You've read the criteria. Now comes the part where you have to apply them to real vendors with real sales processes, trial environments of varying quality, and marketing materials that are written to obscure the differences you're actually trying to find.
This chapter is about how to run an evaluation that actually answers your questions — not one that concludes with "they all seemed fine in the demo."
The Shortlist — How Many Vendors to Evaluate Seriously
Two or three. More than that and the evaluation becomes a project in itself. Use the architecture checklist from Chapter 3 to eliminate vendors that can't run in your deployment environment or don't support your database — that usually cuts the field significantly before you start trials.
Vendors worth understanding before you shortlist, for context on where Yurbi sits in the market: Sisense (strong platform, opaque pricing, enterprise sales process, floor around $21K/year); Logi Symphony (four acquired platforms merged — Logi, Dundas, Izenda, Exago — under PE ownership, no published pricing, integration complexity from the merger); Power BI Embedded (consumption pricing, Microsoft ecosystem, no self-hosted path); GoodData and Reveal BI (both strong on features, both cloud-first, limited self-hosted options). If any of those is on your shortlist, the comparison pages at yurbi.com/vs/ have the specifics.
What to Ask Before the Demo
Before you invest time in a demo, get three things in writing from every vendor on your shortlist:
Full pricing for your scenario. Your user count, your expected server count, your deployment model. Not a range — a specific number, or a specific formula that produces a number. If they won't give you pricing before a sales call, that's information about how the relationship works.
Feature confirmation for your tier. The specific capabilities you need — multi-tenant isolation, dynamic data sources, white-labeling, SSO, scheduled exports, row-level security — confirmed as included at the tier you're evaluating. "Available on higher plans" in response to any of these is a red flag before you've spent trial time.
What "support" means. Who answers your support tickets — a helpdesk queue, offshore tier-1 support, or engineers who built the product? What's the SLA? What's the escalation path? Support quality during the evaluation reflects support quality in production.
Running a Trial That Actually Tells You Something
The most common trial mistake is evaluating the platform against sample data in a demo environment. That tells you the platform works when it's pre-configured with clean data. It doesn't tell you whether it works with your data, your schema, your authentication system, or your multi-tenant architecture.
A trial that produces useful signal has three components:
Your data, your schema. Connect the trial environment to a copy of your actual database. Not a sanitized sample — your real schema. The semantic layer configuration and data model work only get evaluated against real complexity. Edge cases in your schema are exactly what you're trying to surface during the trial, not after go-live.
Your multi-tenant test. Set up at least two test tenants with different data. Test cross-tenant isolation as described in Chapter 4. Test that per-tenant branding applies correctly. Test SSO with your actual authentication system — not a dummy token. If any of these don't work during the trial, they won't work in production.
A real integration by your developer. The developer who will own the integration should do the trial work — not a vendor-guided walkthrough where they configure everything for you. How long it takes your developer to get from installation to a working embedded report in your application is the most honest measure of integration complexity. Every hour of unexplained friction in the trial represents a risk multiplier in production.
The Questions That Reveal the Most
Beyond the technical checklist, a few questions in the vendor conversation tell you the most about what the relationship will look like after you sign:
"Tell me about a customer who left and why." Every vendor loses customers. How they answer this question — whether they acknowledge it honestly or deflect — tells you how they handle difficult conversations. You'll have difficult conversations with your analytics vendor over a multi-year relationship.
"What's on your roadmap for the next six months?" And then: "How often do you actually ship?" A vendor with a published roadmap and weekly release cadence is meaningfully different from one with a vague roadmap and quarterly releases. The features your customers will ask for in year two depend on the vendor's release velocity.
"What's the renewal price?" Flat-tier published pricing renews at the same rate. Negotiated pricing gets renegotiated. The honest answer is simple. A non-committal answer is a signal.
"Is this one codebase or an integration of multiple products?" Relevant for Logi Symphony specifically — but worth asking any vendor with a complex product history. Integrated acquisitions carry hidden technical debt that surfaces in unexpected ways: features that work differently across the merged platforms, support teams that specialize in different legacy codebases, roadmap conflicts between the acquired products.
Red Flags That Should Eliminate a Vendor
| Red flag | What it signals |
|---|---|
| Won't provide pricing without a sales call | Pricing is negotiated; leverage shifts after you've invested evaluation time |
| Multi-tenant isolation relies on your application filtering data | Security model depends on your code never making a mistake — not an acceptable architecture |
| SSO requires professional services to implement | Standard integration is non-standard for them; expect friction throughout the relationship |
| Trial requires a vendor-managed environment or their own data | They know the platform looks different against your data — that's the thing to evaluate |
| Key features confirmed verbally but not in writing pre-contract | Verbal confirmations don't survive procurement; get feature inclusions in the contract |
| Support escalation requires a higher-tier plan | You'll discover you need escalation when something breaks — not a good time to discover it costs more |
| Recent acquisition with ongoing platform integration | Roadmap uncertainty; support team divided between legacy platforms; renewal terms may change |
Making the Call
After a real trial against your data, the decision usually becomes obvious. The platform either works for your architecture or it doesn't. The integration either took your developer a day or it took a week and required vendor hand-holding. The multi-tenant isolation either passed your tests or it didn't.
What's left after the technical evaluation is the relationship assessment: do you trust this vendor to be a good partner over a three-to-five year commitment? Do they answer support questions directly? Do they tell you about gaps honestly or let you discover them? Is the pricing model one you can plan around?
Embedded analytics becomes infrastructure in your product. The vendor becomes a long-term partner whether you planned for it that way or not. Evaluate accordingly.
Next Steps
If you're ready to trial Yurbi: Download at yurbi.com/trial. No sales call, no consultant engagement. Install it, connect your database, test your architecture. Our support team — the engineers who built it — are available throughout the trial.
If you want a guided technical walkthrough: Book a demo. Not a product marketing presentation — a technical conversation about your specific architecture, your data model, and how Yurbi handles it. We'll tell you honestly if it's not the right fit.
If you're still in the build vs. buy decision: Start with the Build vs. Buy guide and the cost calculator. Get the numbers right before you evaluate platforms.
If you're comparing Yurbi against a specific vendor: The comparison pages have the side-by-side specifics — pricing, feature coverage, deployment model. Or bring us a quote via the calculator and we'll show you what the comparison looks like at your numbers.
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