facebook Ads, HubSpot, Pipedrive, QuickBooks, and many others. Combine different sources or accounts if you’d like.

Once the data is collected, you can prepare it for analysis – apply filters, choose the columns you want to fetch, create new calculable columns, and make any other adjustments. Then, load it into one of the supported destinations, which include spreadsheets (Google Sheets, Excel), a data warehouse (BigQuery), and a data visualization tool (Looker Studio).

But that’s not all. You can connect the imported data to virtually any BI tool on the market. It’s common, for example, to use Power BI or Tableau for their advanced data visualizations. 

Coupler.io lets you set up connections between your business apps and any of these tools within minutes. Choose a schedule for data refreshes, build a report you need, and the underlying data will stay up-to-date without any effort on your side. For a quick start with Looker Studio, check out the Coupler.io templates gallery.

We discuss the differences between Databox and Coupler.io in a later chapter.

Benefits of Coupler.io

• No-code data integration.
• Intuitive interface with a 5-minute setup.
• Full ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) toolset at your disposal.
• The best-in-class customer support.
• Data analytics consulting services to help you with any custom data projects.

Pricing of Coupler.io

Coupler.io offers a free 14-day trial, with no credit card required. After that, you can subscribe to one of the following plans:

• Starter that’s suitable for a single user and up to 3 importers ($49/month).
• Squad is good for small teams that connect to multiple apps or accounts and run more frequent data imports ($99/month).
• Business is for larger organizations or those with higher usage needs ($249/month).

Those needing a custom integration or other data expert services can also reach out for an individual quote.

Coupler.io integrations

Coupler.io lets you connect to over 70+ apps natively, including the likes of Airtable, QuickBooks, Xero, GA4, Salesforce, and more. You can also use a JSON importer to tap into virtually any Rest API and create custom imports with the apps we don’t yet support.
See the complete list of Coupler.io integrations.

GoodData

GoodData is a business intelligence platform that takes a different approach to data integration. Rather than import data from apps, it lets you query data warehouses and databases in search of the data you need. Then, you can pull the results of the queries into the platform for analysis.

The cool thing about GoodData is that the imported data can be analyzed by analysts and virtually anyone on the team. The platform provides a tool for self-service data exploration where users can drag and drop the imported fields and turn them into visualizations. More tech-savvy users can write custom code to generate more advanced charts.

GoodData not only lets you process analytics, but it can also collect them for you. With their embedded analytics and the available SDKs, and libraries, you can integrate analytics into your own application and bring the data natively to AWS, BigQuery, Snowflake, and others. Furthermore, the platform offers various development tools for automating deployments, QA testing, or user management, just to begin with.

Benefits of GoodData

• Robust capabilities for both technical and non-technical users.
• Number of supported data warehouses and databases.
• Embedded analytics.
• Drag-and-drop dashboard builder and self-service analytics.

Pricing of GoodData

GoodData offers a 30-day trial to evaluate if the platform is worth your investment. After that, you’ll need to either hop on a Professional plan, with prices starting from $1,000/month, or request custom pricing. 
The Professional offers plenty of features but lacks support for:

• Data source managers.
• Usage analytics.
• Cross-region deployment, and a few other features. 

Consult the pricing page for the exact features that matter to you.

GoodData integrations

GoodData integrates with various data warehouses and databases, including Snowflake, Redshift, Azure, BigQuery, PostgreSQL, MS Microsoft Server, and more. On a custom plan, you can also access data source managers – Dremio and Apache Drill.

Dataddo

Dataddo is a data integration platform with over 200+ integrations available for moving data in virtually any direction.

With its “Data to Dashboards” offer, you can set up automated data imports from your business apps. The available destinations include Looker Studio, Google Sheets, Tableau, Power BI, and more. As was the case with Coupler.io, you can customize how often the imports run, and apply various transformations to the imported data.

Sending data to the BI tools is just one of the things you can use Dataddo for. If you prefer, you can send the data to any of the supported destinations, which include many popular datasets and data warehouses. This way, you can create a single source of truth for all your business apps and use it later for querying the database or visualization.

Datadoo also comes with Reverse ETL, which allows you to send data in any direction – also back to business apps. An API for integrating all the data flows into your product is also available.

Benefits of Dataddo

• Ability to move data between apps and databases in any direction.
• Over 200 connectors, with new ones added weekly.
• ETL toolset with fully-automated imports.
• API to integrate data flows into your app.

