Overview
What is Sisense?
Sisense is a BI software and analytics platform. With what the vendor calls their In-Chip™ and Single Stack™ technologies, users have access to a comprehensive tool to analyze and visualize large, disparate data sets without IT resources.
Sisense : Great and Fastest Data Visualization Tool
Get insights into your work
Great BI tool for a great cost and easy to roll out to the organization
Provides great analytics to all the data you feed Sisense
Very solid BI platform for every day use, not just a visualization tool.
Sr. BI Analyst's Review of Sisense
Changed the way we looked at data!
Sisense is moving on up in the BI world
Still better than most of the competition by strides but needing a lot of work
Sisense a great solution to consolidate your Big Data Analysis Projects.
Real world Sisense experience.
Sisense is a reliable way of displaying data
Best BI Tool
Sisense: Best Data Visualization Tool in 2018.
Sisense - The analytics tool you've been looking for!
Awards
Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards
Popular Features
- Customizable dashboards (46)9.090%
- Publish to PDF (45)9.090%
- Formatting capabilities (46)9.090%
- Drill-down analysis (46)8.080%
Pricing
What is Sisense?
Sisense is a BI software and analytics platform. With what the vendor calls their In-Chip™ and Single Stack™ technologies, users have access to a comprehensive tool to analyze and visualize large, disparate data sets without IT resources.
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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What is IBM Cognos Analytics?
IBM Cognos is a full-featured business intelligence suite by IBM, designed for larger deployments. It comprises Query Studio, Reporting Studio, Analysis Studio and Event Studio, and Cognos Administration along with tools for Microsoft Office integration, full-text search, and dashboards.
Product Demos
Locked Filter | Sisense Tutorials: Filtering Dashboard Data
Adding a Custom Field | Sisense Tutorials: Preparing your Data Model
Working with Tables and Fields | Sisense Tutorials: Preparing your Data Model
Adding a Custom SQL Table | Sisense Tutorials: Preparing your Data Model
Date and Time Functions | Sisense Tutorials: Preparing your Data Model
Layout and Responsive Design | Sisense Tutorials: Creating your Dashboard
Features
BI Standard Reporting
Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.
- 8Pixel Perfect reports(36) Ratings
Pixel Perfect reports are highly-formatted reports with graphics and ability to preview the report before printing.
- 9Customizable dashboards(46) Ratings
Customizable dashboards are dashboards providing the builder some degree of control over the look and feel and display options.
- 9Report Formatting Templates(32) Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.
- 8Drill-down analysis(46) Ratings
Drill down analysis is the ability to get to a further level of detail by going deeper into the hierarchy.
- 9Formatting capabilities(46) Ratings
Ability to format output e.g. conditional formatting, lines, headers, footers.
- 9Integration with R or other statistical packages(26) Ratings
Integration with the open-source R predictive modeling environment.
- 7.3Report sharing and collaboration(3) Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration is the ability to easily share reports with others.
Report Output and Scheduling
Ability to schedule and manager report output.
- 8Publish to Web(35) Ratings
- 9Publish to PDF(45) Ratings
- 8Report Versioning(23) Ratings
Report versioning is the assignment of version numbers to each version of a report to help in tracking.
- 8Report Delivery Scheduling(38) Ratings
Report Delivery Schedule is the ability to have reports delivered to a destination at a specific data and time.
Data Discovery and Visualization
Data Discovery and Visualization is the analysis of multiple data sources in a search for patterns and outliers and the ability to represent the data visually.
- 9Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)(44) Ratings
Pre-built visualization formats are canned visualization types that can be selected to visualize different kinds of data.
- 9Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization(41) Ratings
Location analytics is the visualization of geographical or spatial data.
- 9Predictive Analytics(28) Ratings
Predictive Analytics is the ability to build forecasting models based on existing data sets.
Access Control and Security
Access control means being able to determine who has access to which data.
- 10Multi-User Support (named login)(44) Ratings
Named model access means that users have access based on name and password.
- 10Role-Based Security Model(43) Ratings
Role-based access means that access to data is determined by job or position in the corporation.
- 10Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)(44) Ratings
Multiple access permission levels means that different levels of users have different rights.
Mobile Capabilities
Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.
