Parabola

What do you like best?

What do you dislike?

How simple it is to get up and running. I was able to hook up our project management tool, Wrike, to our resource management tool, HubPlanner, in a about a day and a half. The interface is easy to read and navigate and there are plenty of transformation steps at your disposal allowing you to change the data any way you need it. The price is more afforable to smaller businesses like us than any other platform out there. Sure, Dell Boomi, JitterBit, Tray.io and other platforms are really nice and have loads of functionality, but they were just too expensive to justify getting two simple systems talking to each other internally that could have been built manually in a week. The support! I have literally probably taken a day's worth of time from Brian having him help me architect our current system. I have also even gotten help from the CEO when Brian was busy. They are incredibly helpful and supportive so any questions you might have, you can be sure they will be addressed usually within 5-15 minutes via their online chat.

There is a slight learning curve, but anyone with any kind of background in computer science or technology should be able to pick it up fairly quickly. Those without that background can still pick it up but it will take a bit longer, but do not be discouraged as it is not written in a foreign coding language and the support team is there to help. I got real-time answers from from not only one of their designers but also from the CEO of the company. They not only helped me design, plan, and verify the viability of solving our problem on their platform, but also supported me throughout that learning phase and suggesting architecture to solve certain roadblocks that come up. The only other thing is that sometimes the flows get hung up on something, but they do always finish within 5-10 minutes and will resolve themselves. This normally only happens to me with Google Sheets Import/Export steps. The team is aware and have either already fixed it or are working on it.

We needed a platform that could take our systems and get their APIs communicating with each other in a quick and easy fashion. Our initial problem was that Wrike didn't have the best resource management built in so we began using a different software for just that purpose. We then needed to get the time entries out of Wrike and into HubPlanner so we could have real-time statistics for planning and decision making purposes. With Parabola, we now not only have both of those systems talking to each other but we have an effective and affordable platform for the future should we need to get other systems talking to each other. Sure, I could have coded this manually, but having Parabola is a life saver so I do not have to spend my free or company time building it manually which would have taken at least 5x longer for me to get fully functioning.

What do you like best?

What do you dislike?

The biggest issue with "integrations" is that there is always a hook. Either only certain data connects, or it maps in a weird way, or it only batches on a daily basis...the lists goes on and on. Parabola makes automating my reports, my systems and my client's systems SO much easier. Plus, it's a quick integration on the API to get any data set loaded.

Literally nothing. There is no downside. It is very inexpensive, flexible, visual and easy to use. I guess the only downside is now I will never go back to using my old systems.

There's no need to think twice here. The pricing and the product itself are absolutely awesome. It has actually changed the way I look at my business and at other's businesses. Whenever there's a question or concern around data, reporting or marketing automation, it is no longer a concern.

Parabola has become part of our operational stack cross-departmentally.

I have been dealing with siloed data for years in my business, as well as for clients. Everything from in-depth Square and Shopify integrated reporting, to pulling reports from Intercom (what a headache, and combining data between native DB's, Salesforce and Pardot. This list goes on and on.

Frankly, I use Parabola to automate all marketing and data needs.

As a marketing person, the power that Parabola has put in my hands to be able to pull data from one source, supplement it with data from another, reformat it and send it to its destination via API, google sheet or csv export (there's more destinations than that, but that's what I use, has allowed me to often bypass the need for developer, analyst or 3rd party analytics tool. Also as someone who loved to mess around in Yahoo Pipes back in the day, this feels a bit like a modern version of that, just a lot easier to use and nothing to do with RSS feeds :

My only nitpicky complaint is once you start to have a lot of Flows, there needs to be a way to organize them so you can find them quicker.

When starting a flow it's a lot easier to build if you know what you want your output file to look like ahead of time.

Parabola is the essential middleware workhorse that is powering daily updates to dashboards in Google Sheets and Data Studio. It has also been a lifesaver in during an ecommerce migration and building product mapping flows for old, new and future product imports and mapping 301 redirects.