Sisense Reviews

• Rich integration features
• High customizability
• ODBC feature allows unsupported data sources (when drivers are available)
• Customizations features enable user interface modification (for someone who knows JavaScript)

We dropped Excel and saved hours of finance team work, with automated reports and dashboards.

Sisense has no native support for week as a data dimension, which is a major issue for us. They try to remediate this with plugins and custom SQL scripts and it works, but only to a certain degree.

I have used it for about 12 months.

I have had no major deployment, stability or scalability issues.

Sisense is easy to understand, support and scale.

I rate technical support extremely high. They put a lot of effort into support; guys even write plugins to enhance system functionality.

We evaluated Tableau, but chose Sisense because of its customisation options.

Installation was extremely straightforward; the installer took care of everything, up to IIS role installation.

We implemented Sisense with an in-house IT team. It was no hassle at all; the few queries we had, we found answers on a support forum.

As any BI solution, Sisense isn't cheap, and we had a long discussion before taking the decision to buy this system. It's hard to measure returns, but it certainly has saved a lot of our finance team time already.

It is very important to understand that Sisense is a startup-type company and you will not get a super feature-rich product (like Tableau). In exchange, you get dedicated support and a lot of customization options. As long as you're OK with this, you'll like the product.

- Ease of integration of multiple data sources (SQL databases, Excel files, etc)

- Rich and detailed documentation and very good support

- Ease of use and intuitive tools to build high quality dashboards in a very short period of time 

In a short period of time, my team acquired the necessary skills to deploy a very high quality BI tool across the company, integrating all our data sources and building dashboards expected by different business units for a long time. Today, no longer have hundreds of Excel files sent across the company to provide a limited view of the business and sometimes with conflicting data. Everything is available in one place, in almost realtime. Managers do not need to search for information, now the information they need comes to them directly.

We are exploring the combination of Sisense and R and fortunately, there is a way to combine the two. But during the training, we were expecting to be introduced to this.

During the introductory training, our trainer wasn't able to accompany us on this subject and there is no return on experience from the community, probably because integration with R seems to be new.

Of course, all the visualization tools of the web interface are one of the things Sisense does best.

But also, the custom tables from the backend of Sisense is one of the most powerful feature of the software. It allows you to clean your data and prepare a frame for less experimented users to work with through the web interface.

Better tracking of the targets for our representatives, quick overview of the market by product categories , supplier, customers, states, etc. Ultra fast drill down capabilities that allows us to find answers to Ad Hoc business questions in a few second during business meetings.

Sisense also allowed us to achieve some less conventional projects like abstracting the effect of the price increases on our sales. As some of you might know the Canadian dollars had a lot of fluctuations during the last years. By attaching our multiple price increase list by items (300 000 skus) with a date stamp, to our real sales from our ERP, Sisense allowed us to develop a value that represent our sales without the effect of the prices increases of the last 3 years. With this we can look at the real growth of our market.

When your data cubes become to complex (many layers of custom tables), the performance of the tool might be slightly affected. Less speed, updates that are not triggered on your web interface without restarting the server. 

Sisense's documentation and video tutorials were thorough and helpful in starting off with the basic usage of the product. Connecting data sources and creating a dashboard with a couple reports was a breeze.

Given the limited company resources, we were looking for a Business Intelligence Tool that would be fast to set up and use by everyone in the company, from Product to Sales. For the price point, this tool is on par with many other BI tools out there. I also appreciate the fact that Sisense is constantly improving on the product, adding new features and providing detailed documentation on the changes and updates.

Deployment of the product on our AWS instance was fairly straightforward.

I did encounter an issue with the Dashboard load time to be slow considering that we had a basic dashboard with five reports and no more than 300 rows was disconcerting. But it appears the load time has improved somewhat, likely due to data caching.

We haven't needed to scale.

Technical support is very responsive and helpful in providing links to various solutions to problems and questions that arose from using Sisense.

Yes, I have personally used several different solutions that were robust in features but also required continual engagement from our engineers.

Setup was simple from a business perspective. It would be wise to have someone who has a background in DevOps to handle the schema and data connecting to start.

Implementation was in-house.

N/A, as ROI remains to be seen. We are in the early stages of launching our product and using Sisense to its full potential so it will be at least another six months time to have a better understanding of whether the product will be helpful to the company or not.

Yes, we evaluated several other options but I'd rather not say which ones.

