David Cummings on Startups

Real-Time Lightweight Business Dashboards

Written by

David Cummings

in

, ,

One of the trends we’ll be seeing this decade is more intuitive reporting and real-time dashboards. At Pardot we employed LED Scoreboards whereby we had a large TV mounted on the wall with our current quarter’s goals displayed in a Google Spreadsheet that was manually updated daily. From a technology standpoint, we had looked into real-time business dashboards but hadn’t gotten around to implementing one.

Here are the real-time lightweight business dashboards I’ve seen on the market:

  • Geckoboard –
    $19/month for 20 connections
    12 employees on LinkedIn (source)
  • Cyfe –
    $19/month for unlimited everything
    1 employee on LinkedIn (source)
  • Leftronic –
    $42/month for 2 dashboards
    10 employees on LinkedIn (source)
  • Ducksboard –
    $25/month for 3 dashboards
    9 employees on LinkedIn (source)

At a glance, it looks to be a small but competitive market. Real-time lightweight dashboards will become even more common as more and more businesses switch to products in the cloud with open APIs. I’m looking forward to trying them out.

What else? Do you use a real-time lightweight business dashboard and what do you think of it?

Comments

5 responses to “Real-Time Lightweight Business Dashboards”

  1. toddschnick Avatar
    toddschnick

    have been really enjoying your posts, thanks for what you are doing here. would love to feature you on our “business transformation radio” podcast. do let me know if you’re interested. here is a recent show, to give you some context…

    Reply
  2. Alex Sherman (@alex_sherman) Avatar
    Alex Sherman (@alex_sherman)

    Thanks for sharing, David. There is an increase in demand for dashboards like these. Especially now more than ever. Even small businesses that use multiple software applications can benefit from small simple dashboards like ducksboard. Helps make sense of all your current efforts.

    For the Pardot spreadsheet and dashboard that is manually updated, have you tried ifttt or zapier to automatically drop those sales numbers into the spreadsheet?

    Reply
  3. Daniel Roberts Avatar
    Daniel Roberts

    Knowing the score is so important. After you blogged about it recently, I decided it was well worth the investment. Used a monitor we already had and bought a raspberry pi and GeckoBoard. Just put it up tonight actually. Looking at all the numbers in once place, they simultaneously cause feelings of excitement, guilt, and pride. Thanks for the recommendation!

    Reply
  4. Jane Carner Avatar
    Jane Carner

    I’ve seen many dashboard apps before but Cyfe is the bestest in my opinion. I run multiple websites/startups and Cyfe helps me keep track of all of them from one place. Saves me hours!

    Reply
  5. Amanda Kendzior Avatar
    Amanda Kendzior

    As it’s been a few years since you posted this, there’s been a definite rise in competition and quality for these products. What we found, though, was that we wanted to display a dashboard along with other information that wasn’t limited to the product we bought…

    So we built it. Screensaver Ninja basically puts a browser in your screensaver, meaning you can display any website in realtime and in rotation via your idle computer. If you’re looking to add to your screen, please do check it out! screensaver.ninja

    Reply

Leave a reply to Alex Sherman (@alex_sherman) Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

More posts