Since Salesforce's acquisition of Datorama in 2018 and its rebranding to Marketing Cloud Intelligence, the platform has barely evolved. As a result, there has been an increasing number of teams speculating about Datorama going away, complaining about the platform and actively looking for alternative solutions.

For large-scale digital marketing teams, Datorama and Clarisights take center stage. On the surface, both platforms look similar and cover the same scope. Thus, understanding the true differences can be challenging.

In this blog post, we aim to show precisely where Clarisights and Marketing Cloud Intelligence/Datorama diverge and why Clarisights continues to be the preferred choice for leading companies worldwide.

Key factors to consider

Before investing in any new marketing analytics technology, make sure it's secure and performs well. But don't stop there – here are five essential questions to ask:

1 - Does the vendor have the functionality to support my team’s use cases, and will it scale with future use cases?

2 - Will the platform support my various teams and stakeholders? Does it enable marketers to self-serve?

3 - Is the pricing transparent, scalable, and value-driven?

4 - Is the platform enterprise-ready?

5 - Does the platform have a track record of exceeding the expectations of current companies using the software?

Let’s look at Clarisights and Marketing Cloud Intelligence using the framework of these questions as the basis of comparison.

Use cases

Does the vendor have the functionality to support my team’s use cases, and will it scale with future use cases?

When it comes to use case support, Clarisights offers more integrations and possibilities to unlock insights and optimization opportunities. 

• Data reliability and scalability - Clarisights has the most reliable and fastest data integrations. Its proprietary data warehouse ensures minor loading times for dashboards.

• Data modeling - Datorama’s data mapping process is manual and time consuming and custom API integrations require significant development. Clarisights offers data joining and harmonization out of the box, down to the most granular level.

• Data sharing/exports - Datorama ability to share data externally is quite limited, leading to silos and lock-in. Clarisights, on the other hand, enables harmonized data exports to any data warehouse or storage location.

• Use cases - given the highest quality integrations (channels, Google Analytics, MMP, etc), Clarisights is able to provide additional insights on e.g., creative optimization, paid search-organic cannibalization, auction insights.

With the digital marketing landscape evolving faster than ever - API updates, new channels, etc - the gap between Datorama and Clarisights will only increase. 

Effective self-service for marketers

Will the platform support my various teams and stakeholders? Does it enable marketers to self-serve?

Since the inception of Clarisights, we’ve been maniacally focused on creating an analytics platform for marketers. This means enabling effective self-service - i.e., marketers can freely explore data to go from questions to insights in minutes.

We’ve continued to innovate on this front, building no-code features like custom dimensions to enable marketers to group data, pivot tables for easier exploration, new visualization possibilities, etc. All no-code possibilities for marketers to explore data, add/edit metrics and dimensions and build their reports.

Datorama has yet to adopt all of these features. As a result, marketers are provided with static, inflexible dashboards and can’t explore data to uncover insights. Most changes around metrics, dimensions, reports and dashboards are dependent on data/BI support, leading to slow time to insight and missed optimization opportunities. Data teams get drowned in requests and struggle to keep up, taking away from critical data products, such as MMM, Incrementality and Attribution.

Transparent pricing, no hidden fees

Datorama plans are based on the number of users and data volume/rows. In addition, new integrations or any significant changes that require support are charged as part of professional services. This model hinders collaboration across teams and partners, and leads to hidden fees and costs.

From the start, we’ve always tried to keep our pricing transparent as possible, aligned with business value and designed for collaboration. This is why we offer value-based pricing and charge based on the number of data sources. With unlimited users.

With Clarisights, you never have to worry about your data volume or adding more users (including external partners). In addition, a dedicated technical CSM provides consulting services and quick support over a joint Teams/Slack group, weekly open office hours and quarterly business reviews.

Enterprise readiness

Is the platform enterprise-ready?

Since the beginning, we’ve been building Clarisights with some of the most sophisticated and large enterprises, such as Uber, Delivery Hero and HelloFresh. Thus, Clarisights is designed specifically to handle enterprise-level scale, complexity, collaboration and security. This includes:

• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): granular controls to define what actions users can take within workspace resources.

• Audit Logs: a historical record of user actions so workspace admins can easily review changes and easily troubleshoot problems

• Collaboration workflows: users can share reports and dashboards with anyone using a link, and can take notes next to dashboards

On the surface, Datorama also covers most of these requirements. However, in real practice, users often complain about the low user-friendliness and having to find many workarounds to make it work on Datorama. The lack of product development for many years leads to this stalled state. 

The devil is in the details

Does the platform have a track record of exceeding the expectations of current companies using the software?

We work with large-scale companies to allow them to make data-informed decisions at the speed of business. This includes companies like Uber, HelloFresh and Udemy.

We’ve also supported several large-scale migrations from Datorama to Clarisights for companies like Universal Music Group.

• Universal Music Group were running into data reliability issues and lack of self-service. Connectors were often broken and data was delayed. In addition, marketers couldn’t self-serve, making the data team a significant bottleneck drowning in tickets. With Clarisights, marketers are able to go from questions to insights in minutes and unlock new possibilities across all channels.

Marketing and data teams continue to choose Clarisights over Datorama due to the maturity of our product, pricing model, stellar customer support and our commitment to leading new innovation and solving our customers' most complex challenges.

Migration process and pilot

Migrating from one platform to another sounds scary, risky and time-consuming. But it doesn’t have to be this way. We always prioritize time to value and seamless onboarding:

• Go live in one week

• Minimal data/BI support required

• Zero disruption and data loss

• Try before you buy