Sisense OverviewUNIXBusinessApplication

Sisense is the #2 ranked solution in top Cloud Analytics tools, #9 ranked solution in top Embedded BI Tools, #11 ranked solution in top Data Visualization tools, and #14 ranked solution in top Reporting Tools. PeerSpot users give Sisense an average rating of 7.6 out of 10. Sisense is most commonly compared to Microsoft BI: Sisense vs Microsoft BI. Sisense is popular among the large enterprise segment, accounting for 63% of users researching this solution on PeerSpot. The top industry researching this solution are professionals from a computer software company, accounting for 22% of all views.
What is Sisense?

Sisense is an end-to-end business analytics software that enables users to easily prepare and analyze large, complex datasets. Sisense’s Single-Stack BI software includes data preparation, data management, analysis, visualization and reporting capabilities.

Sisense Customers

Ebay, WIX, Wave Accounting, ESPN.com, Magellan Luxury Hotel, Paylogic, Sony, Merck, EDA, One Hour Translation, NASA, Plastic Jungle, Philips, Yahoo

Sisense Video

Archived Sisense Reviews (more than two years old)

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PeerSpot user
Consultant at EarthLink
Consultant
It has allowed me to move my data to the cloud
Pros and Cons
  • "I have found the dashboard creating feature helpful."
  • "It has allowed me to move my data to the cloud."
  • "They should improve the filters to create downloaded data by moving them to the top of the dashboard."

What is our primary use case?

I use Sisense to provide monthly information to executives and our sales team.

How has it helped my organization?

Sisense has helped us to migrate core functions of our previous tool in less than 90 days. The sales team used this information when communicating with customers.

What is most valuable?

  • I have found the dashboard creating feature helpful. 
  • It has allowed me to move my data to the cloud. 
  • The customer support and onboarding features have been great.

What needs improvement?

They should improve the filters to create downloaded data by moving them to the top of the dashboard.

For how long have I used the solution?

Less than one year.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

It was used to replace our BI tool, which was expiring soon.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Business Intelligence Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
A very simple setup: Easy to download, install, and updates are pain free
Pros and Cons
  • "​Allows users to build their own solutions without as much reliance on technology staff."
  • "Ability to work with very large data sources without the limitations of Excel."
  • "The dashboard design interface is very intuitive and allows you to quickly and easily produce professional, innovative dashboards."
  • "No issues with stability. It is a very stable solution."
  • "I would like to see more development and growth for the support of Knowledge Base and Community forums."

What is our primary use case?

Analytics and dashboards for product, sales, and marketing organizations. Merges data from many different data sources to deliver comprehensive views of the business. 

How has it helped my organization?

  • Allows users to build their own solutions without as much reliance on technology staff.
  • Ability to work with very large data sources without the limitations of Excel.

What is most valuable?

The dashboard design interface is very intuitive and allows you to quickly and easily produce professional, innovative dashboards.  

ElastiCube Manager allows you to combine multiple data sources and add additional fields and tables with ease. It gives you the power of ETL and data modeling in one easy to use tool.  

What needs improvement?

Minor improvements with formatting of data exports from dashboards. The ability for non-admin users to schedule the emailing of dashboards. I would like to see more development and growth for the support of Knowledge Base and Community forums.

For how long have I used the solution?

Three to five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No issues with stability. It is a very stable solution.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No issues with scalability. I think this is a major strength of Sisense.

How are customer service and technical support?

Support is very responsive and clearly one of the strengths of Sisense. I have always received a fast response and the staff is very helpful.  

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I have used many different solutions recently including Tableau, Power BI and BusinessObjects. 

Sisense provides us with the best performance and the functionality that we need. Sisense provides both an on-premise and cloud solution, which meets our needs.  

How was the initial setup?

A very simple setup: Easy to download, install, and updates are pain free.  

What about the implementation team?

In-house. 

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We did evaluate other options: Tableau and Power BI.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Head of Data Science at a recruiting/HR firm with 201-500 employees
Real User
Helped us gain knowledge about our customers, as well as highlighting data quality issues to correct
Pros and Cons
  • "ElastiCube Manager is a very easy to use ETL tool, which includes the ability to easily transform raw data into reusable data."
  • "There are many built-in connectors, which allow us to easily add new sources of data, often in minutes."
  • "Sisense has helped us gain knowledge about our customers, as well as highlighting data quality issues to correct."
  • "I would love to have more customization capabilities for building dashboards, especially in creating custom widget sizes."
  • "I would also like to be able to run a bursts of reports based on different field values with PDF output right in the tool, rather than filtering on each field value and generating each PDF manually."

What is our primary use case?

Embedded Sisense into our web/mobile application for customers and internal users to able to generate reports and insight from the data we collect.

How has it helped my organization?

While we are still in the middle of implementing, Sisense has helped us gain knowledge about our customers, as well as highlighting data quality issues to correct.

What is most valuable?

ElastiCube Manager is a very easy to use ETL tool, which includes the ability to easily transform raw data into reusable data. There are many built-in connectors, which allow us to easily add new sources of data, often in minutes.  

What needs improvement?

I would love to have more customization capabilities for building dashboards, especially in creating custom widget sizes. I would also like to be able to run a bursts of reports based on different field values with PDF output right in the tool, rather than filtering on each field value and generating each PDF manually.

For how long have I used the solution?

Still implementing.

How was the initial setup?

I have worked with a lot of tools. This one was being used within hours of seeing it without much training.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Director of Product - AI and Data Insights at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees
Vendor
Allows us to execute heavy, complex computations on the fly
Pros and Cons
  • "Allows us to execute heavy, complex computations on the fly so customers can slice and dice the data based on their business needs."
  • "Whenever we have an issue or are unsure how to proceed, they manage to simplify the issue and help us execute it in a graceful and scalable way."
  • "The initial version we purchased only ran on Windows servers, which was less than ideal for our DevOps team. I believe that has been remedied in the latest release."

What is our primary use case?

Embedded analytics for Financial Technology provider. We are a multi-tenant SaaS provider servicing large global organizations. Sisense is our embedded BI solution for visualizing descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics in our product. 

How has it helped my organization?

Prior to Sisense, we had very limited reporting capabilities in our product. Most analyses were performed manually and delivered to customers in Excel or PowerPoint files. Because these analyses could not stand on their own, we needed a lot of business analysts to guide our customers to make the right business decisions and execute the strategies manually. 

