I am an experienced bioinformatics researcher that has personally tried numerous analysis and visualization platforms across several -omics types. A huge advantage of this platform is that it is fully end to end. I haven’t encountered another platform that can process large sequencing files, perform quality control, and generate interpretable and publication-quality analysis. I have shared data through this platform (which is quite easy) to investigators with limited bioinformatics experience. Despite that shortcoming, the platform is so intuitive that they are easily capable of understanding the analysis to that point and are quickly capable of generating new analyses.

Pluto makes running the more mundane processing parts of NGS analysis easy with very little hands on time from the user. As someone who is a bioinformatician, I do not enjoy running the basic parts of informatics analyses (such as QC and generation of counts matrices), and Pluto allows me to spend a couple minutes uploading the data so I can focus on the more intricate parts of downstream analysis analyses and on software development. They provide very thorough and comprehensive QC metrics, so that if I need to modify or rerun the pipeline, I can easily do that by making a copy of the experiment, changing a couple of parameters, and re-running based on the QC issues I see. I can seriously do this in under 5 minutes of my time. I also think the ability to import GEO studies from fastq through analysis is very powerful and saves me a lot of time trying to download fastqs and dealing with internet bandwidth issues from SRA and re-analyze them to be concordant with the pipelines and parameters I want to use; the platform makes running reproducible analysis much more steamlined.

Pluto makes it easy for me to organize my data and run bioinformatics analyses, without having to code. Pluto also lets me create good representative figures on my own. It like that all my data can be saved at the same place and gives me the flexibility to create more plots and interpretations as I analyze. I also like that they have a responsive chat feature that respond to my queries quickly