ThoughtSpot vs Improvado: Choosing the Right AI Analytics Platform (2026)

ThoughtSpot and Improvado both promise AI-powered analytics, but they solve fundamentally different problems. ThoughtSpot is a business intelligence layer that lets you ask questions of data already sitting in your warehouse — think "Google for your company's data." Improvado is an end-to-end marketing analytics platform that extracts, transforms, governs, and delivers insights from 500+ marketing sources without requiring a data engineering team. If your challenge is querying existing datasets quickly, ThoughtSpot excels. If your challenge is getting marketing data into a usable state in the first place, Improvado owns that entire pipeline.

ThoughtSpot vs Improvado: What's Actually Different?

ThoughtSpot positions itself as the AI-powered search layer atop your data stack — you feed it clean data from warehouses, and it returns natural language insights, automated anomaly detection, and self-service dashboards. Improvado is a marketing data platform that handles the messy work upstream: connecting to Google Ads, Salesforce, TikTok, and 497 other sources, transforming that data into a consistent schema, enforcing governance rules, and delivering analysis-ready datasets to your BI tool or warehouse. One assumes you've already solved the ETL problem. The other exists because most marketing teams haven't.

Full disclosure: we're Improvado, and this page is written from our perspective. We've tried to represent ThoughtSpot's capabilities accurately — and where we've gotten it wrong, email us and we'll fix it. Our goal is to help you make the right call, even if that's not us.

Feature Comparison: Improvado vs ThoughtSpot

Both platforms advertise AI capabilities, but the features serve entirely different stages of the analytics workflow. ThoughtSpot's AI helps you explore data that's already structured. Improvado's AI helps you structure the data before exploration even begins.

Where Improvado and ThoughtSpot Diverge

The table shows what each platform does. What matters more is what each platform assumes you've already solved. ThoughtSpot assumes your data engineering team has built pipelines, normalized schemas, and loaded everything into a warehouse. Improvado assumes you're a marketing team without that infrastructure — and builds it for you.

Your Marketing Team Owns the Data Pipeline — No Engineering Backlog

ThoughtSpot's value proposition starts after data lands in your warehouse. If you're a marketing team running campaigns across Google Ads, Meta, TikTok, Salesforce, HubSpot, and 15 other platforms, ThoughtSpot doesn't connect to those APIs for you. It expects that someone — your data engineering team, a contractor, or a separate ETL tool — has already pulled, cleaned, and structured that data. For enterprises with dedicated data teams, that's fine. For marketing teams operating independently, it's a non-starter.

Improvado connects directly to 500+ marketing data sources via native APIs, handles authentication, manages rate limits, and pulls historical data automatically. When Google Ads changes its API schema (which happens quarterly), Improvado updates the connector and preserves two years of historical data in the new format. You don't file a ticket with IT. You don't wait three sprints for an engineer to refactor a Python script. The data keeps flowing.

The no-code transformation layer means your marketing ops manager can map "campaign_name" from Facebook and "CampaignName" from Google Ads into a single unified field without writing SQL. If a campaign naming convention changes mid-quarter, you adjust the recipe in the UI. If you do need custom SQL — say, calculating a weighted attribution model — the platform supports that too. Dual-persona design: accessible for marketers, extensible for engineers.

Improvado review

“Improvado handles everything. If it's a data source of any kind, either there's a connector for it, or we get one created.”

Beau Payne

Marketing Data Governance That Prevents Errors Before Launch

ThoughtSpot offers role-based access and data security, which is table-stakes BI functionality. What it doesn't offer is governance for marketing campaign execution — the rules that catch a misspelled UTM parameter before the campaign goes live, or flag when a paid social ad is running without conversion tracking, or alert you when yesterday's spend exceeded the daily budget cap by 40%.

Improvado's Marketing Data Governance (MDG) layer includes 250+ pre-built rules written specifically for marketing workflows. These aren't generic data quality checks. They're things like: "If campaign_type = 'brand' and keyword contains a competitor name, flag as misclassified." Or: "If cost_per_conversion for any ad group exceeds the account CPA target by more than 25%, send a Slack alert to the campaign manager within 15 minutes."

