Sisense Software

Implementation Was Great, And Support Continues To Be Great. We Enjoy Pushing The Limits

Real-time Internal visibility to operations for account and executive management, also providing similar visibility directly to clients through OEM license of Sisense. We've become dependent on the operational analytics from Sisense for both assessing the success of recent feature updates and prioritizing new features.

Pros

Great experience. We use Sisense both internally and resell (OEM) to our clients. Sisense implementation team did a great job helping us to complete our first use cases, which was a great source of hands-on education. We've been running with Sisense for more than a year and have seen useful new features, design updates, and bug fixes. Their support people are efficient, professional, knowledgable, and just nice people. There have been challenges as we push the limits of functionality, but support from both the sisense community and the Sisense support people has allowed us to push through those challenges. Sisense has a incredibly useful and valuable product today, and I look forward to seeing the product roadmap come to reality.

The speed at which we constructed our original solution, and several solutions since, is outstanding. That speaks to the production functionality and performance, and the people at Sisense that have helped us along the way.

Cons

The product does not have the ability to view it's own operational metrics on a dashboard. We pointed this out during our implementation more than a year ago, and this is still lacking in the product. We've built our own functionality around this since, but it should have come out-of-the-box. The mobile experience also isn't nearly as rich as we'd like. They've grown quite a bit there in the last year, but still needs more capabilities.

Able to get BI up and Running from Multiple Sources relatively easily

Value for money solution

Pros

Able to get a demo up very quickly - basically a full functioning demo product.

Sisense is used in our organisation to perform the following tasks:
- Bring together data from multiple data sources (mysql databases, google spreadsheets, google analytics, web analytics tools)
- 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 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.

Once you bring in your data from multiple sources you can use custom SQL language to bring all data sources together. This is a great way of doing things

Drag and drop dashboarding

Sisense support was also excellent and they were able to provide us with a cloud solution as a one stop shop.

Very solid solution for the price.

Slick interface.

Cons

Drag and drop dashboards also mean there is less customization of dashboards. Not as flexible as Tableau.

If you get your data model wrong the product can hang - you need to self-verify your work. Which you should.

Not sure how it performs with truly big data sets.

SiSense as an OEM Solution

We use SiSense as an OEM tool in place of a traditional OLAP deployment. We chose SiSense due to the out-of-the-box nature of the product, as it was quick to implement within our stack. By far, the most impressive part of SiSense has been their customer success team. Edan has been an incredible success manager for us - professional, responsive, and informed. He's managed expectations on our end exceptionally well and accurately and gotten us the help we needed when we needed it. He's the primary reason four this 4-star rating - he's been simply fabulous.

Pros

The dashboard creation wizard is pretty robust and fairly easy to use. You will need an SME within the organization - this isn't a tool that I would simply throw at someone and expect them to learn in a few weeks, but that's largely due to the wide range of capabilities the tool has. However, the wizard is much more intuitive compared to a tool like Tableau.

The UI of the dashboards is beautiful and offers a nice range of customization features. It's a much prettier dashboard than Tableau.

Finally, the ability to write custom Javascript for formatting preferences has proven to be a very nice feature.

Cons

The cube processing itself is quite limited - this is not a big data tool. Cube builds on our dataset take almost two hours. Part of this has to do with our Elasticube design being suboptimal, but I would argue that just provides evidence that you need a very technical SME within your organization who has experience designing OLAP models.

My major objection is pricing - they charge on multiple vectors; by cube and also by a user. It's complex and the costs ramp up very quickly. I wish they'd pick one vector to price on, as it would make both budgeting and affordability much better.

Sisense has been a key component of our marketing product offering for 3 years. Our clients love it.

Pros

The front end of Sisense is what I like the most about this Software. Whether you are designing a Dashboard or using it you can expect and smooth and intuitive experience.
From a designer standpoint: the basic charts and features of data visualization are available in the standard tool. Once you are familiar with them, you find the need to take it to the next level. Next thing you know you find yourself leveraging Sisense online resources, adding new widgets, and updating javascript very easily to make your dashboard look the way you want.
From a user standpoint, looking at data, drilling and exporting is simple to figure out even without training.

