Source Medium vs Daton + Saras Consulting
Are you looking for a Source Medium Alternative?
Looking for a Source Medium alternative that can help you analyze your eCommerce data and drive business growth and profitability? Look no further! In this comparison, we will take a closer look at how Saras and Source Medium stack up against each other. As a CXO, you should leverage data to make informed decisions, and we are here to help you do just that.
As eCommerce brands grow, it becomes essential to have an up-to-date data infrastructure to manage operations, analyze progress, and drive growth. This is where Saras Analytics and Source Medium come into play.
Smaller to medium-sized businesses typically prefer using point solutions like Source Medium for eCommerce dashboarding and reporting. Although Source Medium only covers 70-80% of the data, it enables visualization through pre-built report templates. Moreover, Source Medium’s plug-and-play approach offers some speed advantage regarding initial implementation. However, due to its lack of customization, brands that use Source Medium may eventually need to turn to other platforms for their data requirements.
Source Medium may not be the best fit for a rapidly growing eCommerce brand seeking to scale from $10M to $100M. Because Source Medium is a turn-key dashboarding solution, it limits brands from achieving complete visibility of all eCommerce data, leading to no single source of truth.
Saras Analytics helps businesses establish a robust data foundation, manage data operations, and perform growth analytics.
At Saras, we provide the people, platforms, and processes to empower businesses to focus on actual insights while entrusting the data responsibility to us. This article compares both solutions to help you understand which one best suit your needs.
| Section | Feature | Daton + Saras Consulting | Source Medium |
| ELT | Data Pipeline | Daton or alternative | Source Medium |
| Data Ownership | In the client’s Data Warehouse/lake  | In Source Medium’s Data Warehouse | |
| Extensive Amazon Connectors | 8 | 2 | |
| eCommerce Connectors | 120+ | 28 | |
| Marketplace Connectors (Amazon, Shopify, Walmart) | 15 | 2 | |
| Reverse ETL |  | Only for enterprise customers | |
| New Source Development | No additional cost | Billed additionally | |
| Replication Frequency | Hourly (up to 15 minutes) | No information | |
| Transformations | dBT or Airflow | Source Medium | |
| Flexibility of Data Stack | Entire data stack is flexible | | |
| Access to Code | | No information | |
| BI & Consulting | Pre-built Reports | Will be built with existing templates | |
| Data Blending | Completely customizable | Source Medium | |
| Custom KPI |
|
| |
| Analytics Implementation | | | |
| Custom Business Intelligence | | | |
| Custom Attribution & Forecasting | | Only custom attribution | |
| Head of Data Services | | | |
| Single Vendor Full Stack Support | | | |
| Flexible Data Team | Scale up or down based on need | | |
| Pricing | Daton + Consulting charges | Unavailable | |
| White-label Dashboard | | | |
| Support | Slack, Email and Chat | Email and Slack | |
| Data Security | GDPR, SOC – 2 | PII | |
| Historical Data Availability | | No information |
eCommerce focused ELT pipeline
When you are using an out-of-the-box solution like Source medium you are limited to using the Source Medium ETL data pipeline and the sources they support. In case you are already using a data pipeline to bring in your data, then Source Medium does not offer the flexibility to bring in data using your current or other data pipelines.
However, with Saras, this is not a challenge. eCommerce brands use a Source Medium alternate like Daton or a data pipeline of their choice. Our no-code, eCommerce data pipeline, Daton, unifies data in trusted cloud data warehouses like Amazon Redshift, Google Big Query, Snowflake, or any data warehouse of your choice.
If you are using your existing data pipeline to bring in data, it is not a deal breaker for us! You can connect your data warehouse, build your desired dashboards, and draw actionable insights. Unlike Source Medium, our approach empowers teams with data, allowing brands the freedom to create insightful dashboards with reporting solutions they love to use.
