Informly – Gathering Business Data From the Cloud

In the world of high-tech business, segregated data is the norm. Companies regularly maintain separate accounts to manage basic business functions like invoicing, accounting, online advertising, search engine marketing, and website management. Informly is a tool that brings a myriad of business apps together and generates informational graphs based on the data these apps create.

Give Informly permission to connect to any business apps you currently use, and the platform will immediately begin pulling data from those apps into your account. Informly works with dozens of popular apps and services, including Xero, Pingdom, Klout, Google AdSense, and Paypal. Once you’ve connected your apps, Informly will begin gathering the data these apps generate onto one central page. Rather than logging into FreshBooks to find out how much income you’ve generated this month, Klout to see your social media influence, and Google Analytics to see traffic patterns on your website, you can log into your Informly account once and get access to all this information on one centralized page.

Informly doesn’t just gather data, it makes sense of it. The web-application turns complex numbers and statistics into easy-to-comprehend graphs that can be color-coded by month and filtered by category. These graphs can give any business owner a meaningful overview of how his or her company is performing.

Practical Uses:

• Review the long-term financial outlook for your company
• Get an overview of how your company is faring in the marketplace
• Find out where your company’s ad program has room for improvement
• Measure your company’s social influence on networking sites

Insider Tips:

• Informly supports a number of business apps, including Google Analytics, FreshBooks, AdSense, Pingdom, and Xero
• Users can give Informly permission to access their apps without handing over their passwords
• Charts can be color-coded for added clarity
• Users can request new features they would like added to the app

What we liked:

• Informly supports a variety of popular apps
• Informly is not as expensive or complex as competing business intelligence apps
• People can get data from the business-apps they use without logging into and out of their accounts
• Users can get the data they’re looking for from the web or their mobile phones

What we didn’t like:

• Informly is built primarily for small businesses, and larger companies may get better use out of a more comprehensive app

Alternatives:

• Improvely – http://www.improvely.com
• Raven – http://raventools.com
• Webtrends – http://webtrends.com

Company Info:

• Launched: 2012
• Privately Held
• Headquarters: Gold Coast, Australia
• Founded by: Dan Norris
• Web site: http://inform.ly

Costs:

• Free for up to 6 charts
• $9/month for up to 20 charts