- 9Responsive Design for Web Access(39) Ratings
Web design aimed at producing easy-to-read sites across a range of different devices.
- 10Mobile Application(24) Ratings
A dedicated app for iOS and/or Android.
- 8Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile(33) Ratings
In-app dashboard reports and data visualization.
Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Sisense?
Sisense data & analytics platform is designed to make it easy to mashup data from across the entire data landscape and transform it into actionable analytics applications that can be embedded anywhere. The vendor boasts innovative startups and global brands like GE, Nasdaq, and Philips, as well as organizations worldwide are using Sisense to accelerate innovation and drive digital transformation by embedding Sisense into their businesses. Whether data is in the cloud, on-prem, or a mix of both, Sisense gives users everything needed to successfully deliver on analytics application strategy today, allowing you to:
- Securely connect and ingest data into cloud data warehouses to create a single store for your data
- Mashup data from dozens of sources for a complete view of your business
- Leverage a combination of live or cached data models to optimize performance and manage resource utilization
- Build beautiful visualizations and actionable application components using the robust library of integrated widgets and certified add-ons
- Develop and white-label with ease using a full suite of APIs and developer toolkits
- Differentiate products and services with fully integrated, white-label analytics in the office or on mobile devices for users on the go
Sisense Features
BI Platform Features
- Supported: Administration via Windows App
- Supported: Administration via MacOS App
- Supported: Administration via Web Interface
- Supported: Live Connection to External Data
- Supported: Snapshot of External Data
- Supported: In-memory data model
- Supported: OLAP (Pre-processed cube representation)
- Supported: ROLAP (SQL-layer querying)
- Supported: Multi-Data Source Reporting (Blending)
- Supported: Data warehouse / dictionary layer
- Supported: ETL Capability
- Supported: ETL Scheduler
Supported Data Sources Features
- Supported: MS Excel Workbooks
- Supported: Text Files (CSV, etc)
- Supported: Oracle
- Supported: MS SQL Server
- Supported: IBM DB2
- Supported: Postgres
- Supported: MySQL
- Supported: ODBC
- Supported: Cloudera Hadoop
- Supported: Hortonworks Hadoop
- Supported: EMC Greenplum
- Supported: IBM Netezza
- Supported: HP Vertica
- Supported: ParAccel
- Supported: SAP Hana
- Supported: Teradata
- Supported: Sage 500
- Supported: Salesforce
- Supported: SAP
- Supported: Google Analytics
BI Standard Reporting Features
- Supported: Pixel Perfect reports
- Supported: Customizable dashboards
- Supported: Report Formatting Templates
Ad-hoc Reporting Features
- Supported: Drill-down analysis
- Supported: Formatting capabilities
- Supported: Predictive modeling
- Supported: Integration with R or other statistical packages
Report Output and Scheduling Features
- Supported: Publish to Web
- Supported: Publish to PDF
- Supported: Output Raw Supporting Data
- Supported: Report Versioning
- Supported: Report Delivery Scheduling
Data Discovery and Visualization Features
- Supported: Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
- Supported: Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
- Supported: Predictive Analytics
- Supported: Support for Machine Learning models
- Supported: Pattern Recognition and Data Mining
- Supported: Integration with R or other statistical packages
Access Control and Security Features
- Supported: Multi-User Support (named login)
- Supported: Role-Based Security Model
- Supported: Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
- Supported: Report-Level Access Control
- Supported: Table-Level Access Control (BI-layer)
- Supported: Field-Level Access Control (BI-layer)
Mobile Capabilities Features
- Supported: Responsive Design for Web Access
- Supported: Mobile Application
- Supported: Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
Sisense Video
Sisense Integrations
Sisense Competitors
Sisense Technical Details
Deployment Types | On-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Windows, Linux, Mac |
Mobile Application | Apple iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry |
Supported Countries | All |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(128)Community Insights
- Business Problems Solved
- Recommendations
Sisense is a versatile platform that addresses the needs of organizations across various industries. Users rely on Sisense to provide accurate and fast insights, reducing report response time and development time compared to manual coding and web UI controls. With Sisense, educators receive real-time feedback on student performance through integrated dashboards, allowing them to make informed decisions and improve teaching strategies. For businesses, Sisense serves as the executive dashboard and managerial reporting platform, providing comprehensive business performance insights at all levels of the organization. The software is also used by various departments such as sales, product management, purchasing, and eCommerce to track key performance indicators - KPIs, analyze sales performance, and answer complex questions about datasets. Additionally, Sisense is utilized by executives and managers to present key metrics, division heads to make better decisions, and compliance departments to quickly identify issues and take corrective actions. Overall, Sisense helps automate time-consuming reports, eliminates error-prone reporting, and creates a centralized data warehouse and portal for better decision-making across the organization. Whether it's analyzing marketing campaigns, managing agent performance or consolidating information in a single tool, Sisense offers a wide range of use cases that cater to the needs of diverse businesses.
