Grapple VS ViewForge

Grapple's answer

Grapple is built for small to medium-sized companies who haven't successfully implemented traditional BI software like Looker, Power BI, Tableau, or other solutions like DataRails and Domo. Traditional BI software requires a lot of technical knowledge to setup, maintain, and they often make it really difficult for less technical users to customize. This means your dashboards either 1) don't work, or 2) aren't flexible and easy to use enough to let operators adjust them as they need during the course of businesses.

Grapple is designed from the beginning for non-technical operators across marketing, sales, and finance.

ViewForge's answer:

Data ownership. Fitment lives in your Shopify metaobjects, so uninstalling does not take your compatibility data with it. Convermax, EasySearch and PartFinder all keep it in their own databases, and getting it back depends on their export tooling on the day you cancel.

Cost at the low end. The search widget, the compatibility table on the product page and the saved-vehicle garage are all on the free tier, up to 50 products, with no expiry. EasySearch puts the table and the garage behind its $75/month Premium plan. Convermax starts at $250/month.

Automotive and non-automotive coverage. Eight built-in templates, and fully custom templates from $19/month, for catalogs that do not decompose into Year/Make/Model at all.

Grapple's answer

Grapple is great for data savvy operators who love working with data. We're particularly helpful for companies with 25 to 500 employees who serve other businesses (B2B) and are focused on improving their CRM analytics and SaaS metrics. If you're using apps like Salesforce, Hubspot, Zendesk, Stripe, or Asana, Grapple is for you!

If you want to write data notebooks in python or SQL and want under-the-hood control of your data stack, Grapple is not for you. We recommend you try Omni or Hex.

ViewForge's answer:

Shopify merchants whose customers need to know whether a part fits before they will buy it — and who do not have an engineer on staff to build that themselves.

Concretely: auto and truck parts retailers, powersports and motorcycle dealers, tractor and agricultural parts sellers, marine and outboard suppliers, small-engine and power equipment stores, bicycle and e-bike component shops, printer supply merchants, and electronics accessory sellers.

Catalog sizes run from a few dozen products on the free tier up into the tens of thousands; it is running in production on a catalog of roughly 40,000 SKUs. The common thread is not the industry — it is that "does this fit my thing" is the question deciding the sale.

Grapple's answer

Jack, co-founder/CEO, had the idea for Grapple a couple years ago after spending almost a decade building in Tableau, Looker, Google Data Studio, Trevor.io, and the list goes on! Jack spent a lot of time collaborating with non-technical users in sales, marketing, bizops, finance on dashboards and after one particularly simple report that was still difficult to generate, he thought there must be a better way! Turns out, most data platforms require a ton of other tools and a ton of other people all of which are slow and expensive—delaying your time-to-insight. Jack had the idea to compress the data stack into a single tool, that maybe couldn't do everything, but would be the fastest, easiest way to pull the types of reports he pulled all the time over the last 10 years. Fast-forward to today, Andrew joined as co-founder/CTO and Grapple is now generally available and includes a suite of AI features to take Grapple's speed and ease of use even further. Let us know what you think!

ViewForge's answer:

ViewForge came out of agency work. Normal View was building for a parts retailer running roughly 12,000 SKUs who needed fitment search, and every app we evaluated stored the merchant's compatibility data in the vendor's own database.

That is a strange trade when you look at it directly. Fitment data is genuinely expensive to produce — it is weeks of work — and the merchant would not own the result. It would belong to whichever app happened to be installed that year.

Shopify metaobjects made a different answer possible: write fitment as native structured data inside the merchant's own store. The theme reads it, the Storefront API queries it, Admin GraphQL exports it, and it is still there after an uninstall. That decision is what the rest of the app is built around.

Everything else came from real catalogs rather than a roadmap. Eight verticals exist because a tractor catalog is not Year/Make/Model. Smart Parse exists because that retailer had already written fitment into 12,000 product titles, and nobody was ever going to retype them.

Grapple's answer

Grapple is a fully vertically integrated data platform and does not require any additional tooling. Unlike competitors Looker and PowerBI, Grapple includes everything you need to get started. Frustrated by your slow data team? Get started with Grapple right away.

In nerd speak, Grapple seamlessly bundles the following tools, you won't even need to manage them: - An ETL and data warehouse for centralizing your data - Automatic data modeling so your data is queryable right away - Visualization and analytics UI

And on top of all that, Grapple provides modern functionality too: - Unlimited Viewers: share your dashboards with as many users as you want, just like a Google Docs - AI/Natural Language: customize your dashboard with natural language instead of SQL or spreadsheet formulas - Straightforward pricing: pay as you go with monthly per user pricing

ViewForge's answer:

Three things. (1) Data ownership: ViewForge writes fitment as Shopify metaobjects native to your store — most competitors store fitment in their own database. (2) 8 verticals out of the box: auto, motorcycle, tractor, marine, power equipment, bicycle, printer, electronics — most competitors are automotive-only. (3) Smart Parse: extract fitment automatically from your existing product titles and descriptions instead of re-typing everything.

Grapple's answer

Grapple's application layer is written in React + Laravel and under the hood uses a mixture of PostgreSQL and No-SQL to deliver data warehousing and analytics capabilities.

ViewForge's answer:

• TypeScript
• Shopify metaobjects, as the fitment data store
• Shopify theme app extensions for the storefront components: fitment search, saved-vehicle garage, compatibility table, product-page fit notice
• Shopify Storefront API, for querying fitment from the theme
• Shopify Admin GraphQL API, for writing and exporting fitment records
• NHTSA vehicle database, for VIN decoding
• ACES and PIES XML parsing, for automotive catalog import