Comparative insight into how Kato differentiates itself from Redash

Kato is an open-source online analytics platform. It allows anyone with a data set to import their data, manipulate or merge different sources and visualize it and finally share the data with anyone and everyone. It’s feature set rival that of other online tools like Redash, Tableau, Sisense, etc.

My name is Achin and I am the product manager for Kato. In today’s post, I will offer a comparative insight into how Kato differentiates itself from Redash and what added features it provides over what’s already in Redash. So let’s get started:

Sharing

Kato provides advanced sharing and access restriction features. Redash does provide the ability to create user groups but Kato’s implementation is multidimensional and provides different access levels for user actions and data access. So, for example, one user can view a set of reports but edit only a subset of those.

Transformations

While redash allows you to get the data you want by writing a SQL query and prepare a visualization, there’s no way to manipulate the data after the query execution and before it’s visualized. Kato provides a whole another layer called transformations. This adds a powerful mechanism that lets the user change the data and perform some changes to the data without having access to or changing the data query.

Custom APIs

Kato allows users to fetch data using user’s custom APIs from their own products. This ability is not available in Redash as of writing this. Using external APIs data user can integrate Kato with virtually any third party software. Integration with custom or in-house software is especially frictionless.

Filters

The global filters available in redash only work on two levels, report and global. Kato’s filters can be defined at the visualization and dashboard level as well. So default values for filters can be different for visualizations of the same query. This lets us use the same query to create different visualizations with different filter values.

Dropdowns

Kato also allows the user to define a dropdown of predefined values of a filter for any report or dashboard. This lets the user create restricted values that change based on user’s roles and can be used to better restrict data within the same report.

Roles & Privileges Carry Over

Using Kato’s auth override, users can implement their own app’s login with Kato. This lets them more closely integrate Kato with their own product and user Kato’s dashboard as their own analytics backbone. This enables things like seamless login into Kato (user never logs into Kato, only the base product), carry over user’s roles and privileges from your own app into Kato. This will make it such that they only see the reports that are shared with their respective roles.

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