Overview
What is Sigma?
Sigma Computing headquartered in San Francisco provides a suite of data services such as code free data modeling, data search and explorating, and related BI and data visualization services.
Sigma Computing Review
Great tool with some weird kinks
Sigma Recommended.
Sigma Rolling Out.
My Sigma Review
Sigma Review
Nearly perfect, missing some nice to have features
I tell everyone about Sigma!
Great BI tool loved by many business stakeholders
A data analysis tool that is easy implement and easy to learn.
Love Sigma
Getting data into your users' hands quickly and easily
Excellent Tool for Business Analysis
Actionable and fun data analytics
How Sigma Differs From Its Competitors
Self-Service Analytics
Ad Hoc Analytics
Self-Service Analytics
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Self-Service Analytics
Ad Hoc Analytics
We are currently only at a …
Self-Service Analytics
Non technical users can create their own custom reports and dashboards.
It allows users to interact with live data providing the up-to-date data for analysis.
Collaboration …
Ad Hoc Analytics
Interactive Dashboards
Iterative Analysis and Visualization
Data Lineage and Versioning
Self-Service Analytics
Ad Hoc Analytics
Self-Service Analytics
Ad Hoc Analytics
Self-Service Analytics
Ad Hoc Analytics
Self-Service Analytics
Ad Hoc Analytics
Self-Service Analytics
This helps us inform …
Ad Hoc Analytics
Self-Service Analytics
Ad Hoc Analytics
Self-Service Analytics
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Self-Service Analytics
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Self-Service Analytics
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Self-Service Analytics
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Self-Service Analytics
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Self-Service Analytics
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Self-Service Analytics
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Self-Service Analytics
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Sigma Computing SQL Knowledge
Dashboards
Sigma Collaboration
Sigma Access Speed
Sigma Computing SQL Knowledge
Dashboards
Sigma Collaboration
Sigma Access Speed
Sigma Computing SQL Knowledge
Dashboards
Sigma Collaboration
Sigma Access Speed
Sigma Computing SQL Knowledge
Dashboards
Sigma Collaboration
Sigma Access Speed
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
- Drill-down analysis (150)8.585%
- Report sharing and collaboration (156)8.181%
- Customizable dashboards (155)7.676%
- Formatting capabilities (157)7.272%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
What is Sigma?
Sigma Computing headquartered in San Francisco provides a suite of data services such as code free data modeling, data search and explorating, and related BI and data visualization services.
Entry-level set up fee?
- Setup fee optional
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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161 people also want pricing
Alternatives Pricing
What is Microsoft Power BI?
Microsoft Power BI is a visualization and data discovery tool from Microsoft. It allows users to convert data into visuals and graphics, visually explore and analyze data, collaborate on interactive dashboards and reports, and scale across their organization with built-in governance and security.
What is Tableau Desktop?
Tableau Desktop is a data visualization product from Tableau. It connects to a variety of data sources for combining disparate data sources without coding. It provides tools for discovering patterns and insights, data calculations, forecasts, and statistical summaries and visual storytelling.
Features
BI Standard Reporting
Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.
- 7Pixel Perfect reports(100) Ratings
Pixel Perfect reports are highly-formatted reports with graphics and ability to preview the report before printing.
- 7.6Customizable dashboards(155) Ratings
Customizable dashboards are dashboards providing the builder some degree of control over the look and feel and display options.
- 7Report Formatting Templates(127) Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.
- 8.5Drill-down analysis(150) Ratings
Drill down analysis is the ability to get to a further level of detail by going deeper into the hierarchy.
- 7.2Formatting capabilities(157) Ratings
Ability to format output e.g. conditional formatting, lines, headers, footers.
- 7.3Integration with R or other statistical packages(5) Ratings
Integration with the open-source R predictive modeling environment.
- 8.1Report sharing and collaboration(156) 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.
- 9.3Publish to Web(99) Ratings
- 8Publish to PDF(124) Ratings
- 9.5Report Versioning(114) Ratings
Report versioning is the assignment of version numbers to each version of a report to help in tracking.
- 9.2Report Delivery Scheduling(127) Ratings
Report Delivery Schedule is the ability to have reports delivered to a destination at a specific data and time.
- 8.3Delivery to Remote Servers(64) Ratings
Ability to deliver reports to remote servers
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.