What is most valuable?

The Sisense data cube allows us to execute heavy, complex computations on the fly so customers can slice and dice the data based on their business needs. The visualizations are adequate and the support from their team has been outstanding. Whenever we have an issue or are unsure how to proceed, they manage to simplify the issue and help us execute it in a graceful and scalable way.  

What needs improvement?

We struggled a bit to get the data cube setup in a way that could be built in a reasonable amount of time. The initial version we purchased only ran on Windows servers, which was less than ideal for our DevOps team. I believe that has been remedied in the latest release. 

For how long have I used the solution?

Still implementing.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Senior IT Project Manager at a government with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real User
Reduced the time to complete quarterly reports to one day using the tool by creating dashboards
Pros and Cons
  • "Visually displaying data."
  • "The administrative side of Sisense is a little cumbersome and confusing."

What is most valuable?

  • Visually displaying data
  • Sorting results
  • Filtering data
  • Doing what-if analysis

How has it helped my organization?

Reduced time to complete paper-based quarterly reports from one month to one day using Sisense to create dashboards.

What needs improvement?

The administrative side of Sisense is a little cumbersome and confusing.

For how long have I used the solution?

Two years.

How is customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

The Sisense customer service group is fabulous. They answer all our questions and respond to our concerns in an efficient, effective manner.

Technical Support:

Top notch.

What about the implementation team?

We implemented this in-house.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user688287 - PeerSpot reviewer
Staff Business Data Analyst/ Business Data Manager
Vendor
A lot of the answers required by internal teams can be found much faster. Scenarios where there are discrepancies in the data can be found quickly by comparing disparate data sources.
Pros and Cons
  • "The most valuable thing I have found is the ability for Sisense to connect data from totally different sources."
  • "Larger datasets will sometimes give a "Accumulated logs" error when trying to make minor changes. T"

What is most valuable?

The most valuable thing I have found is the ability for Sisense to connect data from totally different sources. I can connect an Oracle table with an Excel document, an Access document and a ODBC MySql table, and quickly merge them all and get fast answers. Also, the ability to quickly change data types on the fly so as to match primary keys etc. Great tool.

How has it helped my organization?

A lot of the answers required by internal teams can be found much faster. Scenarios where there are discrepancies in the data can be found quickly by comparing disparate data sources. Also the convenience of using the same build to keep answering several questions without the need to run the entire dataset over and over, speeds things up tremendously.

What needs improvement?

Larger datasets will sometimes give a "Accumulated logs" error when trying to make minor changes. This usually requires you to run the entire Elasticube.

For how long have I used the solution?

Four years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

Very good.

Technical Support:

Very good.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

No. Sisense was an addition to our use of traditional tools like SQL Server TOAD Data Point, etc.

How was the initial setup?

Pretty straightforward.

What about the implementation team?

In-house.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Tableau, Qlik.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Senior Data Architect at a marketing services firm with 51-200 employees
Vendor
Dashboards are integrated into our web portal.

What is most valuable?

As the premier company for cannabis industry data and insight, delivering fast, accurate, and visually appealing dashboards for our clients is mission critical.

Sisense allows us to present data in a visually stunning manner that continually "wows" our clients, with the dashboards seamlessly integrated into our web portal.

How has it helped my organization?

As a market research/data company, this is how we deliver our core product to our customers.

What needs improvement?

Admins can't view all of the dashboards when needed; only dashboards that have been shared with the admins.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used it for two years.

How is customer service and technical support?

The customer service provided by Sisense is excellent. It's clear that the company is invested in their clients successfully implementing and using their product.

This isn't a company that stops caring as soon as they have your money.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated Tableau, Yellowfin, and QlikView.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user605247 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, Advancement Information Services at NC State University
Vendor
The ability to share metrics with our entire organization is valuable.

What is most valuable?

  • Build speed of large data sets.
  • The ability to share metrics with our entire organization.

How has it helped my organization?

I was able to pull together many different types of data into one place and compare it.

What needs improvement?

Some flexibility with the labeling of visualizations would be nice.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used it for 2.5 years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

We have not encountered any deployment issues.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We have not encountered any stability issues.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

Customer service is very good and responsive.

Technical Support:

Technical support is good.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We did not previously use a different solution.

How was the initial setup?

Initial setup was somewhat complex but mostly because our infrastructure was not in place.

What about the implementation team?

An in-house team implemented it.

What was our ROI?

ROI is very good. The amount of money spent to users served is very low.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It is much cheaper than competitors.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated Tableau, Qlik and Domo.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Vice President of Information Technology at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees
Vendor
The best features are the user-friendly interface and ability to deploy efficiently.

Valuable Features

The best features of Sisense are the user-friendly interface and ability to deploy efficiently.

Improvements to My Organization

We implemented the solution into an environment that had been using Excel as a business intelligence tool with data delivered on a monthly basis and we have freed our sales staff from being Excel pivot table experts.

Room for Improvement

The application lacks a control of the exporting function. It gives you the ability to export both the dashboards and the widgets in two formats each, but the format of all the exports are not completely under the control of the administrators. Most of it is select a few options and hope it comes out looking professional. A reporting engine that allows the administrators to format a template used in the exporting options would go a long way.

Use of Solution

4 months.

Deployment Issues

The deployment went fairly smooth. We were on a tight timeline and the Customer Success Manager assigned to our account worked very hard to make sure we had the resources to stay on schedule. All implementations run into some potholes, but the key is how the vendor lives up to their word in getting the proper solution in place. Sisense did an excellent job keeping us on task.

Stability Issues

Through the first 4 months, we have not had any stability issues.

Customer Service and Technical Support

We have used the Technical Support resources on 3 or 4 occasions during the implementation and the group is very professional and knowledgeable. You get to speak to a level 2 or 3 individual rather than starting at Level 1 and hoping the person knows how to handle the case. I am very satisfied with the Technical Support.

Initial Setup

The implementation of the server software and the mapping of the data tables was straight forward and non-complicated.

Pricing, Setup Cost and Licensing

The pricing was very competitive with the other solutions we evaluated. One word of advice would be to discuss the co-branding level you want and discuss how to structure a Test environment before you put your budget together. Overall, we are pleased with the pricing of our solution.