Pricing of Dataddo

Dataddo offers a 14-day trial with no credit card required. After that, you have the following plans available:

• Free, albeit very limited – you can sync data weekly to Dataviz tools.
• Data to Dashboards – sync hourly to Dataviz tools. Depending on the number of data flows, the price can range from $99 to $349 monthly.
• Data Anywhere – sync data in any direction. Price starts from $99/month for up to 3 data flows and can go up to $449/month.

Pricing of Dataddo API is available upon request and depends on your needs.

Dataddo integrations

Dataddo currently offers over 200 integrations, known as Connectors, including over 20 that can be used as both sources and destinations. These include HubSpot, Salesforce, Databox, MongoDB, AWS, BigQuery, and more.

Among the source-only type of connectors, you’ll find plenty of popular business apps, including Facebook Ads, GA4, YouTube Analytics, Shopify, Pipedrive, and more.

Trevor

Trevor aims to make collecting and visualizing data easy. It does so through its self-service analytics, where anyone can work with data – even without any prior knowledge of SQL. Once data is fetched, you can immediately put it on charts with no- or low-code setup.

More technical users of Trevor can take advantage of a built-in SQL editor. Those a bit less tech-savvy can achieve the same with a Query Builder – an intuitive way to send queries and retrieve precisely the data they need for their analysis.

Separately, Trevor offers dashboards you can build and customize yourself without any technical expertise. You can embed them into your app within minutes!

Benefits of Trevor

• Send queries to a database without any coding.
• Self-service reporting that makes every team member independent.
• Enhanced security.
• Intuitive, straightforward interface.

Pricing of Trevor

You can use Trevor for free up to 3,000 of their own Credits per month. According to the example from their website, this should suffice to:

• Send 1,000 ad hoc queries.
• Have 25 dashboards that refresh data daily.
• And set up 18 alerts that will trigger hourly.

Once you need more than that, you’ll need to upgrade to:

• Pro plan starts from $75 per month (the price goes up the more credits you’ll use, up until $500).
• Plus plan that comes with a custom price tag.

Trevor integrations

Trevor works only with databases and data warehouses so you’ll need to fetch your data there first using other methods or tools. The supported databases include PostgreSQL, BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, MariaDB, and others. In terms of destination for your data, only Google Sheets is available.

Dashthis

Dashthis, like Databox, fetches data from various apps and puts it to use right away  on the built-in dashboards. It focuses mainly on the marketing audience, supporting various apps relevant to this audience, including GA4, various advertising platforms, HubSpot, and more. 

Once you choose the app to connect, you can take advantage of various dashboard templates for e.g. SEO reporting, social media reporting, and more. All templates work only within the platform, but you can export them or take advantage of a while label to embed a chart or two on your own pages.

The platform doesn’t put any limitations on how many users or client accounts you can connect. You could probably run an entire marketing agency from a single Dashthis account. 

Benefits of Dashthis

• Data connected and dashboards ready within minutes.
• No-code environment.
• Numerous dashboard templates for any marketing needs.

Pricing of Dashthis

Dashthis currently offers 4 plans:

• Individual with up to 3 dashboards and limited customization options ($38/month).
• Professional allowing for up to 10 dashboards and majority of available features ($119/month).
• Business with up to 25 dashboards and everything included ($229/month).
• Standard with 50 dashboards or more, with the price starting from $349/month.

Dashthis integrations

Currently, Dashthis is integrated with over 30 marketing applications, including GA4, Facebook Ads, HubSpot, Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, and others. As an option, you can also bring this data to Google Sheets.

Looker Studio

Looker Studio, previously known as Google Data Studio, is a popular data visualization tool from Google. It’s valued for its relative simplicity and smooth integrations with hundreds of other apps. In fact, you can connect data and build interactive dashboards without almost any technical expertise.

Looker Studio features 20+ native integrations, and over 800 partner connectors that can provide automated data flows for your dashboard needs. You can start building dashboards from scratch or grab one of the Looker Studio templates to speed things up significantly.

Dashboards in Looker Studio are also great for collaboration, both in terms of creation and usage later on. It’s easy to share a dashboard, customize it to fit your branding, and drill down into the data to obtain the needed insights.

Benefits of Looker Studio

• Free of charge.
• No need to even sign up if you have a Google account.
• Simple interface with powerful capabilities.
• Lots of flexibility to choose how you visualize the data.

Pricing of Looker Studio

Looker Studio is free. Note, however, that you may need to pay for connectors that bring the data to Looker Studio.

Looker Studio integrations

Currently, Looker Studio offers 21 native connectors that come free of charge, mostly connecting LS to other Google services such as BigQuery, GA4, Google Ads, or Sheets.