Data Connectors
As brands scale, they experiment with a ton of tools and platforms to manage their business needs across functions and verticals. With a plug-and-play solution like Source Medium, brands are constrained by the platform supported data connectors and there is always a possibility that some data will still reside in silos. The advantage that Saras Analytics and Daton offer is we provide 100% eCommerce coverage allowing you to choose the tool/platform that meets your business needs while we work in the background to ensure that all the data is getting replicated to your data warehouse.
Amazon Data Connectors
Daton
Brands can bring all their Amazon data into a single data warehouse using Daton by Saras Analytics!
Unifying Amazon data will help understanding how customers discover, consider, and purchase their products.
Ultimately, brands optimize and plan investments, production schedules, marketing strategies to boost their Amazon business.
Amazon data connectors offered by Daton:
- Amazon Seller Central
- Amazon Vendor Central
- Amazon Marketing Stream
- Amazon Advertising
- Sponsored Display
- Sponsored Brands
- Sponsored Products
- Amazon DSP
- Amazon Attribution
Source Medium
Source Medium limits its users from bringing some Amazon data into Source Medium’s own data warehouse. Brands can only bring only Amazon Seller Central, and Amazon Ads data.
Amazon vendors cannot bring their Vendor Central data into Source Medium for further analysis.
eCommerce Data Connectors
Daton
Daton offers 150+ eCommerce data connectors, and if you have a connector requirement, we can build that for you for free!
Data from marketplaces, advertising platforms, customer support channels, CRMs, review managing tools, PoS and other tools, can be brought into your data warehouse using Daton connectors with no manual effort.
Explore all the eCommerce data connectors offered by Daton.
Source Medium
Source Medium allows brands to bring your eCommerce data from just 28 sources.
To bring data from sources that Source Medium does not allow, brands might have to opt for yet another ELT data pipeline or resort to the tedious manual reporting process.
In case, brands opt for using another ELT pipeline to bring their data, they cannot unify it with the rest of their data stored in Source Medium, thus leading to taking business decisions based on incomplete data!
Marketplace Connectors
Daton
Daton has 30+ marketplace data connectors including Walmart, Lazada, Kaufland and more (+ Amazon ecosystem).
Brands can truly unify all their data to build a single source of truth with Saras.
Source Medium
Meanwhile, Source Medium supports only 2 marketplaces i.e., Amazon Seller Central and Shopify.
To bring data from sources that Source Medium does not allow, brands might have to opt for yet another ELT data pipeline or resort to the tedious manual reporting process.
Data Ownership
Saras
Saras provides complete data ownership of your data, unlike Source Medium. As you know, we store your data in your own data warehouse.
This offers high flexibility, and brands can focus on growing their eCommerce brands with complete data ownership.
As a brand scales up, this serves as a huge advantage. As the data ownership is with you, you can choose to scale up or down based on your current requirements without worrying about starting from scratch.
Total data ownership leads to faster scalability and growth leading to business success.
Source Medium
Data ownership lies with Source Medium as the extracted data is stored in Source Medium’s own data warehouse.
Lack of data ownership means low flexibility and heavy dependency on Source Medium once they have been integrated.
The biggest problem here arises at the time of scaling when an eCommerce brand wants to shift into its own data warehouse or switch to a more holistic solution.
This creates a vendor lock-in as Brands will need to start their data journey from scratch. This limits their scalability as rebuilding a data stack is expensive and time-consuming.
Furthermore, Saras Analytics believes that data ownership with the customer is a crucial pillar, ensuring that customers do not face vendor-lock-in and data loss if they switch, which is common for turnkey solutions such as Source Medium.
As brands scale, they compromise between speed, scale, and cost regarding data initiatives. With Saras Analytics, brands can have it all, right from the start.
Data Storage
As eCommerce brands grow, the data requirements grow simultaneously. Solutions like Source Medium do not support flexible data storage. Brands cannot store their data in their own data warehouses of choice and rely heavily on Source Medium for data storage.
The idea of relying on a single platform for data warehousing and business intelligence may seem appealing in theory. It eliminates the need for transferring data across multiple platforms and thereby minimizes the risks commonly associated with data sharing.