Cons

I have experienced a few limitations with Sisense. When you export a dashboard into an image it doesn't look too good. I find myself taking screenshots instead which can sometimes become time consuming.
I've also been a little frustrated with not being to sort data as wanted in ascending, descending or alphabetical order.
I experienced a situation where I identified a design flaw for a supported widget and we were asked to financially support the development to fix the flaw. Which we didn't.
We still really appreciate the tool and its many benefits overall.

Best product on the market in terms of feature set and support.

Provides great visualizations to ease the understanding of complex data sets.

Pros

Developing widgets for a dashboard (even complex ones) is far easier and faster than it is with competing products. User community is a strong asset. Elasticubes are able to accommodate many different files types with ease.

Cons

The initial set up turned out to be complicated and required IT investment, but perhaps that is due to the unique nature of our company's setup. Product is a bit costlier than Power BI, but the feature set and ease of use makes the cost well worth it. Though Sisense is Elasticube allows the software to quickly pull large data sets, it's difficult to create for the average user and requires a lot of technical expertise. In many cases, users must write SQL code, even though Sisense promotes its codeless reporting. However, to get to this codeless reporting you must have a very technical person to write the SQL to build their Elasticube and there are some limitations such as join types and such that create difficult workarounds. We have had former Sisense users complain to us that they experienced a lot of errors getting the Elasticube to load, and because the system relies upon the cube, Sisense won't work if the cube isn't working.

Sisense is a great tool! Very easy to learn, implement and explore :-)

Pros

- Integrated data connectors joining multiple data sources and formats
- Integrates with external web sites or web applications
- Integrates with web portals
- Interactive browser-based dashboards
- Removes limitations to data size
- Use Single-Sign-On to keep a single authentication mechanism
- Wide range of widgets such as gauges, charts, and graphs
- Can be set up and used entirely in-house
- Centralized data hub
- Complex business queries without programming or SQL writing
- Consolidates, stores, and accumulates data
- Data mash-ups
- Data unification
- Drag-and-drop user interface
- Intuitive `script-less user interface
- Embed entire dashboards or individual widgets
- Enables to deliver interactive terabyte-scale analytics
- Exports data to CSV, PDF, Excel, Images and other formats
- Eye-grabbing visualization
- Filters data by dropping fields on the canvas
- Handles data at scale on a single commodity server
- Identifies critical metrics using filtering, calculations

Cons

Managing the elasticube was little difficult as it sometimes hangs while performing various activities.

Good support system and proactive issue resolution especially after moving to sisense managed cloud.

Data to market was ultra quick with no teething issues.

Pros

Intuitive data interface: Elasticube GUI is very intuitive to use, especially building calculated columns, duplicating a column, aliasing, etc.
Easy dashboard creation process: For simple dashboards, not much tech skills required. Advanced use-cases have a robust community in place where you pick up plugins that give the right solution to your problem, usually with examples which
Granular access control: with cube-level and row-level access restrictions, you can ensure that the right audience have access to the right information.
White-labeling and web integration with SSO: As an OEM, this was a primary ask and Sisense extended great support to help us achieve this.
Ability to consume huge data sets: No preaggregates and hence drill down to the most granular level.

Cons

Limitations on how and where I would like my filters to go; ability to filter by clicking on legends; no proactive version upgrades on sisense managed cloud; greater control over retinal elements of visualization.

Amazingly easy, fast & powerful. Great for focused insight creation & deployment. Mobile friendly