If there are no suitable native connectors, 800+ partner connectors are available. For most apps, you can find multiple services capable of importing the app’s data. Some apps, such as Coupler.io, can pull data into Looker Studio from dozens of supported sources and blend all needed data prior to its import to Looker Studio. This helps with Looker Studio’s performance, as it’s commonly known to be slow when tasked with combining multiple data sources itself.

AgencyAnalytics

AgencyAnalytics aims to simplify the life of marketing agencies. The platform helps bring all the clients’ data under one roof and allows for preparing ready-to-use reports in a fully automated manner.
AgencyAnalytics seamlessly integrates with dozens of marketing apps, allowing for automated imports and combining different sources on a report. The platform also features a drag & drop interface for building and customizing reports, white labels, and more.

The platform stands out with its advanced user management features. Its users can create separate accounts for their clients, assign appropriate permissions, and design reports suitable for each client. From a single screen, agency managers can monitor the metrics of all the clients, spot any issues, and react to them. All in a very user-friendly interface with no coding required.

Benefits of AgencyAnalytics

• Advanced user management perfectly suitable for agencies.
• Wide range of marketing integrations.
• Dashboards and reports ready within minutes.
• Fully customizable dashboard layouts.

Pricing of AgencyAnalytics

AgencyAnalytics offers a free 14-day trial with no credit card required. On top of that, there are three pricing plans available:

• Freelancer with a limited set of reports but suitable for small agencies ($12/month).
• Agency with most advanced features included and higher limits ($18/month).
• Enterprise with API access, custom permissions, and additional support options – this plan is priced individually.

AgencyAnalytics integrations

The platform offers over 70 integrations at the time of writing. These include Facebook Ads, GA4, Google Ads, Mailchimp, Shopify, Instagram Ads, and many more.

Coupler.io as a Databox alternative – detailed comparison

When searching for Databox competitors, Coupler.io often comes into the picture. No wonder – in just a few years, Coupler.io has gone  from a simple Google Sheets add-on to a powerful, yet simple, ETL platform, making it a viable Databox competitor. In fact, plenty of our users have previously used Databox but eventually chose Coupler.io to have more flexibility, build custom data solutions, or take advantage of more features for working with data.

Coupler.io is a platform that enables automated data transfers from your business apps into a spreadsheet, data warehouse, or Dataviz apps. On top of that, Coupler.io offers a data analytics consulting service which can make for an excellent alternative to Databox. Here’s why:

• Our team of data analysts can help you solve any challenges you have with data. It can be visualizing it but also refining your data infrastructure, automating business processes, cleaning, and transforming your data to make it suitable for analysis, and more. The sky’s the limit.
• Our service is platform-agnostic. We can build dashboards for you in Tableau, Power BI, Data Studio, and virtually any other BI tool. This way, you take advantage of the advanced visualization capabilities offered by these platforms and virtually unlimited customization options.
• We support you throughout the process, first learning about your vision, then developing the data solution you need, and working with you to align it with your business goals. We then give you a ready solution you can use without our help but will support you should any issues or questions arise. If you wish to build on top of the finished solution, we’re ready to jump on again.
• We build meaningful dashboards and help you with our expertise. We don’t just deliver X number of charts you requested. We learn about your problem and figure out the best way to solve it with data. See the examples of our dashboard and get in touch to see how we can help.

Databox vs. Coupler.io – when to pick each?

There’s no denying that Databox and Coupler.io are quite different services, albeit used for very similar purposes – solving problems with data. Neither solution will work for every scenario, so the choice comes down to your individual circumstances.

Comparing Databox and Coupler.io as a Databox alternative, we look at the particular situations when either service may be more suitable.

When you want to harness the power of BI tools

Choose: Coupler.io
One of the places where Databox falls short of the competition is the visualization options. The available charts are good enough for basic needs, such as calculating metrics, aggregating sales, expenses, etc. Databox may add more in the future, but they’ll probably never catch up with Databox alternatives, such as Tableau or PowerBI.

What if you, for example, want to develop an interactive map of where your clients are, with an ability to drill down on specific regions, types of products, stages of the pipeline, and more? Such and many other types of visualizations are available by default in many BI tools, but you won’t find them in Databox.

Another argument behind using BI tools for analysis is their forecasting capabilities. Tools like Tableau or Power BI can use machine learning algorithms to analyze your past performance and draw conclusions about what the future may hold. It can be predicting your future sales or expenses, forecasting the demand for products, optimizing the allocation of resources, etc. Databox is more for analyzing the past, while BI tools tend to also look into the future.