Nonetheless, there are certain drawbacks to this approach. For instance, Source Medium’s warehousing solution may not offer the same level of features and flexibility as other data warehouses like Snowflake, Oracle Autonomous Database, or Google Big Query. Therefore, it might not be a suitable option for businesses that require advanced functionality, scale rapidly and looking for flexibility. Also, there is the concern regarding data ownership.
However, with Saras, eCommerce brands can bring their data from 150+ sources and store it in any data warehouse of their choice. The data is stored in your server, giving complete access and transparency to the code and data. Moreover, users can choose from 9 leading data warehouses to store your data in-
- Amazon Redshift
- Big Query
- Snowflake
- RDS MySQL
- Amazon S3
- GCP Postgres
- GCP MySQL
- ADW
- RDS Postgres
Therefore, any Source Medium alternative ELT tool needs to support not just the cloud data warehouses like Snowflake and Big Query, but also databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL and cloud data storages like Amazon S3 if customers want to take the data lake approach.
Data Replication Frequency
In addition to loading controls, having control over how frequently data is replicated into the data warehouse is also an essential criterion for eCommerce brands. While ELT tools claim to provide flexible scheduling options, most tools offer scheduling at an integration level where all the tables within an integration inherit the same schedule.
However, business requirements may demand more flexible scheduling routines where some tables in the integration replicate data faster, and some tables can be replicated at a slower frequency. When table-level schedules are not supported, customers must create and manage multiple integrations. Data replication frequency information is not available in the open to evaluate Source medium.
For example, you are running an ad for Back-to-School campaign. Having the ads, sales, and customer data daily and hourly can make or break your campaign! With insights ready to be analyzed, you can tweak your marketing campaigns, optimize your inventory to make it a success and boost your business growth. With Saras, get all your data replicated at an hourly frequency. Saras also offers a premium 15-minute data replication frequency.
New Source Development
Often with out-of-the-box BI Solutions like Source Medium, eCommerce brands need help getting custom sources developed that are important for them. Source Medium provides new source development for an additional cost. However, brands need to be sure of the timeline for the source and the additional cost they have to incur.
Saras, on the other hand, provides new source development for eCommerce brands for no additional cost. We understand how crucial it is to unify all your eCommerce data in your data warehouse.
Data Transformation
Blending data from multiple sources is critical to dig deep and making smarter, insightful, data-driven decisions. For example, many interesting patterns can be explained when you integrate-
- Advertising data,
- Inventory data, and
- Customer support data.
However, Source Medium might not be able to blend data from all your essential eCommerce sources, as it does not readily support new data sources. Therefore, data blending becomes a challenge.
Regarding data transformation, Source Medium does not reveal the technology they use. Customers do not have the flexibility to select a data transformation tool and customize it as per their requirements. Source Medium alternative like Daton + Saras consulting solutions is completely transparent with the technology used in each step of the process.
This flexibility means analysts can use their existing data and create custom dashboards (not templates) with the help of data visualization tools like Tableau, Looker, Power BI, and Data Studio.
Data Stack Flexibility
Source Medium comes with fixed visualization capabilities and features. In this scenario, adding a new feature or building on the existing tools can be troublesome, time-consuming, and expensive. This limited flexibility leads eCommerce brands to look for a Source Medium alternative that caters to their requirements.
An eCommerce brand will require different features, new sources integrations, and requirements as their data needs evolve. Thus, they end up searching for a comprehensive solution like Saras that not only offers them end-to-end solutions but offers them a flexible modern data stack.
Whether choosing the data sources, data warehouse, or data transformation tool, Daton-powered BI solutions by Saras Analytics offer total flexibility of the data stack, enabling options that work the best for you.
Automate your Amazon Reporting in 2-4 weeks with our Connectors and Templates!
Automate your Amazon Reporting in 2-4 weeks with our Connectors and Templates!