Sisense distinguishes itself from an increasingly crowded marketplace with a phenomenally easy to use, fast, seamlessly integrated product. Its Elasticube server/database provides a single point ETL, Data warehouse and semantic layer rolled into one. Building a usable data model is a cakewalk compared to other products out there. Transparency and flexibility of the model is outstanding. You can easily see underlying data, create custom calculation fields using traditional SQL, preview data at will, and make changes quickly without worrying about "breaking" the data warehouse. Sisense Elasticubes accommodate multiple concurrent data sources from a variety of database types including traditional, cloud and big data. Not to mention, you can join on key fields even from Excel and CSV flat files. You may run into some slowness based on data volumes and refresh frequencies. Installation is a breeze. Download the package from their website, tweak your installation parameters and let it go. No additional scripts or components. No additional servers to be set up. This is a single machine-install that uses every drop of juice your server can provide. Make sure you choose upper end of processor and memory specs. Sisense's single web interface for designing individual visuals (charts, graphs, tables, etc) and dashboards is a pleasure to use. Whether you prefer building bottom-up or top-down, this is a truly easy interface to use as master. Filtering capability is remarkably well developed and scope/type of filters can be regulated without leaving the web page you are on. Visuals look great as they are, but if you want to tweak the look/feel and behavior of individual charts, all you need is a working knowledge of Javascript. Their website is remarkably rich with customization scripts, plugins and API libraries for most applications. If your company uses Unix based servers, may be a challenge to use since primary install package is Windows. Your mileage may vary with their scalability and governance architecture - for purists and traditionalists their approach is not "conventional". I think they have eschewed clustering for a different approach. Confirm if this works for you - especially if you expect a growth in volume/users/complexity. Fidelity of report export format and scheduled report emailing need some polish. I hear the newer versions have fixed these issues. If these are important to you, check first. Definitions of Enterprise Class vary.

Excellent full stack solution shows value right away

Pros

One of the things I like best about SiSense is how it's out of the box ease of use has the ability to evolve into a much more advanced analytics tool with continued use. Plugins, custom javascript, upgrades, and new features ensure that I'm always improving the analytics I can do with the tool. Also the ability to set regular email reports, download dashboards as pdfs, and quickly push changes to the users lets us answer business questions on demand in a way we never could before.

Cons

One of the things I dislike most about SiSense is their Elasticbue build process. As our data models have expanded we've found it difficult to manage the build times of our larger cubes which can take several hours to build. For instance, we cannot build changes to the cube while one of the regularly scheduled builds is occurring and the 'stop build' functionality has never been very responsive. It is my understanding that the next version will completely redesign the build process so I'm looking forward to seeing these changes.

The power of custom software available to those of us without an engineer on staff.

We collect data from many disparate systems and struggle to draw conclusions from cross source analysis. Sisense creates a place to connect those data sources in perpetuity without building custom software. It allows us to serve up massive quantities of data to non-technical business users and give them the opportunity to explore the data in ways we hadn't initially anticipated without having to ask for a report to be built with those exact specifications.

Pros

Power, flexibility, and ease of use.

Power: The speed at which Sisense can render complex connections and slice data dozens of different ways is truly incredible.

Flexibility: Even with junky data and funky structure in our data sources, we can produce powerfully useful dashboards for our business users through custom calculations at multiple points in the building process.

Ease of Use: Nearly every step to build and use the software is intuitive and simple. In many softwares you pay for flexibility with a confused nest of features that don't apply to you. Sisense has 90% of what you need right where you'd expect it and a whole host of additional features hidden away (but not impossible to find) to keep the user interface clean and intuitive.

Cons

This is highly sophisticated stuff, so its not surprise that there are still features being built. Most of those relate to the interactions between the Elasticube and the Dashboards. Certain things changed in the Elasticube require equivalent changes to the Dashboards (name changes, mostly). I expect the new web version of the Elasticube to fix much of this.

SiSense allowed me to have the flexibility to have an internal and external portal easily

I am able to scale easily

Pros

The software enabled us to have the ability to be flexible enough to meet the needs of my external and internal customers. The amount of data that can be available to the end user, the ability to drill down and be notified of changes is incredible. The beauty of this functionality is the end user has visual dashboards to run "queries" and then download all the data from the results easily.

Additionally, we needed the security it provides to keep data from being "mixed" between customers. The structure of the system allows for global changes and the ability to modify customers dashboards in a singular location.

Cons

It is not a data warehouse. While there is an incredible amount of data available it is not a data warehouse and you cannot do ad-hoc queries on data residing in the application.

Solid BI Platform, great client-side / customer features. Excited to see what comes next

At TRACK Hospitality Software, we are delivering Cloud based applications for the independent travel market. Our biggest problem was responding to our customer base's demands for data and analytics about their business. Sisense is allowing us to turn our existing set of table-based reports into a powerful set of dashboards that bring BI analytics to all our customers. The team at Sisense has been world class and empowering us with the deployment and development tools needed to bring our solution to our customers.