- 7.3Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)(141) Ratings
Pre-built visualization formats are canned visualization types that can be selected to visualize different kinds of data.
- 5.6Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization(26) Ratings
Location analytics is the visualization of geographical or spatial data.
- 6.2Predictive Analytics(18) Ratings
Predictive Analytics is the ability to build forecasting models based on existing data sets.
Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- Downloadables
- FAQs
What is Sigma?
Sigma is a business intelligence (BI) and analytics platform purpose-built for the cloud. With Sigma, anyone can use the spreadsheet functions and formulas they already know to explore live data at cloud scale, down to the lowest grain of detail. Its familiar spreadsheet-like interface delivers SQL into the hands of any user while keeping data fresh and secure within cloud data warehouses.
Data-first companies can use Sigma to empower their employees, customers, and partners to break free from the confines of the dashboard and explore data for themselves to make better, faster decisions. The software was built to capitalize on the performance power of cloud data warehouses to combine data sources and analyze billions of rows of data instantly – no coding required.
Sigma Features
BI Platform Features
- Supported: Live Connection to External Data
- Supported: Snapshot of External Data
- Supported: ETL Capability
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: Report sharing and collaboration
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
- Supported: Delivery to Remote Servers
Data Discovery and Visualization Features
- Supported: Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
Sigma Videos
Sigma Integrations
Sigma Competitors
Sigma Technical Details
Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
Mobile Application | Mobile Web |
Supported Countries | United States, Canada |
Sigma Downloadables
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(286)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-25 of 34)- Provides a familiar data analysis format with its spreadsheet interface.
- Fast; by querying the warehouse directly, it's much more performant than other cloud-based BI tools.
- Allows non-technical users to interact with and analyze warehouse data without needing to know SQL.
- Easy-to-use templates are great for monitoring aspects of our data stack.
- UI is a little clunky; you'd expect a product that was developed in the last 5-10 years to have a snappier interface and a more polished product.
- There really needs to be a way to weave custom SQL queries into a workbook to perform advanced aggregations and manipulations; currently, you can only use SQL to load data into a parent table.
Sigma Computing Review
- Ease of use - I'm a non-technical user but have built out the bulk of our dashboards
- Their support is world class - their chat function is super quick to respond and knowledgeable
- Their tutorials and webinars are useful for new learnings
- There are occasional bugs
- Their AI functionality is still lacking
Great tool with some weird kinks
- Ability for a data analyst to upload a specific CSV to join on.
- Scheduling reports over slack/email/etc
- Create hidden tabs/charts to use as an intermediary table
- Create charts based off of any table, csv, other table, etc.
- Unable to search for a specific chart in a workbook
- No clear area to test or put one-off questions
- Search overall is really hard to use
Sigma Computing is hard to use however when you are building so many different charts and workbooks, it is impossible to search for a chart that exists inside a workbook. In addition to that, when needing to answer a one-off question, the only option to create is to create a workbook or a new dataset. This means that the best way to test or find a one-off question is to create a workbook called "sandbox", or something temporarily which is not so clean.
Users can directly connect to various data sources to explore and query the real-time data
It offers data transformation and cleaning capabilities which helps users to prepare their data without the need of complex ETL tools
This platform controls and provide permissions, ensuring sensitive data is only accessible to authorized users. The use cases can be ranging from sales and marketing analytics, HR analytics, supply chain management and more.
- Security and Goverance
- Data Lineage and Versioning
- Native Cloud Connectivity
- Data Collaboration and Sharing among team
- Intuitive User Interface
- More visualizations
- Offline Data Access and Export
- More Connectivity for export to cloud storage
- Complex Joins and Data Blending
- Performance Optimisation for large datasets
Suited when we have to work with real time data.
Native Cloud Data Integration makes it a seamless fit.
Scenarios where it is less appropriate:
Sigma is not best choice when comes to advanced statistical modeling or complex ML tasks
Where we have heavy customization and complex reporting demand
Where user requires offline data access.
Sigma powers progress
- Sigma has plenty of onboarding documentation
- Sigma has excellent customer support
- Sigma is powerful, they have features I need before I realize I need them
- Sigma can have a steep learning curve for the un-initiated
- Sigma can sometimes deprecate features or stop supporting them without much notice
The necessary last part of the Data stack!
