I'm a sucker for charts and dashboard tools. In fact anything that lets me visualize and share data to me is worth the dollar. Unfortunately good visualization tools are usually very expensive or difficult to use.

Tableau is the Gold standard but definitely difficult use, and Google Data Studio is a common alternative but is complex also and limited and neither would be considered a "quick" method of gaining insights.

When I first saw columns and didn't fully understand what it was, and thought that it was more of an Oviond type dashboard tool, which I don't need. But I took a free trial just to see and realized that it's definitely not similar to Oviond.

It has a lot of use cases but what eventually sold me was that I uploaded Google Analytics data and in about 1 minute had a visualization that helped me get some good information that I could use.

I did the same with some keyword data, and Google Search Console data, and just for fun ride share data from ny that contained around 10k records.

Columns handled each of the datasets without a problem and the visualizations are very good, including the map visualizations. And it also does data transformations, and allows you to analyze.

Columns is basically a Tableau alternative that will satisfy most users data visualization needs. And since it's relatively new in the development cycle, I expect that it will only get better. Already in the few days that I had it, there has been a new chart type, "tree" added by request and several other updates.

If you are looking for a dashboard tool to share live data, like Whatagraph or Oviond.. this may not be for you.

But, if you use spreadsheets or Google sheets, or data warehouse services like snowflake, then columns is an absolute steal.

Just import or connect your data, and create a visualization. It's literally that simple.

Pros:

Very well done tool
Easy to use
Works Well
Beautiful and functional charts
Good Amount of Features
Early in the Dev Process (The Founder is very responsive to feedback and the direction of the tool)
Nice selection of Integrations to get the data in, esp. Google Sheets and .csv upload

Cons:
No BigQuery integration
Early in the Dev Process (Not as full featured as the more mature competitors)

Columns is ready to use now and feels far more mature than it actually is. Even though I can visualize with Tableau, Data Studio, Google Sheets, and R Studio, I can already tell that I'll be using Columns far more. I already am.

Highly Recommended!!