Pros

Excellent client-side dashboard design tools and capabilities.
Exhaustive support for importing of data from a huge variety of sources. Very good UI for design and manipulation of data sources.
Simple setup and deployment, really does make going from nothing to great looking data dashboards lightning fast.
Good extensibility model with world class REST API support for managing and handling deployments.

Cons

Product lacks good support for multi-organization deployments: Sisense is tailored very much to be a large enterprise type of application, so deployments involving multiple sets of customers require additional development cost.
Product can stand to improve with better support for micro-level date and time based data sets.
Needs better support for software development lifecycle models, (e.g. dashboard versioning, widget repository)

Sisense - 360-Degree Product

The support team was great and customer success manager Shimon was great to work with. He was listening to our requirements was helping us to navigate with the product and escalating to right people for fixing very critical issues.

Pros

Sisense is one of best Product we have been using for last 1.5 years. This product has features of HTML 5 portlets, REST API, Widget Customisation, Best UI experience, Integration to your systems using SSO, AI and Bots Integrations, Modern IOT, Sisense Bulbs, R-Integrations, Data Mining Models, Facebook & Twitter Social Data Integrations. Very easy to implement into the environment. In a traditional warehouse, it takes years to implement BI solutions. This one took few days to implement the solution.

Cons

They still need to Explore on Data Lake Scenarios. Few Features needs to scale up in terms Sisense Apps. Drill down is not available and few reporting features like exporting to excel and emailing to non-sisense users are not available.

Great platform with even greater customer service

As a company, we have been able to refine our data analytics and business intelligence offerings vastly through our experiences with Sisense. This is an affordable option and great for empowering end users to make decisions using their data across platforms and sources.

Pros

The Sisense customer service team is great. You will typically get a response within 24 hours and they are always willing to stay on the call until your issues are resolved. You also tend to get connected to the same support team members, so they already have context about your account, and where you might be having issues. The platform itself is fairly easy to learn and our onboarding process took about 1 month. So far, our clients have been very satisfied with Sisense, not only for its dashboarding capabilities but other features including Pulse notifications. From an agency perspective, you have the ability to easily brand dashboards with client colors, and out of the box widgets are fairly easily to style. Dashboards are clean and modern, and the support team is committed to helping you make the data as actionable as possible for end users.

Cons

Currently, it can be timely to pull data in from social platforms. While completely possible, there is a learning curve if you have not previous connected to these platforms via an API connection. I would also love to see more text editor options, including selecting a specific font size, or choosing from a wider range of fonts and styles.

Sisense is a great tool that has advanced our BI capabilities significantly

The front end is easy to work with and can produce impressive looking metrics within a very short space of time. Users love the way the platform looks and find the agility in terms of filtering provides insights which they wouldn't have looking at figures stored and presented in their traditional ways (in spreadsheets). Pulse alerts mean that some users only look at the data when it's needed - which is helpful for those employees in the business who aren't going to be spending time analysing the data themselves. The Elasticube manager (~back end) is pretty easy to work with once you get used to it and you understand the required behaviours when making changes. The possibility to write SQL statements in the Elasticube manager is a huge enabler and this functionality makes it much easier to produce the data we require - in comparison to some other BI tools which sometimes have more ~"specialised" language or custom expressions / formulas that are difficult / not so intuitive to work with. There is always room for improvement and there are features that you would expect to be available that are not. I suppose though one of the good things about Sisense is that there is an active community around the tool - where plug-ins, work-arounds and feature requests are logged and discussed.

Pros

User experience. People are always impressed when new dashboards are made available due to the excellent look and feel.

Cons

When working in the Elasticube manager there is no way to download the data, you always have to go into Sisense and create a dashboard and widget for the data you want to examine. This makes it more time consuming than it should be to test and validate the data in the Elasticube manager.

The best full stack BI solution on the market

100's of thousands in cost savings from automation and resource redundancies.