Other Solutions Considered

We evaluated Tableau, Domo, Qlik, Phocas, Dundas, and ThoughtSpot.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Network & Systems Administrator at a non-tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Vendor
The ODBC feature allows unsupported data sources, when drivers are available. It has no native support for week as a data dimension.

What is most valuable?

  • 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)

How has it helped my organization?

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

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used it for about 12 months.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Sisense is easy to understand, support and scale.

How are customer service and technical support?

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

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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

How was the initial setup?

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

What about the implementation team?

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.

What was our ROI?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user165072 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user165072User with 201-500 employees
Vendor

Sisense 6.4 has Weeks out of the box now.

PeerSpot user
Directeur des Systèmes d'Informations at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees
Vendor
Integration of multiple data sources such as Excel and SQL databases is one of the top features.

Valuable Features:

- 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 

Improvements to My Organization:

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.

Room for Improvement:

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.


Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Business Analyst - Canada at a marketing services firm with 51-200 employees
Vendor
It allows you to clean your data and prepare a frame for less experimented users to work with through the web interface.

Valuable Features:

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.

Improvements to My Organization:

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.

Room for Improvement:

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. 

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Director, Business Operations at a university with 51-200 employees
Vendor
For the price point, this tool is on par with many other BI tools out there.

What is most valuable?

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.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

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

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We haven't needed to scale.

How are customer service and technical support?

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

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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

How was the initial setup?

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.

What about the implementation team?

Implementation was in-house.

What was our ROI?

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.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
PROJECT MANAGER - Fleet production optimization & monitoring. Quarry/Mining/Construction at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Vendor
Has allowed me switch to visual programming as I have access to all advanced database functionalities and features but don't need to code.

Valuable Features:

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.

Improvements to My Organization:

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.

Room for Improvement:

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

Use of Solution:

We've been using Sisense for two years now.

Deployment Issues:

We've had no issues deploying it.

Stability Issues:

The product is very stable.

Scalability Issues:

The scalability for my utilization is good.

Initial Setup:

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.

Implementation Team:

I did it myself.

Other Solutions Considered:

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.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Product Owner of Business Intelligence at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
Vendor
Easy to Deploy, Easy to Manage, Easy for End-Users; Sisense represents what a BI company should be: Intuitive and scaleable for large sets of data.

What is most valuable?

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

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

About 6 months.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

None.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

None so far.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Not yet, but we did just start rolling this out

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

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

Technical Support:

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

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup could not have been any easier.

What about the implementation team?

In-house

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Qlik and Tableau

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Data Analyst at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
It's more efficient than running queries in MySQL to get data and generate reports, but it lacks connections to statistical packages like R and SAS.

Valuable Features:

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

Improvements to My Organization:

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.

Room for Improvement:

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

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user108030 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user108030Sales with 201-500 employees
Vendor

As of today - Im happy to say we support R integration as well as a wide variety of built in statistical functions in our solution

See all 2 comments
PeerSpot user
Business Analyst at a media company with 501-1,000 employees
Vendor
We're able to do ad-hoc analysis and develop dashboards instead of working with Excel, but I would like an option to plug in any data from any source.

Valuable Features

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.

Improvements to My Organization

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.

Room for Improvement

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.

Customer Service and Technical Support

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.

Other Advice

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.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user186843 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user186843Editor/Writer with 201-500 employees
Vendor

@Piero - Sisense actually comes with a built-in data integration and modeling environment (the Elasticube Manager) which in most cases would remove the need to use additional tools such as the ones you have mentioned. To see how it works, visit http://www.sisense.com/business-intelligence-technology/

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PeerSpot user
Director of Information Systems at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
Vendor
Dashboards are quick and combine multiple data sources.

Valuable Features

Set-up was very simple and Sisense on-boarding made sure we were successful in meeting our business goals. The dashboards are extremely quick and can combine multiple data sources with ease.

Improvements to My Organization

Customer reporting was a manual, laborious process that now is automated. Internal KPIs are now also seen through intuitive dashboards.

Deployment Issues

Deployment started with the pre-sales team. To guarantee success, engineers were made available to connect actual data to build dashboards so our executive team could see end results to justify the buying decision.

Customer Service and Technical Support

Customer Service:

Excellent customer service both pre-sales and post.

Technical Support:

Technical support has been very responsive. If they can't answer immediately, we receive prompt email responses with the result / code to solve the problem.

Initial Setup

The initial set-up was very straightforward since Sisense sales team spent so much time with us to ensure our success.

Implementation Team

Our internal IT staff handled deployment, including an onsite server.

ROI

ROI was realized immediately by reducing manual report labor. We can also meet the needs of clients that require dashboard reporting to retain business. Our sales team have brought bigger / better prospects by offering Sisense dashboards.

Pricing, Setup Cost and Licensing

Choose the onsite solution and only license for existing business, buying additional licenses as clients demand.

Other Advice

Excellent customer service and staff dedicated to their customer's success. You get what you pay for with Sisense (in a good way).

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
VP of Technology with 51-200 employees
Vendor
It has an easy-to-use API and the ability to handle very large datasets.

We chose Sisense for a rip-and-replace of Tableau 9.0. After our initial implementation of Tableau, and as our data set grow, we quickly ran into major performance, stability, and usability issues.

We went with Sisense because of its ease-of-use, visualizations built for the web, easy-to-use API, and, most importantly, its performance and ability to handle very large datasets.

Other key features are how Sisense manages multi tenancy and its visualization plugin support. This give sus the ability to support our use case and build our own custom visuals as needed.

We have been very pleased with our experience with Sisense to date. Our sales team is very excited about the slick dashboards we can put together with very quick turnaround times.

Although its plugin support mitigates this, Sisense could use additional out-of-the-box visualizations. Additionally, the maps feature could also be improved.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user108030 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user108030Sales with 201-500 employees
Vendor

Sisense Offer The Live connection - starting Version 6.6 (Q1 2017).

See all 3 comments
PeerSpot user
Senior Manager of IT at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees
Vendor
The rapid development of the product is good, but it has limited inner join functionality of the cubes. ​

What is most valuable?

The ability to combine multiple data sources in a cube environment is essential. The speed has been very good as well.

How has it helped my organization?