Based on the user reviews, here are the three most common recommendations for Sisense:
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Users highly recommend using Sisense as a cost-effective and productive tool for businesses. They suggest utilizing the Linux version and the managed cloud environment for optimal performance.
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Users advise structuring data properly to take advantage of Sisense's easy left join capabilities. They mention that the software is quick to learn and intuitive but caution against allowing unfamiliar users to access it.
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It is recommended to make Sisense more user-friendly for non-technical users and improve filtering options. Users appreciate the deep insight and advanced analytics capabilities of the tool, but suggest not setting expectations too high. They also mention that a strong foundation in Java is necessary.
Overall, users highly recommend Sisense as an advanced analytics software and one-platform solution. They praise its comprehensive data analysis and visualization capabilities, as well as its simplicity, intuitive use, and continuous feature improvement compared to other BI vendors. It is suggested to engage with the Sisense community, conduct a tool evaluation, and have a comprehensive criteria and a senior BI sponsor in place. Implementing Sisense either in the cloud or on-premise with an in-house team of BI developers and data engineers is also advised. Additionally, following best practices when building dashboards and elasticubes is recommended.
Attribute Ratings
- 8.9Likelihood to Renew14 ratings
- 8.2Availability1 rating
- 8.2Performance1 rating
- 8Usability5 ratings
- 9Support Rating6 ratings
- 8.2Online Training1 rating
- 7.3In-Person Training1 rating
- 7.1Implementation Rating3 ratings
- 8.2Configurability1 rating
- 8.2Product Scalability1 rating
- 8.2Ease of integration1 rating
- 9.1Vendor pre-sale1 rating
- 9.1Vendor post-sale1 rating
- 8.4Data Visualization3 ratings
- 9.2Data Sources47 ratings
- 9.1Data Sharing and Collaboration47 ratings
Reviews
(1-25 of 26)Sisense : Great and Fastest Data Visualization Tool
- Fastest - due to its in chip methodology.
- Using great visualization, BI becomes easier with Sisense.
- Millions of data can be loaded in fewer seconds which didn't seem possible with other traditional reporting tools.
- Robust Architecture and provides Rest APIs to access it externally.
- Instability of the data cubes, runs and failures.
- Unknown issues in widgets, dashboard, filters.
- Republishing of the dashboards for every single change.
- Variables, parameters cannot be used in the front end.
If data can be stored in form of elasticubes and can be accessed offline. But for large organization, its not appropriate as large number of users required more logins and it leads to costing and maintenance issue.
Also, at times we have observed its instability.
- Ease of Use
- Accessability
- Better graphing tools
- Better alerting systems
Provides great analytics to all the data you feed Sisense
- Technical support has been great and the on-boarding process has been straightforward.
- Great customization with a vast array of plugins and API integration capabilities.
- Sisense is constantly adding new features and being innovative.
- They need to get the Linux version out of beta. Having to run a Windows Server is not too big of a deal but it does require more resources if you devops team only develops in Linux.
- Management of Cubes is a pain and requires high system resources.
- Random stability issues.
Changed the way we looked at data!
- Combining data from different sources
- Cleaning up and modeling data
- Dashboard creation
- Cubes get very slow once your data starts to grow big.
- Admins currently cannot edit each others' dashboards. This gets very cumbersome once admins change - it takes duplicating and republishing dashboards to let them take over.
- Maps can be done better. The ability to compare to some standard benchmarks such as population density, demographics, GDP, etc., would be very useful.
