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Chart.IO : Google Analytics For Idiots

From Chart.io’s website:

"Tired of waiting for IT to run the reports you need? Don’t want to spend forever learning SQL? Fed up with dumping results to Excel? Chart.io lets you interact with your database data intuitively via drag and drop."

Well if your business needs reports and you can’t "get IT to run them" your business has problems bigger than what Chart.io’s pretty pictures can solve.  Chart.io is really just a slightly dumbed down version the Google Charts API.  They don’t do anything you couldn’t do in 10 minutes with Google Charts, and they don’t have an SLA so if they lose your data you are screwed.

Chart.io has some interesting features that remind me of Microsoft Access,  after you give them your data, they analyze it and present some charts they think will interest you.  The problem is that any data you would want analyzed is probably data you shouldn’t share with a third party.

"Chart.io does not own and shall not be responsible for any data, information or material that you submit to the Service in the course of using the Service."

If you take the time to learn a Chart API, you often don’t need to expose you data base to risk and you don’t have to have limit yourself to the types of charts that Chart.io provides.

Be aware that because of the terms of service of chart.io you can’t use any data that is protected by an NDA, HIPPA, or international treaty.  So if for example you are a small SEO/SEM firm and want to put your client charts in the "cloud", you’d likely be breaking your NDA with your client.

-- Brandon Wirtz

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Filed in: Industry News