We are now able to increase our visibility into our business beyond the canned reports available in our ERP (NetSuite) and provide actionable, timely insight to our leadership.

What needs improvement?

The document is definitely a sore spot as well as the limited inner join functionality of the cubes.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using this product for approximately two months now and are close to our final implementation.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

Only trying to understand some of the functionality and our internal business rules.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No issues with stability have been encountered yet.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We are very early in our project but do not see any major limits yet.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

Customer service has been excellent.

Technical Support:

Technical support is very good. The rapid development of the product has some features that are new even to the tech support staff.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

No previous solution was in place.

How was the initial setup?

The connections to the SQL data were straightforward.

What about the implementation team?

We utilized the Sisense staff for implementation along with our internal BI group. They are very helpful, knowledgeable and responsive.

What was our ROI?

Unknown at this time.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

  • Tableau
  • PowerPivot/PowerBI
  • Birst
  • Sisense

What other advice do I have?

Understand your business hierarchies intimately. Create flattened data files for roll-ups.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user8760 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user8760Product Manager with 201-500 employees
Vendor

Hi there,

As Director of Product Management of Sisense I would love to shed some light on the inner join issue you mentioned. In general I will say that there are two ways to address it:

1. You can still always create an inner join with the custom SQL feature, if it's absolutely necessary.

2. It's true that the ElastiCube Manager (visual data modeling environment) doesn't show inner joins as a configuration option. However, it's quite possible that if you find yourself looking to do inner joins, you're not utilizing the full power of the product:

Most solutions rely heavily on joins in the data prep phase to create a single view.
What's unique about Sisense is that you don't *need* to flatten the data during the data preparation stage. Sisense only performs joins when it needs to answer a query, such as when a new visualization is created. The joins are performed ad-hoc and the system automatically detects which type of join is most effective for that particular data scenario. So 99% of the time, you shouldn't be dealing with these join headaches in the first place.

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PeerSpot user
Director of Commercial Solutions with 51-200 employees
Vendor
We leveraged support from Sisense's technical folks on multiple occasions and they were always knowledgeable and helpful.

What is most valuable?

Simplicity, wide range of visualizations, managed data model layer

For how long have I used the solution?

Deep-dive evaluation for a client

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

None.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

Exceptional. The pre-sales support was outstanding - the team was patient, generous, and highly responsive. An excellent partner through the evaluation process - far more so than any other vendor we dealt with.

Technical Support:

Excellent. Our eval process we fairly detailed and specific. We leveraged support from Sisense's technical folks on multiple occasions and they were always knowledgeable and helpful.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We evaluated several products for a client engagement.

How was the initial setup?

Straightforward. We had our trial up and running and were building sample cases in less than an hour.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

These tools are powerful, universally applicable, and scale to the enterprise level, so expect a substantial price point across the market. Against that backdrop, we found Sisense to be very competitively priced, and with a good range of options to match up a right-sized deployment footprint for small-to-medium size organizations.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Many, including Tableau, Qlik, InetSoft, Business Objects, LogiAnalytics, Birst, MicroStrategy, and several others.

What other advice do I have?

Sisense is an excellent tool set, hitting all of the BI sweet spots and stacking up very well against the top players in the BI market. Sisense shines especially well in the pre-sales support area. The sales and technical staff are the most supportive and responsive of any of the vendors we dealt with, hands down.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Section Editor: Print Software at a printing company with 51-200 employees
Vendor
Very easy solution to use. For very complicated blended data from multiple sources we would like Sisense to add a "nerd mode".

Valuable Features:

We found the ease of use to be our primary factor for choosing Sisense. We have a client that changes their mind often and their business is moving very quickly (what clients don't live under these conditions)? We needed to bring them a tool that could be learned and then deployed easily without a lot of technical expertise. 

The other "feature" we experienced in the buying process was Sisense's response time, materials that accurately answered our questions, and great sales support - access to experts within the company when we needed them.

Improvements to My Organization:

Our client is graduating from the world of static reports to the world of dynamic business intelligence dashboards. Its a rough transition because it requires a change in behavior. People (IT people) and customers have been turning to static reports for a long time, it takes a little effort to help them understand the power of dynamic data that you can drill into but once they get it, they will never mention a custom report again!

Room for Improvement:

Sisense has made their product too easy - is that possible you might ask? For very complicated blended data from multiple sources we would like Sisense to add a "nerd mode" where we can geek out without the visual connecting of tables and data elements. Some folks on our team know data structures really well and could do the connections more efficiently through a non-visual interface.

This doesn't prevent you from doing anything. Many of the improvements I would have listed in this review have been addressed in Sisense's latest release. 

Use of Solution:

About 6 months.

Customer Service:

The sales experience was a real differentiation for Sisense. The customer service has been awesome so far, granted we haven't had to rely on them much. We don't find this is the kind of tool that requires a lot of help because it is easy to learn and deploy.

Other Solutions Considered:

Yes we evaluated Qlik, Tableau, and Domo.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user183096 - PeerSpot reviewer
Techno-Functional Consultant at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
You can easily make decisions based on the visualizations however the ability to handle larger data sets needs work

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature is the ability to combine multiple/disparate data sources into one and derive intelligence from them. Also, the ability to easily visualize the data-sets via Sisense studio is a key feature.

How has it helped my organization?

The client we have deployed this for is now able to easily make decisions based on the visualizations from this BI solution. Top Executive Management is able to make decisions without necessarily relying on reports from the mid-level management. This has greatly improved the ability to make decisions based on trends from the past by making projections to the future.

What needs improvement?

The ability to handle larger data sets, tables in the hundreds of millions of rows range.

For how long have I used the solution?

Two years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No, the process for deployment was straightforward especially with the older version V4. However, IMO, the new v5 which is purely web-based has a lot of optimizations in order to be equal to or better the previous version. This has greatly hindered our upgrade to the newer version as some of the most obvious features are missing.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Yes. We have encountered some issues especially as far as importation of data is concerned. Sometimes the platform works great, but other times, it's a drag and users are always on our necks to speed it up.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Yes, as the number of rows or volume of data has increased over the past two years, the querying time has been gradually increasing and this has impacted user productivity.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

Satisfactory, with opportunity to improve. Some issues are speedily handled, however, others take forever to be taken care of and communication is sometimes lacking.