- Visual ETL and UI for data relationships and modeling within ETL.
- Drill down and interactive reports with varying levels of filters for each dashboard.
- Data alterations and updates are fast.
- Their technical support has no option for immediate phone support in the event of a disaster or emergency. Their support staff is mainly located in Israel, so a ticketing system is relied on no matter what the urgency.
- Their tech support also doesn't easily remote into your instance if you're hosting yourself to be able to quickly diagnose issues.
- We've still been experiencing many random issues with Sisense like corrupt files and unexplained failures in production which seems very buggy.
- Anytime deeply advanced SQL is used in the ETL section (Elasticube Manager) Sisense kind of falls apart. It needs any complex queries to be broken down into multiple, separate queries at the simplest denominator.
You don't need an actual data warehouse with historical and live data
You don't need separate solutions for ETL, DW and Reporting
You need all your data available via API's automatically
Less appropriate
You want to be to run stored procedure or cursor logic as part of your ETL (not possible in Sisense)
- Sisense is easy to set up and connect to a wide variety of formats and platforms.
- Sisense reduces the time it takes to obtain an optimal ROI.
- Sisense really delivers the instant analysis required to merge financial numbers and statistics with a pretty accurate dashboard landscape.
- Sisense could work on their management strategy for dashboards that are created by multiple users, reducing the complexity and improving their management options and security premises.
- The navigation and filtering options could be useful in the mobile version, but Sisense needs to work on the layouts to improve the UX.
- Sisense is a heavy app so be careful if you deploy this powerful tool in a resource that is under its system requirements--it can drive you crazy waiting for optimal performance.
Sisense is a reliable way of displaying data
- Drag and drop feature for creating a dashboard is very easy to use and intuitive.
- Easy to share with other users especially if you want them to have a read only file.
- Depending on the machine you have, it can be very fast and responsive when pooling data together.
- Mobile system is wonky and not as intuitive as the desktop version. I would recommend against viewing the dashboards on a mobile device as well.
Sisense: Best Data Visualization Tool in 2018.
- The biggest pro I found with Sisense is that you do not need a DBA in order to manage the system. This makes the learning curve really easy, which helps lots when thinking of implementation across a whole organization. This reflects well for the tool, since it is powerful, but easy to use.
- ALL-IN-ONE! Sisense answered all of my customers and our company's requirements, to include data modelling and complex calculations.
- Sisense is as accurate as your data, and best of all, it is real time. After using other visualization tools, I learned that when using multiple sources, errors occur. Sisense prevents this risk by allowing all of the resources to be managed at their engine, maintains connections, and as a developer, the EliastiCube allows you to source large volumes of data with an easy click.
- The usability of the application on mobile devices needs some improvement, especially navigation and filtering.
- Dashboards that are created by multiple users can be a bit of a hassle to share by Admins.
- If you need to embed dashboards into your website, you are require to buy a license separate from the user and platform license. This is a norm on most BI visualization tools, but Sisense can seem a bit on the high side, cost-wide.
Sisense - The analytics tool you've been looking for!
- Great management of large amounts of data from numerous sources.
- Beautiful visualization capabilities.
- Fantastic support of customizations through custom JS plug-ins.
- Implementation requires very little effort allowing users to start working with their data in a short amount of time.
- After initial implementation, learning spikes up rather quickly in regard to SQL joins and custom table manipulation.
- There is plenty of documentation surrounding how to do specific tasks, but not as it pertains to errors and why other things do not work. However, this is constantly improving as the community grows and collaborators contribute content.
- There are quite a few tasks that require significant manual input and design. This is ideal in many situations; however, many users would like a more intuitive engine that can create working widgets automatically based on the type of data fed. Again, this is already a work in progress and will likely need much more data to establish a learning engine.
Using Sisense
- Ease of use especially when it comes to building widgets
- Customer Support & Professional Services
- Implementation Support
- Accessing NetSuite data through ODBC has been a bit of a challenge if you are not 100% familiar with the data structure
- Some of the widget labels that need to be updated/maintained via script can be challenging to a novice user (non-technical user)
- Give junior and medium level managers more control over data and take data driven decisions.