Reporting & Custom Dashboards
Saras and Source Medium provide an extensive selection of P&L metrics, with customizable options to track your preferred metrics. Source Medium offers campaign-level marketing metrics, but it lacks data from different marketplaces, shipping platforms and other crucial eCommerce data sources.
Both Saras and Source Medium offer various reports related to sales, inventory, marketing, and purchase analytics.
At Saras Analytics, we aim to accelerate your eCommerce data and analytics journey end-to-end. Our custom dashboards and reports offer the freedom to create insightful dashboards that make the most of your eCommerce brand’s data. Be it slicing the data with respect to product, time, platform, certain KPI or any other filter, Saras makes advanced data insights and reporting possible and accessible for brands.
Saras’ data team is familiar with Amazon, Shopify, Walmart, and other marketplaces data and can build your custom dashboards (white labelled for agencies) with all the KPIs that you require. You can choose BI tools like Google Data Studio, Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, and Looker. Some key benefits of Saras Turnkey BI Solutions-
- Agency white-labeled dashboards
- Custom BI solutions
- Analytics Implementation, unlike Source Medium.
- Pre-built business reports such as-
- P&L Reports
- Sales Report
- Inventory Report
- Amazon Reports and other marketplaces reports, and more.
As brands grow, their needs evolve, and a successful data initiative should be built keeping these things in mind. Saras Analytics has done this for more than 300 brands, and as a result, it understands the troubles that brands face at different points in their data journey. Saras Analytics has connectors for every ecommerce source, making it easier for brands to integrate their data sources seamlessly.
Advanced Analytics & Machine Learning Models
Building advanced analytical and machine learning models to solve use cases like
- Sales Forecasting,
- Anomaly Forecasting,
- Inventory Optimization,
- Subscription Analytics,
- Customer 360,
- Customer LTV, and
- Churn prediction.
These are critical for an eCommerce brand to be more proactive.
Source Medium does not offer advanced analytics and Machine Learning Models. Integrating raw data with analytics tools to build these models makes it exceedingly difficult. And brands have to either manually build these models or opt for more tools and increase their dependencies.
However, Source Medium alternative like Saras Analytics offers a 360o view of your eCommerce business across marketplaces and business channels. Using our turnkey data team + solutions, you can get advanced analytics for-
- Sales
- Marketing
- Inventory
- Subscriptions
- Customer
- Product
Along with Advanced Analytics, Saras also offers Analytics Implementation and custom attribution for their customers, unlike Source Medium. With Saras, eCommerce brands go beyond Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning Models like-
- Sales Forecasting Models
- Anomaly Detection Models
Flexible Data Team
Saras offers a flexible data team with expertise in eCommerce data and analytics focused on growth who can partner with you and your analyst throughout the data lifecycle.
Whether you are building a custom report, tweaking a calculation, or updating your data model, we have a team of analysts and data scientists, engineers who can help you get more from your data. Some eCommerce brands might need a Head of Data Services to look after the data team, and Source Medium lets their customers down in this aspect. They offer only a customer support analyst who can help brands with their queries and requirements on Source Medium. Learn about the cons of a one person data team.
With Saras, eCommerce brands get:
- A full-stack data team’s power without the headache of hiring, retaining and managing it.
- Support for everything related to data, analytics, reports, and dashboards.
- Google Analytics Instrumentation
- Data Strategy, Technology Evaluation, and Data Engineering
- Advanced Analytics and Machine Learning
- Custom Business Intelligence
Brands can now achieve faster, consistent results with the help of a fractional data team. They can now build and manage a flexible, scalable, modern data in a fraction of the amount to hire, manage and retain a specialized data team.
Conclusion
In conclusion, both Source Medium and Saras Analytics have their pros and cons, but Saras Analytics stands out for providing a complete solution to manage a brand’s entire data operations.
With a team of experts who understand the evolving needs of eCommerce brands, Saras Analytics is the perfect solution for brands looking to build a robust data foundation and analyze their growth effectively. So, if you’re looking for a comprehensive data solution that can scale with your business, Saras Analytics is the way to go.
