Making the most of third-party apps on Salesforce
How can organizations ensure success with their third-party apps on Salesforce? our Director of Managed Services, Bruno Pimenta, explains.
Read moreEverybody knows how important Analytics is for any business. It can help you make key improvements, Everybody knows how important Analytics is for any business. It can help you make key improvements, find the root causes of problems and highlight areas where you can save money. But what if analytics dashboards could represent not only the boring numbers but also tell the story to the people who see them? In this article, we’re going to show you some of the best dashboard editor tools on the Salesforce AppExchange which will help you transform standard Salesforce reports into creative visualization tools to bring your Salesforce dashboard game to the next level. We aggregated the list to represent different angles so that you can find the best option for your business needs – some tools offer comprehensive multidimensional customization, others enhance just one aspect of data representation.
So, let’s get started. Here they are, in no particular order:
1. Tableau CRM (formerly Einstein Analytics)
What it is: Tableau CRM is a powerful, Salesforce-native application that helps to visually monitor and analyze key business metrics. It allows you to create interactive dashboards that help to better understand your Salesforce reports and combine them with data from other sources.
Who it’s for: Sales executives, sales managers, sales reps, account executives.
Product Features:
- It offers a variety of ready-to-use dashboard templates (including “smart” options) as well as an opportunity to create your own dashboard with intuitive wizards that will help you effortlessly add widgets.
- You can choose from over 35 chart types and use customizable filters or divide the content into multiple pages in order to easily emphasize particular metrics.
- To simplify team cooperation, you can optimize the dashboard view and make it mobile-friendly, restore any previously existing dashboard versions and work behind the scenes collaboratively on new charts before they are published.
- Can be also connected with big data, SQL databases, spreadsheets, cloud apps both on-premises and in the cloud.
- It provides powerful tools to explore and reveal the deeper meaning of your insights.
Pricing: Starting at 75$ USD per month.
2. Standard Salesforce Lightning dashboards
What it is: It is an out-of-the-box Salesforce option that offers dashboards with underlying reports based on standard objects and fields. It is available for all Salesforce clients and although its offer is limited you can still gain data visibility, opportunity detection and easy access to pipeline patterns without a high cost.
Who it’s for: Sales executives, sales managers, sales reps, account executives, marketing, customer service.
Product Features:
- Contains 10 dashboard template types in 14 color themes.
- To maximize data visibility, components can be sorted in different ways and users can add and apply various filters or link them with specific reports
- To enhance team collaboration, charts can be easily embedded into the home tab and still remain interactive (can be refreshed and filters can still be applied).
- The owner can choose a group of people that will have access to a particular dashboard.
- Users can subscribe to dashboards and receive scheduled, personalized email updates.
- To simplify data sharing, they can be organized in dedicated folders with controlled access.
Pricing: Free.
3. DashboardX
What it is: DashboardX is a powerful, free app from VRP Consulting, that enables users to transform standard Salesforce reports into new custom dashboards using creative design tools. It also offers effortless data distribution through email subscriptions and real-time updates.
Who it’s for: Sales executives, sales managers, sales reps, account executives, marketing, finance.
Product Features:
- Offers a wide selection of predefined dashboard designs: linear maps, sliced charts, geo location maps, and many non-conventional shapes.
- Its most unique feature is that you can upload your own images such as your company logo, a figure connected to your industry, a company mascot, or a representation of a particular insight – the possibilities are endless!
- Allows you to customize the font and color scheme to match your company’s branding.
- It also provides dashboard email subscription and allows daily, weekly, monthly or specific time updates.
- Every single dashboard that you create can be shared with other Salesforce and non-Salesforce users in the same collective way as Google Docs.
- Dashboards can be transferred to the account page in the Salesforce solution, with live mode updates to provide real-time data.
- It allows you to create compelling reports, specific internal documentation, and powerful presentations that are in sync with the visual identity of your company.
Pricing: Free.
4. Klipfolio
What it is: Klipfolio is a business real-time dashboard app that allows you to turn your Salesforce reports into attractive visualizations and combine them with other key business metrics.
Who it’s for: All sales management, finance, marketing.
Product Features:
- It offers 10+ built-in widgets to display your Salesforce data in a way that maximizes their impact.
- It also allows you to collate and share metrics from multiple streams to get a complete picture of your business.
- It is compatible with cloud services, SQL databases, Excel, JSON, XML and XMLA databases.
- Makes presenting your dashboards on wall-boards or browsers easy
- It is mobile-friendly and supports data mash-ups and advanced functions and formulas.
Pricing: $29 USD per company per month.
5. BIME
What it is: BIME is a cloud platform that facilitates data analysis and dashboard management allowing for the incorporation of Salesforce data with information from other sources.
Who it’s for: All sales management, finance, marketing.
Product Features:
- Connects key Salesforce statistics with a variety of online and on-premise streams including spreadsheets, Google Analytics, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, Microsoft Azure, and SAP HANA.
- It contains 25 visualization options, from traditional to relational analysis and word clouds.
- It enables you to join the data together using a specially designed query tool
- Offers advanced calculation engine.
- It allows dashboards to be embedded into the Salesforce environment.
Pricing: Starting at $490 USD per company per month.
6. AppExchange Dashboard Pack for Sales, Marketing and Service
What it is: AppExchange Dashboard Pack for Sales, Marketing and Service is a starter pack of seven rudimentary dashboards that provide real-time insights into sales, marketing and support. It’s part of the Force™ Collection curated by Salesforce Labs, a community project.
Who it’s for: All sales management, marketing, customer service.
Product Features:
- Provides a basic overview of accounts by type, active users, contacts by industry, documents by folder and reports by folder.
- It offers simple dashboards for lead flow, support KPIs and sales KPIs.
- You can also gain insights into Salesforce adoption and usage.
Pricing: Free
Which AppExchange dashboard editor tool is right for you?
We all know getting the most of your Salesforce reports, by exploring your data through dashboards, can lead you to groundbreaking insights about your key strategies. So, improving this functionality is always a hot topic. All these applications can help you understand and showcase your data, all providing you with different options. Some give you more control of the look and feel of the data, whilst others focus on combining it with other business metrics.
Hopefully, this list will help you choose the best option for you from the AppExchange. Of course, we’re a little biased – our favorite app is ours: DashboardX. See if you agree – you can find DashboardX right here on the AppExchange.
Dmitry Zhugin,
CTO VRP Consulting
About the author
Dmitry Zhugin is a Chief Technology Officer for VRP Consulting. He is an established software specialist with 10 years of experience in Salesforce Architecture.