- Take control over large users data and attributes
- Visualization and aesthetics of dashboards and widgets is top tier
- No immediate support for extremely urgent issues like system errors/crashes or phone support
- Viewers option to drill into data is somewhat clumsy and needs adjustments
- Build time and duration expectancy changes a lot for no apparent reason.
- There are no proper metrics regarding dashboards/tables use and workload. Effects optimization and schema size
Sisense is good a dashboarding
- Our board of directors appreciates the ability to present key metrics about our company on a single page. The graphs are easy to understand. The ability to gather information from disparate divisions and present a unified picture saves time and aids decision making.
- Our division heads use it to get a picture of how their individual divisions are working. The ability to show the data in graphical form with minimal programming allows them to make better decisions for their departments.
- Our compliance department uses the graphs to quickly find issues within the company. By highlighting outliers from a number of different systems, corrective actions can be taken quickly, eliminating potential legal issues.
- Sisense can display data in a variety of formats, tabular or graphical, with no programming necessary for the display logic
- One 'elasticube' or back end data source, can collect data from any number of different systems. Sisense provides connectors to more than 20 different back end technologies, including all of the leading databases and flat file formats. The Elasticube can contain a query that joins together data from disparate data sources.
- The graphical front end facilitates filtering the back end dataset, both at design time and at run time, allowing the user to see just the necessary data set.
- Graphical views can be linked, allowing the user to drill down to see more details of any part of the database.
- My non-IT users are often confounded by the techniques necessary to build beautiful dashboards
- The web version of the elasticube manager does not do everything that that the desktop application does. With version 7.1, this seems to be getting better. More to follow...
- Our primary contact person keeps changing, leading to difficulties in continuity of support. On the plus side, it is nice having a dedicated support person.
- Sisense is a dashboarding tool. It is very appropriate for delivering summary or exception data to the users, presenting it in a fashion that is easy to digest.
- It is not as good at presenting tabular or raw data, showing the details that support the conclusion. If you need to see reams of data for the application, a reporting tool will be better suited to the job.
Flexible BI single stack solution
We are using Sisense as platform for providing reports and business intelligence for our customers. In essence, we are using the platform as OEMs.
With Sisense, we provide reports and insights for contact center solutions which we implement to our customers.
- Excellent single-stack BI solution, allowing great flexibility for data-modelling within the Sisense platform itself, with no need to perform the data modelling on a separate platform. The data modelling is implemented using standard SQL which makes anyone familiar with SQL already able to use the system.
- Virtually unlimited customization options using Java Script, allowing you to modify and enhance existing functionality.
- Great support from the both customer support and the user community.
- Some functionality is missing as built-in functionality, and can only be added by using Javascript, which requires technical knowledge of JS from the dashboard designer to implement. So although almost anything is possible to implement, some things which should be basic require high-level skills.
- Viewers of dashboards have very limited customization options, almost any customization requires the dashboards designer to implement.
- Particularly, viewers are unable to select conditional formatting, rename fields, change the order of items, etc.
Well suited for almost any BI implementation across any subject matter, and especially where a lot of data modelling must be performed on the data before used in the reports.
Somewhat lacking where the users/viewers of the dashboards need to have customization options of the dashboard per-user, such as when the same report might be used by different customers.
- Simple, clean user interface. Sisense offers the most options to the designers and admins. Leaving the end-user the abilities only they need. No confusing layers of options they can't use or understand.
- Fast building of metadata layer over millions of records.
- Ability to interface (reliably) with various databases/systems including IBM iSeries.
- Better ability to download data to excel in a readable format close to what appears in the dashboard.
- Knowledge base is vast but not easily searched.
- More customization options for UI.
Pushed for Sisense...never looked back!
However, the best part of using Sisense was the partnership. Not only where we assigned an account rep, but we had a dedicated product engineer at our finger tips to help with questions related to data modeling, dashboards, and custom enhancements. The service and attention we received from that duo was world-class. It is rare to work with a company of this size and consistently receive same-day service with high quality, knowledgeable engineers.
Overall, Sisense has a great, innovative product and is an excellent partner. You will not be disappointed with their service.