- Intuitive interface
- Live chat
- Ease of joining tables
- Simplifying the interface - too many areas to do the same action
- Joining queried data with warehouse data
- Better looking visualizations
Sigma at a startup
- robust technical support
- data querying capabilities are strong
- formula writing feature is intuitive
- formatting dashboards/visuals is terrible and buggy
- design capabilities are very limited
- various menus are complicated and difficult to understand
Great, but Limited for Now.
- Disseminate workbooks and information through user profiles and features with a relatively low learning curve.
- Customization tools for colors/branding.
- Limitation in visualizations that lead to long workarounds to get features we want, or to be able to display data in the way we like it.
- Limit choices in customization when it comes to fonts, text size, and element sizing.
- Difficulty in handling complicated dashboard designs that require multi-element/section movement and a higher number of elements.
Sigma: As easy to use as Excel, as powerful as Tableau.
On a daily basis, use it to determine a broad range of things:
Product performance:
- Observing past trends and predict future trends in product usage
- Identify broad trends that could lead to product improvements
- Help clients get the maximum potential from our product by observing how its being used
- Identify areas where costs to us, or the client, may be unnecessarily high and address
- Proactively identify issues and reach out to clients for troubleshooting and resolution
- Reach out to clients who are not using the product to its maximum potential and assist in helping their projects succeed
- Maximize delivery to our clients by identifying the causes of shortfalls
- Customer Support: They've always been very quick to respond, willing to help work to come up with solutions for anything I'm stuck on.
- Very quick and easy to create reports with, once a solid dataset has been built.
- Low Code/No Code UX is intuitive to any excel users.
- Many options for joining different data sources.
- Adding new features regularly
- Formatting: On workbooks and dashboards, it can sometimes be difficult to make the page elements align correctly.
- When creating and setting up datasets, having a temporarily row-limiting option when editing would help a lot, particularly on anything with a large number of rows.
- Scheduling reports to be sent out can be tricky if the request is something like "Last Monday of each month".
- Being able to export an xls with conditional formatting would be helpful in some cases.
The scenarios where Sigma is less appropriate are when a task needs to be confirmed. If we reach out to a client regarding an issue, we can't indicate it was done in Sigma. I don't consider this a Sigma issue, as it's not meant to be a workflow tool.
Sigma user survey
- I like the conditional highlight feature.
- I like the flexibility I can change the width and height of the widget.
- I constantly update the dashboard so I'd like to see version somewhere in the view.
- The query is a bit slow but I don't know if that's Sigma's issue or the query engine we are leveraging on.
- flexibility change the UI layout
- clear permission level
- a bit slow (updating the permission view, query, changing the tabs)
- building tools and be available for non-engineers
less appropriate
- just for analysis purpose. Jupyter is probably better tool. The main reason is Sigma takes quite a few steps to add a UI module. There is a learning curve for beginner in my opinion.
- i don't see a lot of charts support compared to similar products
Quick Metrics for Faster Results
- Easy to learn
- Plug n Play
- Great Customer Support Staff
- Prettier visualizations & aesthetics for sharing externally
- More visualization options (heat maps especially)
- Some menus are hard to find, very small buttons that lead to features that aren't accessible from other places.
- Have to ask support where to find features, help docs are often not for the version/exact product you're using.
- Aggregates vs total rows vs aggregating data yourself - unclear which is correct or what they do exactly
- Quick creation of new, basic visualizations & charts
- Identifying & tracking new metrics
- Creating overview dashboards for clients Empowering business users to create value for clients
- Creating beautiful, in-depth dashboards for clients
- Preserving credits in snowflake or w/e data warehousing service you use
- Designing creative, new visualization types
Traditional BI is Dead; Long Live Sigma!
- Create custom datasets without the need for SQL.
- Easily manipulate/transform workbooks using Excel-like language.
- Fast calculations with much lower wait time for data to load or be transformed.
- When writing custom SQL, there should be an option to merely call the database at the beginning without having to do so throughout the query (similar to Snowflake).
- Sigma should allow uploads of .kml files.
- Make it flexible so that there are more ways to resize workbook elements.
Fast but.. Lacking.
- Sorting related analytics, such as percentiles and bins.
- Easy to quickly manipulate large data sets.
- Responding to questions Via the Live Chat.
- Allowing for Relative Values between columns, in tables, and pivot tables (% difference, for example).
- Allowing visuals to be fully customized, such as moving data labels, allowing a bar chart to have a color mark based on a column even if it's a combo chart, and Allowing for Water Fall Charts (possibly stacked visuals and transparent color options).