It's really user friendly and fast. I can use the product during customer meetings, not only to show dashboards, but to create and process data analytics in real-time. It's perfect for consultant workshops where you can't work with static dashboards. Also, because it has an HTML5 interface, it now looks very good when compared to BI solutions that haven't evolved since Windows XP.

I can finally switch to visual programming as I have access to all advanced database functionalities and features in Sisense without having to code almost anything.

I'd like to see branding features and more layout possibilities.

We've been using Sisense for two years now.

We've had no issues deploying it.

The product is very stable.

The scalability for my utilization is good.

Deployment is ultra-easy. I’ve installed the product, connected to mySQL database, and created my first dashboard in a day. ElastiCube manager may require some very basic IT skills, though.

I did it myself.

When I started looking, I had two main prerequisites for my BI solution. I needed to create on-the-fly dashboards for customers so I needed a fast and intuitive solution to make graphical request and look good in front of customer when we wanted to check a particular aspect of their activity. Also, I wanted a product that looks sexy for its time and not outdated, as opposed to Business Objects. I checked a few products such as SAP, BOARD, Yellowfin, Klipfolio among others. We also looked at internal development using a Javascript library such as D3.js, metricsgraphics.js, and highchart.

Time to deployment was one of our most critical factors in choosing a BI vendor, and I am not sure you can get to deployment faster than Sisense. On day one, I was able to download it, connect two disparate data sources with multiple tables, and build meaningful dashboards.

Other features that I found very valuable:

Query Speed: Querying a data source with more than 180 million records took on average less than 5 seconds after initial load.

Speed of Development: It took less than a month to configure single- sign on, be fully embedded within our web product, and to build a comprehensive data cube that covered all of our metrics.

Ease of use for end-users: Building meaningful dashboards is no longer an IT task. Sisense has done a great job at not over complicating dashboard building

We are no longer in the business of report changes and making a slight change to a report for a specific customer. Sisense is already reducing our development workload since customers are building their own reports instead of waiting on us.

Users with viewer access have less capabilities than similar users in Tableau. For example, data discovery would be difficult with only a viewer license.

Sisense limits the cube building to a very visual display that can get hard to analyze when you bring in many data sources. It would be nice to have either an "advanced" view or alternate view that helps with many tables.

They do not currently have support for R, but I hear that is coming in 6.0.

About 6 months.

None.

None so far.

Not yet, but we did just start rolling this out

Excellent. I am confident I will receive a response within the same day and usually much sooner than that.

Technical support has been superb. We had a fairly complicated security implementation, and they helped guide our developers through all the nuances.

We previously were on Pentaho, and we switched because we needed an easier platform to develop on. Building complex dashboards required a great deal of training and Pentaho experience.

The initial setup could not have been any easier.

In-house

Qlik and Tableau

The sales process was excellent. We opted to do a proof of concept, and we were able to test all of our requested functionality prior to buying the product. They also guided us through the proof of concept, and offered a great deal of support. The sales process was one of the best sales experiences we went through.

Our customers love the product. When we demonstrate Sisense's capability against their data, they wonder how they existed without Sisense.

It has a very easy-to-use interface and we are able to create custom tables and fields that allow us do advanced analytics.

We have MySQL, and we used to run queries to get data and generate reports in Excel and Google Doc. Sisense can do both in a much much faster way, which drives our reporting efficiency into another level.

Sisense doesn't have connections with statistical packages like R, SAS, etc.

Sisense is excellent to get done your analysis quickly. It's an easy-to-use BI tool and doesn’t require extensive IT knowledge, except when it comes to specific design requirements of widgets.

The ability to handle large datasets is impressive and fulfills all our expectations.

Also, I am very happy with the user management system that allows to set up rights and access to data on a very detailed level.

We are now able to do quick ad-hoc analysis and develop stylish dashboards instead of working with excel. This does not only save a lot of time but also reveals useful insights in the area of Marketing, Finance, Sales and Consumer Insights that are new to us.

The only thing I am missing is the option to plug in any data from any source easily since Sisense only offers a limited amount of supported data providers.

I’d like to highlight the good and quick support, which always tries to find a custom solution for any issues either by mail or even screen sharing session. Important requests are handled with high priority and are usually fixed quickly.

Overall I think, it is a fantastic value-for-money analysis tool and I would absolutely recommend it to anyone who looks for a up-to-date BI solution that can be customized to your specific needs. We are happy with the choice and look forward to all the planned future developments.