SheetRocks vs. PowerBI

     Spreadsheets contain multitudes. Gamers use them to analyze stats, marketers use them to store customer lists, and brides use them to plan weddings. So, when people started to call SheetRocks "a spreadsheet on steroids," we had to ask ourselves: which spreadsheet muscles were we really bulking up? Prospective customers drew natural comparisons to business intelligence tools which are, in effect, also leveled-up spreadsheets. But SheetRocks is a very different athlete, and we'd like to explain why comparing SheetRocks to business intelligence tools like PowerBI or Tableau is really like comparing cats and dogs.

First, a little bit about what business intelligence tools are, and why they exist. Business Intelligence tools are essentially an analytical interface that sits on top of no-code or low-code data extraction tools. The holy grail of this type of software is "insights" – understanding your business data better so that you can make more data-informed decisions. In practice, they are often huge wastes of money that take up precious IT budget and deliver dashboards that nobody looks at or reports that decision-makers promptly ignore. That's because by their nature, business intelligence tools are a dead-end – the end of the road for your data.

In contrast, SheetRocks is a business operations tool. It's a place where work gets done, where data comes into *and* out of, where people collaborate and get organized and take action.

For example, imagine you're in sales. A tool like PowerBI might be able to show you a chart on which regions had the most sales last quarter. It's insightful, but largely passive. With SheetRocks, your sales team could be inputting their commissions into a custom mobile web app, using it to track their goals and quotas, and seeing which leads they need to call today.

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Or suppose you're planning a big event. With Tableau, you could visualize which marketing efforts drive the most signups. But with SheetRocks, you can make an app for your team to submit expenses, log and update vendor details, and see a personal calendar of what they need to do when.

Spreadsheet-backed apps built on top of SheetRocks are not about musing over what has already happened; they're about taking action in the present. So while business intelligence tools emphasize the analytical and data ingest aspects of the spreadsheet, SheetRocks flexes its muscles best when users take advantage of its extensibility and programmability to build apps that fit their business like Spandex, so that they can get work done without any friction.

SheetRocks is free to get started, and we'll help you or your devs onboard onto the platform. We can even build it for you if you're short on resources. Pump. Me. Up!