When you need a quick solution and know what you need

Choose: Databox
There’s no denying that Databox is an excellent option when you need to build a dashboard quickly, largely due to the existing set of templates for each supported app. They may not show precisely what you were hoping for from the get-go, but it’s easy to drop new metrics onto the dashboard from the dozens available and adjust them to your needs.
So, if:

• Speed is your priority,
• Your app(s) are natively supported by Databox, and
• The available templates visualize, more or less, the metrics you wanted to show

Then, we would recommend that you don’t look for a Databox alternative. Chances are you won’t find any better options on the market.

However, if the existing templates in Databox don’t work for your needs, you’ll need to build a dashboard from scratch. The more custom elements you add, the higher the complexity of a task. This directly translates into a longer development time that often grows exponentially as you add more and more elements.

At some point, you may find yourself spending more time on a dashboard built with Databox than you would have had choosing an alternative solution from the start.

When you need a custom solution

Choose: Coupler.io
Databox offers excellent dashboard templates and a drag & drop builder. They also offer to help you finish up a dashboard of your choice. It can involve, for example, adding a new metric or looking at the data from a different perspective. However, if you need more customization, you’re probably on your own.

Suppose, for example, that you need a custom product dashboard harnessing the data from a database and a multitude of services you use. It can be done to some extent in Databox if you bring data engineers on board, but you’ll encounter platform limitations at some point.

Data projects we pick up at Coupler.io often encompass other areas, too, such as data automation. It’s common for businesses to set up automations between apps they use. For example, marketing, support, and accounting apps can be feeding data into a CRM so that its users know everything there is to know about their clients.  

For any custom projects that involve much more than a dashboard for a specific app, we recommend looking for Databox alternatives. It will be faster to build them and may also prove more cost-effective. 

When you have a limited budget, prefer to start slow

Choose: Databox (or look for another alternative to Databox).
Coupler.io hires best-in-class data analysts and engineers. As each solution is custom-built, it requires a certain amount of time to build and comes with a higher price tag, at least up front. We don’t have fixed pricing as every solution differs, but please feel free to schedule a free consultation, and we’ll try to find a cost-effective way to solve your problem.

Databox isn’t cheap by any means, and, as some users point out, you may need to be on the most expensive plan to get the most value out of the product. So, in the long run, you may end up spending more than you would have on a custom solution.

However, if price is your main reason for searching for Databox alternatives, consider, for example, Google Data Studio. It’s not as intuitive as Databox, and you may need some hours to conjure a proper dashboard, but it’s among the easiest to grasp data visualization tools. Moreover, it’s free to use and integrates seamlessly with many apps, mostly from Google’s ecosystem. See, for example, our guide on integrating Shopify with Data Studio.

When you need to organize your data before visualizing it

Choose: Coupler.io
Databox deals very well with demonstrating data fetched from a single app. It’s also capable of blending data, as in mixing data coming from different apps to produce better insights. That is, as long as your data is fit for such blending.

Quite often, data coming from different apps isn’t all that straightforward to mix. It can use different date formats, or contain lots of typos, missing values, ambiguous column names, etc. Such datasets must be cleaned before uploading them to Databox, making the process much more technical and time-consuming.

Coupler.io makes it easy to clean the data prior to importing it to its final destination. The Transform module inside the app lets you add or remove columns, rename them, create calculable formulas, apply filters, sorting, and more. You can also combine data from different sources this way and make the joint dataset ready for analysis.

Alternative to Databox – recap

The Databox alternatives we covered in this article are quite different tools. Which will work best for you depends very much on your individual circumstances. Here are some suggestions you may find useful:

• If you need to build a dashboard quickly, go with Dashthis or Trevor.
• If you value flexibility in choosing your visualization methods, go with Coupler.io or Looker Studio.
• If you’re building a dashboard for a single app, e.g. an advertising platform, go with Trevor or Dashis, or grab a Looker Studio dashboard template from Coupler.io.
• If you need to blend different data sources, go with GoodData, Dataddo, or Coupler.io.
• If you’re building marketing reports for multiple clients, go with AgencyAnalytics.
• If you want to preview and transform your data before it’s put on reports, go with Coupler.io, Dataddo, or GoodData.
• If you need an analytical solution that you can integrate into your application, go with GoodData.
• If you have some analytical skills on board, go with Looker Studio and connect the data with either Coupler.io or Dataddo.
• If you’re in need of a custom data project and lack the skills to build one, hire data exports from Coupler.io or GoodData.
• If you have a very limited budget, go with Trevor, or Dashthis (both feature free plans), or check native connectors for the free Looker Studio.

Many thanks for reading.

Back to Blog