- Service
- IoT integration
- Self-service
- Not 100% web-based ....yet
(1) orgs that want to abandon the traditional DWH model and allow users to ingest data from ANYWHERE
(2) orgs that want teams to collaborate and move fast
(3) orgs that want to explore IoT integrations
Sisense - the Right Fit for Ease of Use and Ease of Implementation
- Sisense owns the implementation by assigning a customer success manager that has the power to assign resources as needed to help you accomplish your goals.
- The GUI (both front-end and back-end) is very intuitive and user-friendly, which allows the company to adopt it quickly and allows the administrators to focus on the layout and usage of the dashboards.
- The technical support team and professional services team are both very knowledgeable and helpful.
- The onboarding process that you start with misses the mark. The concept is for you to start slowly and build over time, which can be a challenge if you are a technical person and want to move rather quickly.
- The exporting feature could use some improvement. There are four total options for getting the data out of the browser to be able to share, but there are no templates that allow administrators to have control of the output of the exports.
Beginner's Thoughts on Sisense
- In particular, the ability to easily model data within the Sisense ElastiCube, re-build the data and see the changes reflected within our dashboards is great.
- SiSense's ability to make short work of large data sets to answer questions is impressive.
- Sisense allows you to easily pull data from multiple sources. If you have data, it can use it.
- The filtering and formula capabilities within Sisense are strong.
- Being so powerful, the ElastiCube must be carefully built especially with larger data sets - too many connections or the wrong ones between tables can lead to queries that eat up all system resources, requiring a reboot and disrupting the production environment.
- Sisense is very customizable and flexible, but sometimes it is surprising that some simpler features are not available; for example, you cannot change up or control your font size/color or other presentation elements at all without scripting.
- Emailing dashboards is very limited, particularly with larger widgets (like pivot tables). Furthermore the email scheduling doesn't allow you to choose a specific schedule or certain recipients.
SiSENSE as web service platform.
- Great at mashing up data from multiple different data sources.
- Easy deployment, ETL process, Dashboard or Report preparation and distribution to end users.
- Very low hardware usage so you probably wont need to invest huge money on new servers.
- JS Extensions engine which allows to create really powerful tailored features.
- Plug-ins in ETL tool are powerful, but configuration could be a little easier. Also JS extension in PRISM Web is powerful but could be a little more clear how to use.
- Need to catch up with several common features for BI platform.
Strong Data Management Tool
- Managing data such that there is a single source of truth
- Processing large quantities of data
- Connecting to many different data sources
- Building dashboards is very mouse-heavy and often a slow process
- Provide more training upfront so companies use best practices from the start
- Types of visualizations should be improved to look better and have more functionality & flexibility
BI Solution SiSense
•Get better insight into the data we already have
•Automate time consuming and labor intensive reports
•Eliminate error prone reporting, multiple spreadsheets, no audit trails etc…
•Create a centralized data warehouse and portal for all levels of the company.
•More time in analysis state than data collection
•Clear business driven BI Dashboards to allow executive level management to make clear educated decisions.
SiSense is being used across our organization to help manage agent performance and maintain important KPI's
- Ability to snapshot critical data that shows us the lifecycle of a customer and make intelligent predictions that drive change to our business model.
- Direct access and visibility into real-time performance metrics for coaching and performance improvement.
- Unified single source of truth for metrics company wide
- Central web portal for all data
- Email notification when new dashboards are created
- Web UI for BI Studio so it can be used across multiple OS
- East/West Coast US Support Hours
SiSense - a most sensible choice
- Bring together data from multiple data sources (mysql databases, google spreadsheets, google analytics, web analytics tools) to form a single source of truth.
- Dashboarding - various sales/metric dashboards are displayed around the office on large plasma screens. Individual users also have access to the dashboards.
- Adhoc reporting - we also use Sisense to perform adhoc reporting and do data extractions across different sources
The product is used across multiple departments from the CEO's office, through to marketing and accounting.
The product has a long way to establish a single source of truth for our sales data, but to also allow for the quick and timely extraction and presentation of data in dashboards which was previously done in a very laborious way.
