Use this article to help you understand the major differences between Explore and Insights. You'll also find links to information in the Explore docs to help you get started.
Important: Insights has now been removed for most customers. If you used Insights before, you'll now need to move to Explore, the latest generation of reporting for Zendesk products.
This article contains the following sections:
General
| Feature | Insights | Explore Lite | Explore Professional | Explore Enterprise |
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| In-product getting started tutorials (learn more) |  |
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| Access roles (viewer, editor, admin) (learn more) | Limited | |
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| Use Support Enterprise custom roles to assign Explore permissions (learn more) | |
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| Granular editor authorizations to control the datasets and dashboards that users can view and edit. (learn more) | |
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| Data refresh rate (learn more) | See here | Daily | Hourly | Hourly plus live dashboard |
| Data can be located in European Union (learn more) | |
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| Advanced account settings like default colors, export separators and roles (learn more) | |
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Data sources
| Feature | Insights | Explore Lite | Explore Professional | Explore Enterprise |
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| Zendesk Support data, including tickets, ticket updates, users, organizations, backlog history, and SLAs. (learn more here and here) | |
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| Skills-based routing data (learn more) | |
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| Zendesk Talk data (learn more here and here) | |
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| Zendesk Chat data (learn more here and here) | |
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| Zendesk Guide data - available for Answer Bot, Knowledge Capture, and knowledge base - planned for Team Publishing and Gather. (learn more here and here) | |
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| Combine analysis from multiple datasets and products | |
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Planned |
| Multi-select and multi-line custom fields (learn more) | |
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Custom queries
| Feature | Insights | Explore Lite | Explore Professional | Explore Enterprise |
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| 500+ customization options (learn more) | |
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| 20+ visualization types (learn more) | |
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| Intelligent visualization selector to choose the optimum chart type automatically (learn more) | |
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| Drag-and-drop chart builder (learn more) | |
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| Easy-to-use calculations (learn more) | Limited | |
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| Calculated attributes (learn more) | |
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| Result manipulations (learn more) | |
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| Axis configuration options (learn more) | Limited | |
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| Displaying results by color and size (learn more) | |
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| Advanced interactions and filters (learn more) | Limited | |
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| Customizable datatips (learn more) | |
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| Rows selector (learn more) | |
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| Advanced trend line (learn more) | |
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| Forecasting using the Holt Winters model and "What if" analysis (learn more here and here) | |
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Custom dashboards and sharing information
| Feature | Insights | Explore Lite | Explore Professional | Explore Enterprise |
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| Advanced dashboard widget customizations (learn more) | |
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| Change dashboard attribute or metric widget (learn more) | |
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| Bookmarks to save current dashboard state (learn more) | |
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| Dashboard sharing with individual agents or agent groups (learn more) | |
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| Real-time dashboard (learn more) | |
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| Schedule dashboards for delivery to agents (learn more) | |
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| Schedule dashboards for delivery to end-users (learn more) | |
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| Share dashboards with users who don't have a Zendesk account (learn more) | |
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| Test emails before scheduled delivery (learn more) | |
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Note: If you've been migrated from Insights to Explore or if you're currently using Insights, you get a free version of Explore known as Explore Professional (Legacy). This version is currently identical in functionality to Explore Professional except it includes the following features that are not part of Explore Professional:
9 Comments
GoodData had a data model you could visually browse around to quickly learn its inner-workings. Have you guys started one for events, fields, and metrics in Explore for the different data-sets?
Hey David,
I wasn't able to track down a visual model for Explore similar to what you're referencing for Insights. This is a great idea though and I'll be sure to mark this as feedback for our Explore team :)
I've linked some useful documentation for you below that may help if you're new to Explore:
Let me know if there's any other information you're looking for.
It seems a major difference is that all the statistics are ONLY about tickets, and nothing but tickets. That is, we no longer have access to the raw organization and user data. Only if they're part of an existing ticket. We have Organizations and Users that have not submitted tickets and require queries over those entities. Will this be made possible? It was extremely useful from Insights. It's going to be a very difficult conversation with management if we lose that accuracy in our reporting.
We just went Live with a second branded help center. This one is for our customers verses internal IT\employees. As part of the release I was asked to provide some usage statistics and was able to quickly capture them in a dashboard available in Support\Insight. Great information to provide our Senior Management team. However, as with a number of disappointing decisions made by Zendesk they will no longer be supporting Insight in 2021, and most importantly not carry over the current Guide metric to Zendesk Explore. Yes I know, I can use the Rest APIs to capture the Guide metric as least I hope I can. Just like I have to use the Rest APIs for everything (replicating help centers, Live Chat metric with Chatbot implementation, Ticket Metrics, SSO syncing of users and now it seems we have to develop something for Guide Metrics. Please include these simple metrics in Explore. I feel like I'm developing everything you should be doing in core. Please help
Hi Christopher Ferlazzo sorry for the slow reply. We are actively working to provide Guide article metrics in Explore and plan to have these available by the end of the year. We'll be sure to announce these as soon as they're ready.
Has there been resolution to Craig Bailey's concern? We are still using insights, I see little value if Org reporting is not part of Explorer. As he points out, not all our customers have had a ticket, but represent an industry sector we report on.
Hi Richard and Craig. To the best of my knowledge, this isn't something that's currently being addressed, but would be a great item to post in our feedback forum if you have time - https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/360001200913
That gives it visibility to the product team and also lets others vote for it. I can certainly see the value in adding this to Explore.
Hello there,
I am forecasting the switch from Insights to Explore, however all the datas aren't the same.
Even a simple one as "created tickets" doesn't match.
And it's worst with the agents activity.
Could you please let me know about it, explaining me why and before all which one are reliable?
Thanks in advance,
Jules
Hi Jules
Thanks for your feedback. Here's a great article that explains why in some cases Insights and Explore reports might return slightly different results - https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360022177714
If, after reading that article you see any other metrics that you don't believe are correct, I'd encourage you to open a ticket - see https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360026614173 so we can investigate what's happening with your particular instance ... I'm sure we can get to the bottom of it! Thanks.
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