Technical Support:

Adequate. The team of engineers are adequately skilled to deal with whatever we throw at them.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

No previous solution used.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was straightforward. The installation process was very clear; it was/is very clear what one needs to do for the product to work or to derive the maximum use from it. Proper documentation has helped a great deal.

What about the implementation team?

Vendor team; 9/10. They were adequately skilled to provide the solution.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Yes, other products such as QlikView & Tableau.

What other advice do I have?

You should have adequate SQL skills as this will come in handy. Else, prepare to have some fun slicing and dicing data.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: We are also a partner. We implement their software.
PeerSpot user
it_user90048 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user90048Product Manager with 201-500 employees
Real User

Totally agree with the review, handled Sisense in a POC in our company.
Great visualizations, intuitive setup and user friendly.
Lacks stability and data loading features as Sliding window (incremental load), not consistent in queries execution times.

In general, great prospect, not mature enough from my point of view

it_user90066 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
Great dashboards, speed and support for 3rd party JS library graphical components

We acquired SiSense a month ago and absolutely love it.

It allows quickly delivering staining dashboards. It is fast, blazingly fast in both data retrieval and graphics rendering.

I was impressed by the fact it permits third party/free JS library graphical components plugged right in.

All of the above and the superb customer support plus the willingness of the SiSense staff to make you a success puts SiSense apart from the competition.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user8619 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user8619BI Expert with 51-200 employees
Vendor

I totally agree. We implemented SiSense at our organization a year ago, after a failed project with a big-name BI solution. I think SiSense has the right ingredients to make BI excel at companies that need agile BI. It is disruptive. BTW, their V5 release is coming out with transforming usability. there are a lot of cool things to look forward to.

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PeerSpot user
Infrastructure Expert at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Consultant
Very good product, would recommend in the future.

Valuable Features:

It's incredibly lightweight, and very easy to work with. Implementing it and linking it with existing resources was a breeze.

Improvements to My Organization:

From what my customers have told me, regarding this product, it adds a layer of automation previously non-existent from their previous reporting service.

Deployment Issues:

Deploying it was smooth as butter, and there was little to no down time after lab testing. Pretty much had the new environment up and ready, shut the old one down and transitioned to the new one overnight.

Scalability Issues:

I haven't necessarily needed to scale past the original requirements yet, but the product seems to have potential for easy scaling to medium and large businesses.

Customer Service:

From what little I had to talk to SiSense, their CS department was top notch and had an answer for any question I had. The reps were very knowledgeable about the product.

Initial Setup:

Surprisingly simple, to be honest. The API's included with it provide for easy access to existing data and resources, and creating custom resource links where there is no API was straightforward, not much room for error!

Implementation Team:

Implementation was done personally, but for 2-3 clients. A few cases it was simply a recommendation and it was implemented through another vendor or through a specific companies in house IT department.

Cost and Licensing Advice:

The implementation cost was substantially lower than what I've seen of the competition.

Other Advice:

Thoroughly research before you decide to implement. This meets the needs of most clients that I have offered it to, but some have outright rejected it due to lacking visualization and readouts.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user3876 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user3876Database Manager at a tech company with 51-200 employees
Consultant

One of the most impressive features of prism is its browser based dashboard that can be easily customized through HTML and CSS according to the needs of organizations. It also makes it easy for the multiple users to share and collaborate with each other.

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it_user68067 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Data Analytics at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
We have worked with both Qlikview and Tableau but switched to SiSense for functionality and value

For how long have you used this product?
- 4 years

Which features of this product are most valuable to you?
- It's lightweight, good value, easy to implement and work with, easy to hookup data sources to and create dashboards.

Can you give an example of how this product has improved the way your organization functions?
- We're an agency, we used to do our client reporting in excel. With SiSense we can send them automatically generated professional reports. Right now, we use it for the more complex dashboarding projects with several data sources and serve them out through the web.

What areas of this product have room for improvement?
- In terms of visualization there is still some room for improvement. For our more demanding customers in this field we add a visulization layer.

Did you encounter any issues with deployment, stability or scalability?
- The product has become a lot more stable these past years. Currently no issues.

Did you previously use a different solution and if so, why did you switch?
- We have worked with both Qlikview and Tableau and found that for most of our customers the extra money they'd have to pay did not result in more value.

Before choosing this product, did you evaluate other options? If so, which ones?
- About 4 years ago, there were a few products in this area in this price range. In terms of functionality nothing came close.

How would you rate the level of customer service and technical support?
- The company has improved in this a lot as well. Currently no issues at all.

Was the initial setup straightforward or complex? In what ways?
- Remarkably easy. We slam it on a hosted server, use the API connections to get the data in, create other connections where there is no API and we're up and running for a customer within 2 weeks.

Did you implement through a vendor team or an in-house one? If through a vendor team, how would you rate their level of expertise?
- In-house

What is your ROI on this product?
- Cannot say - we can do a lot of projects at a much lower price than our competitors, because of SiSense, so I'd say it's pretty good.

What was your original setup cost for this product and what is your day-to-day cost of using this product?
- Cannot say - but it's pretty low

What advice would you give to others looking into implementing this product?
- We have a lot of customers that are in the process to become more data driven. For the first time they see a lot of data come together and they can prove the power of data to their board without having to do huge investments in hard and software. Then after some years they will have outgrown the product but at that point they will be experienced, will know better what they need and the risk for bad investment is a lot smaller.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user72735 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user72735Head of Data Analytics with 1,001-5,000 employees
Vendor

The key to SiSense isn't just their product (which is superb)....it's the responsiveness and quality of their internal executive and technical personnel across the board.
I've worked with all the major BI/Big Data/Analytics vendors at one time or another on various scales of projects...but none come close to the level of performance provided by SiSense...truly the biggest differentiator.
Andrew

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it_user12075 - PeerSpot reviewer
VP of Development with 51-200 employees
Vendor
Our company also evaluated Tableau and QlikView but chose Prism for excellent ability to deal with large volumes of data

On a scale from 1-5 (1=worst, 5=best), how would you rate this product overall compared to similar products?

- Hard to answer because I have little experience with other products. The ability to deal with large volumes of data is excellent, and is very valuable for us.

For how long have you used this product?

- 1.5 years.

Which features of this product are most valuable to you?