You can write custom rules in plain English using AI-assisted SQL generation, and those rules run automatically on every data refresh. Budget pacing validation happens before the daily report goes to your CMO, so you're not explaining why Q4 spend hit 80% of budget in October. Governance here isn't about restricting access — it's about making sure the data your team acts on is consistent, complete, and campaign-ready.

Improvado review

“If we don't trust the data, the agency won’t trust the reports and won't give them to the client. They’ll start pulling data manually to Excel and spend a lot of time comparing platform numbers to reports. With Improvado, we now trust the data. If anything is wrong, it’s how someone on the team is viewing it, not the data itself. It’s 99.9% accurate.”

Tyler Corcoran

AI That Understands Marketing Context, Not Just SQL

Both platforms offer AI agents, but they're trained on different jobs. ThoughtSpot's Spotter is designed to answer questions like "show me revenue by region last quarter" — business intelligence queries that translate into SQL. It's excellent at that. What it's not built for is understanding that "CPM" on Meta means something slightly different than "CPM" on Google Display, or that Facebook's "link clicks" aren't equivalent to Google's "clicks" because one counts outbound traffic and the other counts ad interactions.

Improvado's AI agents are trained on 46,000+ marketing-specific metrics and dimensions. When you ask "which campaigns drove the most conversions this week," the AI knows to pull the right conversion event from Google Analytics 4, match it to campaign IDs in Google Ads and Meta, apply the correct attribution window, and exclude internal traffic. It understands that a "conversion" in your CRM might be labeled "MQL" in HubSpot, "lead" in Salesforce, and "form_submit" in GA4 — and it unifies them automatically.

You can schedule recurring AI-generated reports, set up automated anomaly alerts for performance shifts, and even have the AI write the executive summary for your weekly stakeholder update. The difference is specificity: ThoughtSpot's AI is a general-purpose BI copilot. Improvado's AI is a marketing analyst who already knows your stack.

Improvado review

“I use Improvado AI Agent to get basic analytics and quick solves. I just enter the question, and it gives me the answer I need.”

Beau Payne

Dedicated Support vs. Self-Service at Scale

ThoughtSpot's Essentials and Pro tiers are self-service by design — you're expected to configure data models, troubleshoot integration issues, and optimize query performance on your own. Enterprise customers get dedicated support, but that's reserved for the upper pricing tiers (starting around $100K annually). For mid-market teams, you're filing tickets and waiting for responses.

Improvado includes a dedicated Customer Success Manager and professional services as part of the standard package, not an add-on. When you onboard, your CSM works with your team to map your specific data sources, configure transformation recipes, and set up governance rules that match your campaign structure. When a new platform launches (say, TikTok rolls out a new ad format), Improvado's team builds the connector and notifies you — you don't discover it's missing three weeks into a campaign.

This matters more than it sounds. Marketing moves fast. If your attribution model breaks because a Salesforce field name changed, and you're waiting 48 hours for a support ticket response, you're flying blind during that window. Proactive monitoring means issues get flagged and fixed before you notice them. The support model isn't a luxury — it's the difference between a tool you use and a tool you trust.

Improvado review

“Having a single point of contact simplifies everything. If we ever need assistance, we can reach out directly to Improvado instead of managing it internally. That's worth something.”

Jonathan Hemnes

EVP of Engineering

When to Choose ThoughtSpot

ThoughtSpot is the right platform in specific scenarios — particularly when your data infrastructure is already mature and your primary bottleneck is business user access, not data engineering capacity.

