News

Mode Announces No-Cost Toolkit to Democratize Data Analytics

• By David Ramel
• April 18, 2018

Mode Analytics Inc., seeking to make the power of data analysis "accessible to everyone," announced a toolkit that it said will be free forever, offering some core capabilities of its business data platform.

At the same time, those capabilities have been improved with the addition of support for R Notebooks, adding to the existing support for SQL-based analytics and Python Notebooks.

The new free Mode Studio reflects the company's belief that data analytics is trickling down from the highly trained data-science types working with complex Big Data projects to others doing analyst work throughout an organization.

"Over the years we've also observed a trend in the way business decisions happen," CEO Derek Steer said in an introductory post yesterday. "At the best and most forward-thinking companies we know, analysis is no longer only the domain of people with the words 'analyst' or 'data scientist' in their job titles."

To serve those types and more, Mode Studio offers the basics of its full-fledged commercial business platform.

"The product we're launching today is completely free and includes the core elements of Mode -- a clean interface to do analysis in SQL, Python, or R, take that analysis and build it into visualizations and reports, and then share it with anyone at your company," Steer said on the Product Hunt site.

Capabilities it doesn't offer that are included in the Mode Business platform include more advanced collaboration, sharing, visual data exploration, automation and more.

Steer said the four-year-old company decided to focus on being open and accessible in the best interests of the analytics community, offering resources such as an SQL and Python tutorials, an Analytics Jobs Board, a Mode Forum, a Mode Gallery and more on its community.modeanalytics.com site.

The San Francisco company also has parked a bevy of associated open source resources on GitHub, including data, code and scripts for the analysis in the Mode blog and a playbook including queries and visualization code for Mode Playbook.

"Starting today, as an analyst, you can use Mode to work in SQL, Python, R or JavaScript for free for as long as you want," Steer said. "It's easy -- you can create an account here. When the impact of your work starts to reach a broader audience, you can use Mode Business to manage permissions, automate distribution, and handle everything else an organization needs to sustain a powerful data ecosystem."