Pros

Quick to deploy, easy to use, and you can manage both the front end and the back end from a web portal. No more vpn into a server somewhere! We throw millions of rows of data at Sisense and it still keeps working like a champ! Having tried Domo, Tableau and others in the past Sisense was the first real full stack solution that got us out of our data issues and into a centralized source of truth with reporting. We have effectively saved 100's of thousands of dollars each year in automation and efficiencies alone!

Cons

Would love to see more widgets and customization options in the future. Some of the administrative features could be more robust as well.

Customer review of Sisense

We purchased the Sisense Dashboard application about 8 months. My company provides Broadband Service Assurance Solutions to companies all over the world. The product and services provided in many ways are customized to a particular market based on their specific needs and network. However one common theme in all markets is improving testability which is measuring the accuracy at which measurements and analysis are performed. The Sisense Dashboard application was chosen as it provides a comprehensive set of tools allowing implementation of customer specific dashboards in a short period of time. The people at Sisense are extremely knowledgeable about their product and are always willing to assist. I have had the pleasure to work with many individuals within Sisense and have many productive meeting and conversations with Alex Rich, the Tollgrade Customer Success Manager.

Pros

There are so many options and capabilities with the dashboard application that I see over time being able to enhance what I deliver to the different markets. This is important to keeping customers engaged.

Cons

Customer service trouble tracking is sometimes difficult to keep up with; tickets are closed before having an opportunity to look at suggested resolution.

Easy, feature-rich, and customizable BI solution

SiSense has been a fantastic BI tool. Combining data from multiple systems is simple with their ElastiCube caching system. The ability to write pass-through queries at the time of importing the data and then custom SQL expressions on data within the cube means that the data can be arranged and linked as if it was natively in one large relational database. The visualization tool is sleek and easy to modify. The ability to add community-made plugins means the visualization options are virtually endless. My customers, both internal and external, routinely compliment the appearance and value of our BI implementation.

Pros

Community-driven Plug-Ins allow for unparalleled customization for someone who is not a developer.

Cons

Joining data outside of SQL expressions is an enforced inner join and null values will drop from tables. Be careful about dropped data!

SiSense Customer Survey 12-04-2018

For what is it, it strike a good balance of functionality for the price. It did not require a lot of in depth training or professional services to get the software up and running.

Pros

The ease in setting up the software and future software upgrades. The use of the software is pretty straight forward. The use of webinars and 10 day startup program made it fairly easy to get started and become successful. The user support though the use of additional plug-Ins to improve functionality is a great way to enhance the usefulness of the product without a lot of time and/or expense.

Cons

They should include a report writing feature, that will allow users to create formatted reports beyond graphical dashboards. Also I would like to see a more varied color palette for the charts beyond the basic color palette. Some competitors include both these things to which make for a more robust product.

Advanced Product Capable of Running Big or Small. Quickly Scalable. Fast.

I had first introduced SiSense to a Midwest business in Ohio. It is a nice sized firm focused on Revenue Cycle Management for Radiology Practices across all 50 States in desperate need of modernizing both the look and feel of their current set-up, as well as the functionality. While knowing reporting upgrades were necessary, I knew that whatever the choice, I needed to be absolutely precise when replacing the old with the new. I also knew that we needed to run both systems in parallel to implement safely and smartly. All of these items were communicated to every vendor during the vetting process and for nearly a whole quarter- It was the incumbent verses the likes of SiSense, Tableau, Domo and others. Ultimately, I chose SiSense based not only on the product's flexibility, but the company's "All-Hands-On-Deck" approach to understanding our business prior to telling us that it would do things that it couldn't. From the pre-contract "sales funnel" to the on boarding staff's attentiveness, there was patience and willingness to help us learn and embrace all feature sets helpful to the business. In the end, I would and will use SiSense over and over again. For small to medium size businesses, the product is pretty straight forward using a quantitative and tenured employee or two. For larger, more complex installations, I do recommend having a web/app/dev type of staff member available during the initial build process, which is what I ultimately did, but ONLY due to the complexity of the metrics needed to run this particular business. Today, the product continues to take on new shapes and forms, especially as ad-hoc requests encourage reporting in ways deemed previously unattainable to this company. Finally, with the continual attention to detail that SiSense provides to its clients, even during their own growth, I will gladly use and recommend this product for large, medium or small implementations across the foreseeable future.