Choose ThoughtSpot if:

• You already have a data engineering team managing ETL pipelines, and your data is flowing reliably into Snowflake, BigQuery, or another warehouse.
• Your primary need is enabling non-technical business users across departments (finance, operations, sales, marketing) to run ad-hoc queries without waiting for analyst bandwidth.
• You're comfortable handling data transformation and governance in DBT, Dataform, or your warehouse's native tooling, and you just need a consumption layer on top.
• Your analytics use cases span multiple business functions, not just marketing, and you need a general-purpose BI platform with embedded analytics capabilities.
• You have the budget and team size to justify ThoughtSpot's Enterprise tier pricing (often $100K–$500K annually for full feature access), and you're willing to invest IT resources in the initial setup.

ThoughtSpot excels at what it does — making data exploration intuitive for business users — but it doesn't replace the upstream work of connecting, transforming, and governing marketing data. If that's still a manual process for your team, ThoughtSpot won't solve it.

What Improvado Customers Say

Marketing teams at enterprise brands and agencies rely on Improvado to eliminate the manual data work that consumes analyst bandwidth and delays decision-making. Here's what that looks like in practice.

Case study

At ASUS, Enhanced data availability not only enabled faster experimentation but also allowed teams across regions to "speak the same language." This increased transparency in global marketing efforts provides a strong foundation for innovative, data-driven strategies that maximize the impact of global marketing investments. Read full case study →

"Now, we don't have to involve our technical team in the reporting part at all. Improvado saves about 90 hours per week and allows us to focus on data analysis rather than routine data aggregation, normalization, and formatting."

Jeff Lee

ASUS

For agencies managing dozens of client accounts, the difference is even more stark. When you're pulling data for 30 clients across 15 platforms each, the time savings compound rapidly.

Case study

At Signal Theory, for most clients, the reporting process is now fully automated, taking 30 minutes to an hour at most. For clients with unique data sources requiring manual input, the system is flexible enough to accommodate specific needs without compromising overall efficiency. Read full case study →

“Reports that used to take hours now only take about 30 minutes. We're reporting for significantly more clients, even though it is only being handled by a single person. That's been huge for us.”

Shayna Tyler

Analyst, Signal Theory

The trust factor matters as much as the time savings. When your CEO is asking why spend is trending 20% over plan, you can't afford to second-guess whether the data is right. Governance and automated validation turn that question into a 30-second answer instead of a three-hour investigation.

Pricing Comparison: ThoughtSpot vs Improvado

ThoughtSpot shifted to tiered user-based pricing in 2026, making entry-level access more predictable. Improvado uses outcome-based pricing scaled to data volume and complexity. Both require custom quotes at enterprise scale, but the cost drivers differ significantly.

ThoughtSpot Pricing

ThoughtSpot offers three tiers for its Analytics product, billed annually:

• Essentials: $25/user/month for 5–50 users, 25 million rows, basic AI insights. Minimum $1,250/month for a 20-user team.
• Pro: $50/user/month for 25–1,000 users, 250 million rows, Spotter AI Agent (25 queries per user per month).
• Enterprise: Custom pricing, typically $100K–$500K annually for unlimited users and data, full AI capabilities, and advanced governance.

Real-world costs often exceed the per-user sticker price due to data volume charges, query complexity (measured in "ThoughtSpot Units"), and minimum contract commitments. Mid-market deployments (100 users) average $200K–$350K annually, making ThoughtSpot more expensive than Tableau or Power BI for comparable use cases.

Improvado Pricing

Improvado pricing is custom and based on three factors: number of data sources, data volume processed monthly, and number of destinations (warehouses or BI tools). There's no per-user seat licensing — your entire marketing team can access the platform without incremental cost.

What's included in the base price: 500+ native connectors, unlimited transformation recipes, Marketing Data Governance with 250+ pre-built rules, dedicated Customer Success Manager, professional services for onboarding, and 24/7 support. Custom connector builds are completed within 2–4 weeks under SLA at no additional charge (though non-standard connectors may incur a one-time development fee).

For pricing details specific to your data stack, visit the Improvado pricing page or schedule a demo to get a custom quote.

