The digital tools your team uses will impact your work in a myriad of ways. The right technology will quicken time to impact, positively influence funder decisions, and empower teams to maximize their potential and resources.
One big decision you need to make is how to structure your technology stack, and that means choosing an all-in-one digital tool for a set of data-related tasks or workflows vs. setting up a tech stack of specialized tools.
If you’re in the middle of making this decision and finding it difficult to weigh the pros and cons, you’re not alone! It’s a hugely significant question for organizations investing in technology: Do we go with a single vendor that offers many capabilities, or choose best-in-class tools purpose-built for specific needs?
Let’s break this important question down further.
What’s the difference between best-of-breed vs. best-of-suite solutions?
Best-of-suite solutions come from vendors that offer a broad range of capabilities within a single platform. These are your all-in-one systems designed to meet a wide array of needs across teams.
Examples include Adobe Creative Cloud, a platform with functionalities for photo editing, videography, graphic design, and more for visual creatives, and Google Workspace, which covers everything needed for remote teams, from email to calendaring to video conferencing.
Pros
Cons
- One vendor relationship
- Can be expensive
- Integrated platform experience
- Switching costs are high if it doesn’t work out
- Designed to generally handle multiple tasks well
- May not go deep on specific needs
Best-of-breed tools, on the other hand, are designed to do one thing—or a few things—exceptionally well. These are your specialized tools.
Think of Microsoft’s PowerBI for data visualization, Stata for statistical analysis, TolaData for monitoring and evaluation, or SurveyCTO for data collection.
Pros
Cons
- Highly specialized functionality
- May require integration with other tools
- Increased flexibility and affordability
- More tools to set up and manage
- Ideal for complex or evolving needs
Both best-of-breed and best-of-suite solutions excel in their particular area—but in a different way and at a different scope.
Best of suite can make sense when you want a single procurement process and a unified platform—especially if your needs are relatively standard across the board. However, while purchasing and payment may be simpler, the evaluation process can actually be more complex if multiple teams are involved. Coordinating internal requirements can be a major undertaking.
Best of breed shines when your needs are specific, evolving, or demand deep customization. These tools often offer the flexibility that generalized platforms can’t match.
To distinguish between these two concepts, think of buffet restaurants that offer an all-you-can-eat deal featuring a wide variety of cuisines vs. a sit-down, white-tablecloth Italian restaurant. Both are broadly excelling at providing food—but in very different ways! The buffet excels at providing a variety of options, and at the quantity of food they offer for the price they charge. The Italian restaurant excels at ambience, special occasions, and pasta. Both are great options—but for different times and needs.
Why a best-of-breed solution is best for primary data collection
Now, let’s take a look at this question through the lens of SurveyCTO’s area of expertise: Data collection!
Data collection isn’t a standalone activity. It’s one step in a greater data lifecycle that involves gathering data, monitoring it during collection, visualizing it, analyzing it, reporting on it and ultimately using it to inform decisions.
Given all of these needs in the data lifecycle, you might think a best-of-suite, all-in-one data management platform designed to handle everything from collection through analysis would be highly efficient and desirable for data-based organizations and companies.
But is that really the case?
No single tool excels equally at every stage of the data lifecycle. All-in-one platforms often involve trade-offs: breadth over depth, generalization over specialization. And when it comes to data collection, specialization matters.
Take the example of Oxfam, who needed to gather feedback and complaints in the field to provide accountability to their programs. Their tech stack was built on SurveyCTO’s case management feature for organized, entity-based data collection, and Microsoft’s powerful data visualization platform PowerBI to use the data in interactive dashboards.
Or, look at research NGO ODEKA. They needed to collect property data for 130,000+ properties in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) without reliable internet—while minimizing duplicate data. By combining SurveyCTO with Google Maps’ Google Plus Codes, they successfully identified and set apartment buildings up as cases for a seamless, integrated workflow.
In both examples, organizations used a selection of best-of-breed tools—and built best-in-class workflows!
At SurveyCTO, specialization is the name of our game. We focus deeply on the data collection and data quality stages of the data lifecycle because we know that high-quality data is mission-critical for impact-driven organizations. That’s our core strength. From our flexible form and workflow design to automated quality checks and robust offline functionality—including offline case management—we’ve built a platform purposefully for the most critical stages of the data lifecycle. We also integrate easily with data analysis and reporting tools so users can transition seamlessly to the next stage in the lifecycle using tools designed and optimized for those specific purposes.
We have always maintained the position that we want to be easy to use with other tools built for visualization and analysis, not to compete with them. That’s why we offer so many integration options that let you automatically sync between SurveyCTO and other platforms you rely on. We know our strengths and focus on them, iterating on principle-driven innovation to make our robust data collection functionality even better, instead of putting energy into competing with other solutions created for different stages in the data life cycle. This makes us best of breed—for data collection.
This approach of specialized functionality with a broad set of industry applications is especially well-suited for managing the data lifecycle because it combines functional optimization with plenty of built-in flexibility.
Final thoughts: Take the time to design your tech stack around your unique mission
Ultimately, the best approach for building a tech stack is the one that empowers you to accomplish your mission. When it comes to work involving the data lifecycle, we are confident in recommending a best-of-breed tech stack over trying to use one tool for too many functions—in most cases.
However, we also want to emphasize that using best-of-breed solutions to manage the data lifecycle doesn’t mean opening the floodgates to a high volume of tools for its own sake, and we do understand that managing more than one tool for data work can be daunting. Sometimes, a hybrid approach can also work well, letting you rely on one or two powerful best-of-breed data tools for parts of the data lifecycle that are most important to you, while using a simpler, lower-cost tool for other tasks.
For example, imagine using SurveyCTO for data collection and monitoring, and then relying on Google Sheets for data visualization, reporting, and analysis. Even though Google Sheets is not, arguably, best-of-breed for each of those tasks in comparison to more specialized tools, this hybrid approach lets you highly prioritize data collection and quality while still having a solid tool to manage other parts of the lifecycle.
Are you looking to simplify your tech stack? Or are more generalized solutions not quite fitting your exact needs? Whether you’re going hybrid or building a fully optimized best-of-breed tech stack, you’ve got to understand what your non-negotiables are when evaluating tools.
Questions to help you be strategic in choosing between best-of-suite vs. best-of-breed tools:
To understand your non-negotiables, ask yourself the following questions.
- Where do you need depth and where do you want flexibility?
- Is the features list full of “nice to haves,” or does it effectively nail the essential “must haves” that will get you the outcomes you’re aiming for?
- Does this tool let you design the exact workflow you want?
- What is your growth potential as a company, and will you be adding or adjusting the tools in your stack as your needs evolve?
- What is your capacity for administration and maintenance of your tech stack tools?
- What’s your budget?
Tip
Best of breed tools may cost more per month or year, but can yield higher returns if the performance gains matter to your goals—and depending on how they are funded and structured, can also reduce the need for IT talent on your team or free up time for your engineers to do more mission-critical work
Bottom line: When you have specific but evolving needs, it’s worth the time it takes to question assumptions around the promise of “all-in-one” platforms, and the effort involved in optimizing your workflows without sacrificing depth, flexibility, or performance in the areas that matter most.
Want to discuss this in more detail? My virtual door is always open—just click the “Request Consultation” button below!