- Flexibility and ease of design of dashboards.

- Handling large data sets.

Can you give an example of how this product has improved the way your organization functions?

- SiSense has allowed us to offer a browser based business intelligence solution for our customers much faster than we could have done on our own.

What areas of this product have room for improvement?

- SiSense is lacking in richness of data analysis capabilities, particularly standard deviation, median, percentiles, and other aggregates. Mean, min, and max only take you so far.

Did you encounter any issues with deployment, stability or scalability?

- No significant problems.

Did you previously use a different solution and if so, why did you switch?

- No.

Before choosing this product, did you evaluate other options? If so, which ones?

- Yes. Tableau, Qlikview, Dundas

How would you rate the level of customer service and technical support?

- Excellent. Very responsive, and when necessary they go above and beyond what is typically expected. It was the responsiveness and eagerness to help us solve problems, along with the ability to handle large data sets, that led us to choose SiSense over other competitive offerings.

Was the initial setup straightforward or complex? In what ways?

- Very simple.

Did you implement through a vendor team or an in-house one? If through a vendor team, how would you rate their level of expertise?

- We do it all on our own.

What is your ROI on this product?

- Hard to fully quantify at this stage, but the SiSense tool has brought in a significant new capability and has opened a sales channel that was previously closed to us.

What was your original setup cost for this product and what is your day-to-day cost of using this product?

- Sorry, but we don't have that level of sophistication in our accounting.

What advice would you give to others looking into implementing this product?

- I'd suggest paying a visit to the team in Tel Aviv.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user2652 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user2652Project Manager at a non-tech company with 10,001+ employees
PopularVendor

There is a trial version available for Prism. If you try that, you will see how it gathers information effectively from huge tables and love it and is a must buy for developing organizations. This is highly recommended for medium and large sized organizations.

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PeerSpot user
BI Expert with 51-200 employees
Vendor
We evaluated Tableau, QlikView, Tibco, Microstrategy, SAP, IBM and others but chose SiSense

For how long have you used this product?
- 6 months

Which features of this product are most valuable to you?

- Agile development of dashboards & reports

- I like SiSense's agility in building the report and analysis. It's report development environment is fast, easy-to-use and sees results instantly. It's easy to build reports with business users together and going through multiple iterations in a short period of time.

- Manage unified data model & data mash-up.

- The ability to define unified data-model universes is imperative to build an enterprise-level BI solution. SiSense's ElastiCube allows us to do just that.

- To crunch large amount of data fast.

- We found that Sisense performs in large volume of data without heavy investment in hardware and IT expertise. The setup was fast and not much tuning was required.

Can you give an example of how this product has improved the way your organization functions?

- We reduced the report / analysis delivery time from weeks to days.
- The BI team is able to sit with the business user and build reports on-demand, making changes instantly and see the results.

- The business becomes much more agile in analysis, thereby responds faster to changes in the market and products.

What areas of this product have room for improvement?

- Sisense needs to improve the ability to build more complicated reports, such as merging two dimensions of the same type on-demand in one report.

- For example, business's wants to know the user signup-to-usage ratio by country. Both the signup and usage have country dimensions. The two country dimensions are same in attribute type but different in context. SiSense doesn't allow you to join the two countries dimensions on-the-fly in the report.

- Sisense needs to improve its security and permission management capability.

- We find it difficult to define user roles and permission rules to fine-control the data allowed to be access by different business users.

- Sisense needs to improve the capability to distribute analysis / reports via different channels.

- It's hard to implement distribution reports by email.

Did you encounter any issues with deployment, stability or scalability?
- Not much.

- SiSense has done a good job to make deployment simple and straight-forward. It's very stable and could handle failures gracefully. We are crunching hundreds of GB's of data without scalability issues.

Did you previously use a different solution and if so, why did you switch?

- We used the SAP Business Objects SME solution prior to this. BO is powerful but cumbersome. It has many overlapping components doing similar things because the M&A over many years from different solutions that SAP acquired. It's doesn't fit the culture and circumstance of our business well.

- We decided to switch to SiSense after comparing multiple vendor solutions. We favor SiSense for its light investment, quick deployment, agile development and fast response to changes.

Before choosing this product, did you evaluate other options? If so, which ones?

- Yes, we evaluated:
Tableau, QlikView, Microstrategy, Microsoft Suite, IBM / Cognos, Tibco Spotfire, SAP BusObj, EDGE, Info Builders, LogiXML and JasperSoft.

- We found that SiSense provides a solution that is best in supporting our business to respond to our market challenges.

How would you rate the level of customer service and technical support?
- 4.5 out of 5

Was the initial setup straightforward or complex? In what ways?
- It's straightforward.

- It's the simplest setup I have ever had among these BI solutions.

Did you implement through a vendor team or an in-house one? If through a vendor team, how would you rate their level of expertise?
- We implemented the solution In-house.

What is your ROI on this product?
- I don't have the exact numbers now, but I would say it's the best BI investment we had.

What was your original setup cost for this product and what is your day-to-day cost of using this product?
- We are under SiSense's annual subscriptions for under $10,000 per year.

What advice would you give to others looking into implementing this product?

- Start small

- Try out the solution in one team or department, for one business domain, and then extend to the whole organization and cross-domain analysis.

- Engage business users

- BI team or analysts could sit with business users and build the reports together. Building reports in SiSense is fast enough for you to do that.

- SiSense is best fit for organizations in a constant-changing market that have large amount of data and constantly explore different ways in analysis.

- Look closely at SiSense's security / permission management capabilities if you have complicated data security and permission requirements. I found it limited and difficult to implement when a complicated scenario arose.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user3876 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user3876Database Manager at a tech company with 51-200 employees
Consultant

While making comparison between Tableau and Prism, I found that Tableau with its predictive analysis feature has definitely an edge over Prism. SiSense should move forward for incorporating this important feature in their product.

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PeerSpot user
Business Analyst at a leisure / travel company with 51-200 employees
Vendor
Using the right tool for the right job

Recently, we have added our Google Adword and other Marketing spend in to Prism and have linked this with our bookings, giving a ROI (Return on Investment) at Company Level, Destination, Resort and Hotel Level, so we use Prism to drill down showing the Gross Profit and Cost down to Hotel Level, we also then link in competitor pricing data in to the report also, this by far is the most useful report in the Business so worth some sort of mention.

