Dashflow vs. Supermetrics

What is Supermetrics?

• Overview: Supermetrics is a data integration tool that pulls marketing data from over 150 platforms into reporting tools like Google Sheets, Excel, Looker Studio, and data warehouses.
• Key Value Proposition: Streamlines raw data collection and storage in order to create data views for reporting across diverse marketing platforms.

What is Dash-Flow.io?

• Overview: Dash-Flow.io is a marketing data & governance platform that unifies marketing, web, and CRM data into a single, high-quality data model optimized for BI tools like Power BI and Tableau.
• Key Value Proposition: Unified, high-quality marketing data model combined with CRM data and intelligent data governance.

Target Customers

• Supermetrics:
  • Marketers & agencies needing flexible data views, reports, and storage options
  • Businesses with in-house domain experts and engineers for their data use cases
• Dash-Flow.io:
  • Businesses that struggle with marketing data quality, lack IT resources, and need data governance
  • Businesses that quickly need a standardized marketing data model to satisfy stakeholder reporting and BI analysts
  • Businesses with at least $50.000 ad spend per year that want to optimize their ad spend by connecting CRM (revenue, margin, cancellations) with marketing data to optimize ROAS and budget allocation
  • Business with high traffic websites that aim to smartly monetize organic content, deploy content attribution and maximize profit accross organic and paid marketing activities

Feature Comparison: Supermetrics vs. Dash-Flow.io

Data Sources/Connectors Supported

• Supermetrics: 150+ connectors of different data types (Marketing, CRM, E-Mail, E-Commerce, Tracking)
• Dash-Flow.io: Focused on major marketing integrations

Data Storage

• Supermetrics: Connects to Google Sheets, Excel, Looker Studio, BigQuery, Snowflake, and other data warehouses.
• Dash-Flow.io: Exports to Azure Blob storage for performance and compatibility with BI tools (e.g., Power BI, Tableau, Qlik, Metabase)

Data Transformation/Modeling

• Supermetrics: Limited transformation; relies on domaine experts and destination tools for complex modeling.
• Dash-Flow.io: Automated data cleaning, matching, and unification into a single marketing data model covering 95% of use cases. Includes algorithms to unshorten links (e.g., lkd.in), deduplicate data, clean UTM tags, join and unify data correctly

Reporting/Visualization Options

• Supermetrics: Flexible dashboards in connected tools (e.g., Looker Studio); supports custom reports.
• Dash-Flow.io: Pre-built Power BI templates, customizable for specific needs; optimized for dynamic filter relations handling up to 10M rows.

Automated Attribution Models

• Supermetrics: Not available; relies on external tools or manual setup for attribution modeling.
• Dash-Flow.io: Built-in automated attribution models that integrate marketing and CRM data (revenue, margin, cancellations) for cross-channel budget optimization and advanced ROAS analysis.

Data Governance

• Supermetrics: Not available; lacks built-in data governance features.
• Dash-Flow.io: Provides advanced data governance, including UTM parameter tracking, click/session quality analysis, detection of untracked traffic, and AI-driven insights for accountability and compliance. Enables marketers to ensure data accuracy, transparency, and auditability across all marketing channels.

Pricing Example

For 12 marketing connections, data pipelines, daily refresh, and 4 million data rows without data governance:

• Supermetrics: ~ 1200-1500 / month
• Dash-Flow.io: 499 / month

Where Does Supermetrics Excel?

• Broad Connector Range: Supports 150+ platforms, ideal for diverse marketing ecosystems.
• Flexibility: Flexible for building tailored data views and/or export to multiple data destinations.
• Looker Studio: Tight integration with Looker Studio.
• Agency-Friendly: Supports multi-client reporting with white-label options.

Where Does Dash-Flow.io Excel?

• Data Governance: Ensures data quality and accountability with advanced governance features.
• Focused Integrations: Connects to the most important marketing and CRM platforms.
• Unified Data Model: Delivers a single, standardized model for all marketing data.
• Automated Data Cleaning & Unification: Cleans, matches, and unifies data automatically (see features comparison)
• Automated Attribution Models: Integrates marketing and CRM data for cross-channel attribution and ROAS optimization.
• Performance: Optimized for BI tools to ingest large, flat files from blob storage.
• No Engineering or Domain Expert Needed: Fast onboarding without custom ETL or technical setup.

Common Use Cases: Which to Choose When?

• Scenario 1: Struggling with poor marketing data quality (e.g., missing/wrong UTM tags, mismatching conversions) –> Choose Dash-Flow.io
• Scenario 2: Stakeholders need unified, accurate reporting on major paid and social media channels but lack IT resources for custom pipelines. –> Choose Dash-Flow.io
• Scenario 3: Building many custom reports with varied data views (session, hit, page level). –> Choose Supermetrics
• Scenario 4: Managing a large landscape of 20+ marketing integrations. –> Choose Supermetrics

Supermetrics: Drawbacks & Limitations

• High Costs: Especially with data warehouse exports, pricing can be steep, with plans starting at $29/month for limited connectors, and additional destinations or sources significantly increasing costs.
• Poor Support: Support is often slow and unhelpful; issues, such as those with the HubSpot connector, can remain unresolved for over a month, with users needing to proactively contact support for updates.
• Technical Issues: Buggy connectors (e.g., Facebook Ads) can result in missing data or sync issues, with some users reporting persistent problems with query reliability and dashboard functionality.
• Data Quality: Data issues, such as incomplete datasets or discrepancies in Facebook Insights and Google Analytics 4 data, complicate accurate reporting and require manual validation.
• Usability: The interface is unintuitive and presents a steep learning curve for complex queries, with manual setup and customization of data pipelines often required, making onboarding challenging.
• Scalability: The popular option to dump data to Google Sheets is not scalable for high-traffic websites or complex reporting infrastructures, struggling with large datasets and lacking robust data storage.

Supermetrics: Example of Poor Data Quality

• Incorrect Data: Carousel Ads / Multi-Product Ads, for example, are reported incorrectly in Supermetrics. We cover this in a separate blog post.
• Duplicate Data: Supermetrics has no de-duplication algorithms that make sure your data rows are unique. This can cause data errors of 1% to 15%.
• Sampling: Supermetrics is sampling data over longer time periods, while Dash-Flow.io performs precise data-refreshing.

Dash-Flow.io: Drawbacks & Limitations

• Limited Integrations: Focuses only on major marketing platforms, not suitable for niche or extensive (20+) data sources.
• Pre-Defined Data Model: Dash-Flow.io focuses on a session-based and path-based data model. Less flexible for users needing custom data views outside the unified model.
• Less Customization: Limited ability to create highly customized data models or transformations compared to DIY ETL or flexible tools.
• Looker Studio Connection Requires BigQuery: Connecting Dash-Flow.io data to Looker Studio is possible but requires setting up an export to BigQuery, adding extra steps.