- Being able to use a lookup between built out tables instead of only raw tables.
- Offline Functionality (Sigma Extract??)
- Formatting of Tables and Pivot Tables (e.g. Particular font for particular column).
SIGMA Fast and Easy to use.
- Runs data extremely quickly.
- Data sets are easy to manipulate.
- Data is presented in an easy way to use to analyze.
- Data is downloadable to Excel.
- No recommended changes at this time.
- User interface.
- Integration with other related services.
- Loading speed.
- Friendly learning curve.
- Library of visualization types.
- Standardization of advanced features across visuals.
- Support articles for specific features.
- Reduced learning curve compared to other products
- User friendly interface
- Very responsive support chat
- Communicating errors and why they happen
- Preventing users from performing functions that commonly cause errors
- East coast support times
Moving date filters have been tough for Sigma to handle with the nature of our datasets. We have daily ledgers that are only useful one day at a time (and bank dates only), but the preset dates filters are better suited for date ranges (i.e. the "last month" filter is 7/1/2022 to 7/31/2022, while we would just want 7/31/2022). We tend to need to get creative with our functions to get moving dates to work.
Sigma - Strong analytics for technical teams.
Where Sigma comes in is trying to find the signal from the noise. We create a few "approved" workbooks/dashboards for everyone to see but the power of Sigma is in the self-service arena. We allow our teams to build their custom data views. Sigma is easy to use for slicing/dicing, and anyone who knows excel has a good chance of getting up to speed on Sigma. Don't want to oversell how easy it is. There is a learning curve, but it isn't that steep, and once the team is over, they can self-serve.
- Excel-like formulas that are easy to use
- Simple table like metaphor that is easy to understand
- Complex SQL queries created automatically.
- Ability to automatically drill down into Day/Week/Quarter on one chart with no coding
- Search functionality - hard to find just dashboards/workbooks
- Ability to share components - eg create a visualization in one workbook, reuse this exact one in another workbook. Change it in one place updates everywhere.
- Create custom functions that can be used in calculations (eg: Fiscal Quarter = some complex formula) then in the workbook have ability to =FiscalQuarter([thedate])
- Self-service for semi-technical excel-like people
- Have existing data warehouse
- More technical teams
Not well suited
- Complex analytics and analytic graphing
- Board-ready visualizations
- No data warehouse was established
Sigma Computing--effective but a steep learning curve
- Dashboards
- Visualizations
- Organization
- Can be a steep learning curve
- Not as useful for unstructured data exploration
- Concept of groups is confusing
- Works at cloud scale (billions of rows)
- Familiar to Excel users without training
- Works as a service, no software to download or manage
- Highly performant, allowing access to transactional details
- Supports drilling into details across any dimension to any level of detail without pre-modeling
- Write-back features are limited and somewhat difficult to discover
- Joining of tables is not as intuitive as it could be
- Limited control over certain visualization features
Sigma Computing - Room for Improvement
- Data visualization
- Integration with SQL
- Workbook functionality
- Concept of data levels is confusing
- Dashboards are hard to create
- High learning curve
- Dashboard Visualizations look great!
- Nice set of query and filter tools.
- Love the scheduled emails / notifications.
- Love the integration with Slack.
- Users have complained that it can be a little difficult use.
- There are performance issues on occasion.
Good, Flexible BI Tool For Novice and Intermediate Data Analysts
- Flexibility with data ingestion from various sources.
- General UX has improved fairly significantly.
- Sigma [Computing] is designed in a way that reduces the learning curve for most users coming from a world of Excel and Google Sheets.
Steep learning curve but great functionality!
- Data analytics
- Dashboards for teams
- Filtering
- Onboarding
- Continued education for those unfamiliar with the platform
- Search functionality within tables
- Easy to use for business users
- Powerful and fast
- Great self service tools for education and troubleshooting
- There's lots of room for improvement for flexibility and ease of use for data visualization
- Room for improvement for CSV file upload limits
A great tool for data analyis
- Aggregating large data sets.
- Charting the data.
- Performing quick queries.
- Saving queries by user and allowing users to share queries.
- The user interface had at least one big change in the past two years, which was confusing.
- I would like to be able to create and run report on the fly, instead of having to schedule them.
- Better navigation using tabs and menus.