There is a bit of history to this report, we contracted a Developer who had been working for the company for a while to use the Google Adword API to get to the stage where we can use this data linked with our booking data to automatically adjust bid prices, and also use this to add new campaigns etc, and the dashboard reporting was a big part of the development, we use MongoDB within the business for storing user sessions and some caching stuff as its great for handling big data of that type and is widely used for this purpose within the travel industry, and the developer decided to build the Adword data in to MongoDB from the API and also build the booking data in to MongoDB from the SQL database as this is fairly big data and thought using this technology would allow fast reporting. He built an entire website to handle this process and created reporting on the website, this whole process took about 9 Months and then the contractor decided to leave (for tax purposes as he was coming up to 2 years continually working in the same place), there was then a process for about 4-6 weeks of other developers and the MD (who has a Developer background) trying to get this MongoDB & website to report how we wanted it.

So 11 months down the line I and Prism got involved, I had to come up with a way of getting the Google Adword data into SQL and in the format required with additional information, for speed I downloaded a report from Adwords client reporting with the information required and set up a stored procedure to automatically upload this report, link it to additional data from our databases and create the reporting tables in SQL.

We then put all this data into a Prism Elasticube and I recreated all of the reporting plus a number of the backlog requests outstanding on the old method into the Prism dashboards, It took about a day of effort to do SQL work and about half a day to do all of the Prism work, and due to changes in how we were going to alter bid prices within a couple of days of it going live in Prism we ended up scrapping what was a six figure development, although some one does have to run a couple of reports each day and paste them onto a Server, and kick off a job that runs all the SQL stuff and at the end kicks off the Elasticube build using Prism Shell all from a SQL Server job. This process takes a couple of minutes a day.

This is another demonstration of how you should use the right tool for the right job.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user3876 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user3876Database Manager at a tech company with 51-200 employees
Consultant

Prism needs some improvement in its standard service plan. It is providing important support features like “Live Training” and “Support Tickets” only to Premium and VIP service plans.
I strongly recommend that such features should also be included in its standard service plan for facilitation of users.

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it_user9945 - PeerSpot reviewer
COO with 51-200 employees
Vendor
SiSense offered the most cost efficient and end-user friendly solution.

I am COO of an on-line travel agency which advertises and lives on-line but handles all bookings by phone or email. Our data analysis requirements span the usual gamut of online advertising via multiple search engines, direct advertising, call center management, lead conversion and efficiency as well as product and demographic performance analysis. To this end, we had assessed competitive products and IT was already testing a leading in-memory technology – but the that product fit was sub-par and we quickly stopped the trial. The solution required specialist IT resources to work with the tool proprietary scripts and consultants to work with and modify the application for our needs. This was not a cost effective way for our business to invest in BI, nor did it simplify our decision making. We assessed that such a tool might have increased our cost by as much as $80,000 a year, given the need for incremental headcount and hardware.

I set a goal where everyone in the company should be able to work quickly and efficiently with the underlying data and reach effective decisions, so we needed a solution that could address three main requirements:

1. Provide near real-time feedback for agents and managers on any metrics (such as sales closings, destination performance, advertising conversion rates) that would help them better serve our clients;

2. Support dashboard and report-building mechanisms that are simple enough for non-technical users to use while still sophisticated enough to provide the ability to drill down and manipulate the data; and

3. Nimble and scalable enough to not require major infrastructure upgrades or impact the existing infrastructure as reports are generated.

SiSense delivered a solution that met the requirements. Within a few months of purchase, we had what we needed: a near real-time dashboard that didn't bog down the company’s servers no matter how many data sources it accessed, and a solution, intuitive enough to allow non-technical users to create their own reports.

SiSense Prism has helped our IT department reclaim time, provide booking agents with near real-time updates, and allowed sales managers to coach and counsel agents to meet their sales goals. The rest of the company can call up reports immediately and manipulate it on the fly, instead of waiting for IT to publish it. IT now has time to focus on core projects while retaining their role as the data authority and interact with users as resources rather than script writers.

Beyond the operational benefits of the solution, the company data-driven culture is also greatly reinforced: Everyone is much closer to the data. All decision makers, managers and agents can now analyze data and share insights in a snap. The travel industry is highly competitive and the fact that we glean insights in real-time across marketing, sales and operations is a key strength for us.

Disclosure: PeerSpot has made contact with the reviewer to validate that the person is a real user. The information in the posting is based upon a vendor-supplied case study, but the reviewer has confirmed the content's accuracy.
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it_user3876 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user3876Database Manager at a tech company with 51-200 employees
Consultant

Prism is a good business intelligence tool that supports large amounts of data without relying on external data resources like OLAP cubes.

We are using it because of its low deployment cost. It runs smoothly on all type of hardware and using its data visualization tools, we can better understand the raw data of our company.

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it_user9936 - PeerSpot reviewer
Finance Expert at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
We evaluated other solutions such as Microsoft, but chose SiSense to fulfill all of our requirements

Our company considers itself a next-generation technological company, and its organizational structure and operations are highly automated. Instead of employing a standard monolithic ERP system (e.g., SAP), we have built our IT infrastructure using corporate-environment open-source standards. Automation is approached from a decentralized perspective based on this open-source IT backbone. In other words, our company uses different software packages for different functions and ties them together to form an enterprise collaboration platform. The result is impressive: we enjoy no-compromise IT functionality and flexibility with extremely low software costs. It was into this environment that our company sought to integrate a reporting and analytics tool. Our company’s operational and historical data was consolidated into a homegrown data warehouse, based on a MySQL database. We were looking for a powerful and flexible business intelligence solution that would easily integrate with its existing system, which would not require rebuilding the data warehouse, which would allow non-technical business users to quickly create new reports and analytic queries and which would be relatively inexpensive.

Before we implemented Prism, we relied on the technical expertise of a small number of people to create manual queries. Upon request from business users, the queries were run manually using a MySQL client and the results were exported to Excel for delivery.

Before selecting Prism, we evaluated a well-known open source package (with paid premium service and support) and also looked at a Microsoft product.