- Easy to generate dashboards
- Easy to link up your different data sources (drag and drop)
- Pleasing UI
- Professional and responsive customer support
- Smooth integration (hosted solution was seamless)
- Cost effective
- Would like to see conditional alert feature - ie if a value
- Manual builds of the Elasticube (back end) can sometimes take a long time, for unknown reasons
- Better mobile integration/UX
- Can't print to PDF (yet)
Big Data and Charter School - What? Sisense delivers big time
- Elasticube technology simple to use - extremely flexible and easy to use. You have many built in plugins to connect to multiple sources of data and the ability to build an API connector if needed.
- Short Development time - build comprehensive dashboards on the fly and push changes instantly to the web
- Customer service - big strength here. They have a very responsive support staff that will help you figure out any issue. I have them all on Skype if that tells you how accessible they are.
- Discrepancies between what you see in the designer and how it is displayed on the web. It does not look as polished when published. Fortunately I have been already shown a sneak peek into the upcoming v5 and they moved the designer completely to the web.
- Documentation on how to accomplish some things is sometimes left to much to the interpretation of the user. I would like to see a more comprehensive guide in different areas such as their API designer and some of their SQL design pieces.
- Some stability issues within the prism web environment. Not sure if this is something at fault on my end or theirs.
- It is fast to setup, develop, and deploy.
- It requires no tuning to handle large amounts of data.
- it is easy to maintain and has low software license and hardware costs
- Elastic Cube makes it easy to maintain consistency in data relationship / data definition across all reports,
- The dashboard builder could construct complicated dashboards from the data model with lowest granularity level (minimal or none data aggregation before loading data to SiSense ).
- SiSense doesn't have a comprehensive data permission authorization capability. It could be difficult to manage the data access permissions for an organization with a large hierarchy structure or for complex authorization requirements.
- SiSense does not support merging two dimensions on-the-fly when building reports in BI Studio (the report development tool in SiSense). For example, there were a user table and a revenue table in the ElastiCube. To show user growth and revenue growth in one chart, I can not build the chart directly. Instead, firstly, I needed to bridge two date dimensions, the user sign-up date and the revenue date, from the two tables in ElastiCube Manager ( the cube management tool in SiSense). Secondly, I used the bridged date dimension to build the chart in BI studio. This leads to a complicated data model and the reduced flexibility in ElastiCube.
- ElastiCube does not support outer-join tables when modeling data. Though it's always feasible to build reports that have outer-join logic, some minor work-around is required.
SiSense is a great for
SiSense Provides a Professional Solution but with a Catch
- The data cube feature of SiSense is extremely powerful. It allows you to integrate with many different data providing systems. For the application we used it for, we had to use an ODBC driver to interface with an Allen-Bradley data collection system. SiSense was able to handle that data exchange very well.
- The visual front end of the SiSense reports is very sharp looking. The reporting and monitoring screens look very clean and professional. You can pretty much match any GUI you are using on the customer's manufacturing floor. In the application we deployed SiSense for, we were able to seamlessly match the Wonderware HMI screens and then run SiSense on an external monitor so that it looked like the SiSense data monitoring screens were part of the HMI.
- SiSense is easy to learn. When we were trying to decide if we wanted to purchase the license, we were able to download a trial version of the product to get a feel for it. SiSense also setup a webinar for us and walked us through a typical setup. It was very helpful.
- One area that was not exactly perfect for us in terms of SiSense was the licensing system. It was very expensive, and the license was not a lifetime purchase. Their license has to be renewed yearly.
- SiSense does a great job making the reports look awesome. However, what if the customer wants plain/jane reports? I wish there was a "simple" mode or something similar for a functional but clean and simple report interface.
- SiSense's tech support was adequate, but I would only give it a 6.5 out of 10. They were not able to answer our data cube problem. We found the solution on our own and copied them on it.
Solid BI tool for a reasonable price.
- Great value for the cost from a BI standpoint.
- The Elasticube is pretty intuitive in terms of adding data sources and cleansing/joining them.
- The BI studio has many different report building features, allowing you to customize each clients dashboards to their needs.
- The web version of the dashboards doesn't have the full functionality that the BI studio does, which can cause some issues
- The elasticube's can sometimes be finicky and have failure to build errors which can cause headaches. This is primarily due to all of the different APIs that they try to maintain, but I'd like for their to be an easier way to pinpoint why the error occurred to remedy it versus a lot of manual investigation.