Total Cost of Ownership

When comparing costs, factor in what each platform doesn't include:

ThoughtSpot's hidden costs: Upstream ETL tooling (Fivetran, Stitch, or custom scripts), DBT Cloud subscription for transformations, data engineering time to maintain connectors and models, IT resources for initial setup and ongoing governance configuration, separate marketing analytics tooling if ThoughtSpot doesn't cover domain-specific needs.

Improvado's hidden costs: Warehouse storage fees if using BYOW (Snowflake, BigQuery), potential one-time fees for highly custom connector builds outside the standard 500+.

For marketing teams without existing data infrastructure, Improvado's all-in-one model often delivers lower TCO despite higher list pricing, because it consolidates five separate tools into one platform. For enterprises with mature data teams already running ETL and transformation pipelines, ThoughtSpot's incremental cost is just the BI layer.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the main difference between ThoughtSpot and Improvado?

ThoughtSpot is a search-driven business intelligence platform that operates on top of data already loaded into your warehouse — it helps users query and visualize data using natural language. Improvado is an end-to-end marketing data platform that extracts data from 500+ sources, transforms it into analysis-ready formats, enforces governance rules, and delivers insights. ThoughtSpot assumes your data pipeline is solved; Improvado exists to solve the pipeline itself.

Can ThoughtSpot replace Improvado for marketing analytics?

Not directly. ThoughtSpot doesn't connect to marketing APIs like Google Ads, Meta, or Salesforce — it requires that data to already exist in a warehouse. If you have a data engineering team handling those integrations and transformations, ThoughtSpot can serve as your BI layer. If you need the platform to own the entire pipeline from API connection to dashboard, Improvado is purpose-built for that job.

Does Improvado offer the same natural language search as ThoughtSpot?

Yes, Improvado includes AI agents that respond to natural language queries about marketing performance — "which campaigns drove the most conversions this week" or "show me CPM trends by channel" — and the AI understands marketing-specific metrics and dimensions. The difference is that Improvado's AI also assists with data transformation (e.g., "unify campaign names from Google and Meta") and governance (e.g., "flag any ad groups spending over $500/day without conversion tracking"), not just querying.

How long does it take to implement ThoughtSpot vs Improvado?

ThoughtSpot implementation depends on your existing data infrastructure. If your data is already clean and structured in a warehouse, setup can take a few weeks. If you need to build those pipelines first, add months. Improvado's typical onboarding is 2–6 weeks, including connector configuration, transformation setup, and governance rule implementation — because the platform handles all three layers in one system.

Which platform is better for agencies managing multiple client accounts?

Improvado is designed specifically for this use case. Multi-client account structures, white-label reporting, and automated governance rules prevent cross-client data leakage and ensure consistent reporting across accounts. ThoughtSpot can support multi-tenancy at the Enterprise tier, but it requires separate data pipelines for each client unless you build that unification layer yourself.

Can I use Improvado and ThoughtSpot together?

Absolutely. Improvado can deliver transformed, governed marketing data to your warehouse, and ThoughtSpot can query that data alongside other business datasets. This architecture makes sense for enterprises that want Improvado to own the marketing data pipeline and ThoughtSpot to serve as the cross-functional BI layer for finance, sales, and operations teams.

How does pricing compare for a mid-market team (50–100 users)?

ThoughtSpot charges per user, so a 75-user deployment on the Pro tier would cost roughly $45K annually ($50/user/month × 75 × 12), plus potential overages for data volume and query complexity. Improvado doesn't charge per user — pricing is based on data sources and volume, so the same team could use Improvado without per-seat fees. The total cost depends on how many platforms you're integrating and whether you need the upstream ETL work Improvado provides.

When does ThoughtSpot make more sense than Improvado?

Choose ThoughtSpot if you already have a data engineering team managing your marketing ETL and transformation pipelines, your data is reliably structured in a warehouse, and your primary need is enabling non-technical users across multiple departments to explore that data with natural language search. ThoughtSpot is a BI consumption layer; it doesn't replace the upstream data work that marketing teams without engineering support still need solved.