We wanted a powerful and flexible business intelligence solution that would easily integrate with our existing systems, which would not require rebuilding the data warehouse, which would allow non-technical business users to quickly create new reports and analytic queries and which would be relatively inexpensive. After evaluating the alternatives, we concluded that Prism was the only solution to deliver on all of the company’s requirements. Whereas our previous approach required hours for each new report, Prism enabled non-technical personnel to create reports in minutes.

During the trial phase, we set up a test database and tested the software successfully using very cheap PC hardware. After selecting and purchasing Prism, more powerful hardware was used. Setup was very easy.

We use Prism to generate all of our standard operational, managerial and financial reports. As adoption within the company is increasing, more and more managers are creating and customizing their own reports. Technical staff is still available to help, but demands on their time are now a fraction of what they were before.

The biggest benefit of having Prism is that we quickly achieved uniform and comprehensive monitoring and reporting on all key performance indicators. Additionally, management now has very fast and easy access to any information they want, via custom reports, and are able to quickly test "what-if" hypotheses using Prism.

Disclosure: PeerSpot has made contact with the reviewer to validate that the person is a real user. The information in the posting is based upon a vendor-supplied case study, but the reviewer has confirmed the content's accuracy.
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it_user2652 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user2652Project Manager at a non-tech company with 10,001+ employees
PopularVendor

Prism is a nice tool for automating IT infrastructure. The best thing is that custom reporting is available at user friendly interface.

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it_user9930 - PeerSpot reviewer
COO with 1,001-5,000 employees
Vendor
We chose SiSense for agility, rapid analysis and extremely short implementation time

We were looking for a way to easily track and analyze key business metrics, such as revenue channels and customer segments, and to generate detailed operational performance reports. Since the company’s operational data consists of about 20M records in a 100GB MySQL database, the solution had to easily integrate with MySQL and quickly process large amounts of data.

Before using Prism, we used various piecemeal solutions to try achieve the reporting and analytics it needed, including manual analysis and home-grown software. Some of our analytics requirements were not being met at all.

Our company explored the possibility of expanding development of its in-house analytics software development, but deemed it too expensive and time-consuming. Our company then evaluated BI solutions from several leading BI software vendors before selecting Prism.

We chose Prism because it had four primary advantages over the competition, which made it an easy choice:

1. The agility of the Prism software to answer current and future questions in a very simple and efficient way

2. The ability of the company’s in-house team to easily create, maintain and modify Prism reports and analytic applications for any future needs without the need for expensive maintenance and support services

3. The rapid analysis of large amounts of data using inexpensive hardware, as demonstrated even before purchasing the software

4. The extremely short implementation time: it took only three hours of planning and ten hours of implementation to be up and running with all the initial reports we wanted

Even before making the decision to purchase Prism, SiSense worked with us to implement a thorough demonstration of Prism running over our actual data. This was accomplished via Web conference only, with Prism running on standard desktop PC hardware. Following the purchase decision, our personnel traveled to SiSense’s offices for ten hours of implementation and training. Overall, it took only three weeks from the initial demo to the live, fully-functional BI solution.

Our management now enjoys the benefits of a comprehensive dashboard which presents live transaction and project data, as well as drill-down views into specific customer, transaction and translation project data. All the managerial and operational reports required by our company are available, and the ability to easily make modifications means that the dashboards and reports are improving all the time to answer new business questions.

The ability of our management to monitor all business processes in realtime allows fast responses to take advantage of new business opportunities as they arise and to prevent small problems from becoming big ones.

Disclosure: PeerSpot has made contact with the reviewer to validate that the person is a real user. The information in the posting is based upon a vendor-supplied case study, but the reviewer has confirmed the content's accuracy.
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it_user2652 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user2652Project Manager at a non-tech company with 10,001+ employees
PopularVendor

What are the alternatives available for Prism? Have you tried any open source tool for this?

it_user9927 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Data Analytics at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
Real User
We evaluated Tableau, QlikView and MicroStrategy but decided on Prism because of improved data extraction and analysis

At my company, theft-related information was available from several unconnected sources, but without a central database or tools to analyze, our company’s management feared they might not be making the most of their data. The team tasked with finding a solution identified three major goals:

1. Since organizing and aggregating data from various locations drained time and ate up the data team’s resources, our business intelligence solution would have to reduce the workload associated with pulling theft data from multiple sources.

2. Far more theft-related data was available than the team really needed, so simplifying the information after it had been aggregated in one place was the next step. Theft-prevention measures were designed around very basic information: what is being stolen, and where is the theft occurring?

3. Theft prevention is a company-wide challenge, not one the data team would try to solve by itself. Because multiple departments in different locations would use theft information at various points, the team needed a solution that could standardize data consolidation, analysis, and distribution.

Fed up with the complexity of multiple channels, wasted resources, and indecipherable reports, our team started looking into business intelligence options that fit our needs and goals. After initial research, four solutions were evaluated for long-term implementation: Tableau, QlikView, MicroStrategy, and SiSense Prism.

Prism offered the Elasticube Manager, which gave our data scientists the ability to compile data from multiple sources quickly and easily--a major advantage over other BI solutions. This eliminated concerns about data structure and made implementation a snap--a handful of our staff were able to set up Prism with minimal support from the corporate technical team.

Since installation, our Assets Protection teams have created standardized reports and dashboards to monitor theft information, reducing reaction time. Thanks to improved data extraction and analysis, theft-related data is housed in a single location, making data manipulation a snap. The team spends less time configuring data and more time using it to reduce theft.

Disclosure: PeerSpot has made contact with the reviewer to validate that the person is a real user. The information in the posting is based upon a vendor-supplied case study, but the reviewer has confirmed the content's accuracy.
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it_user4401 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user4401Developer at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Vendor

You said you evaluated Tableau, QlikView and MicroStrategy. Compared to those products, what areas of SiSense Prism have room for improvement?

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PeerSpot user
Business Analyst at a leisure / travel company with 51-200 employees
Vendor
We Considered Cognos, Hyperion, QlikView and BO, but Chose SiSense for Usability, Performance and Low TCO

My team needs to provide information and analysis about numerous aspects of the company’s activity to a wide range of business functions across the company. Examples include detailed Web behaviour analytics, Google Adword spend tracking, email marketing activity tracking, booking pattern analysis for each type of booking and Financial P&L. We require dashboards and reports that include interactive drill-down features so that each user can quickly find information and discover useful insights without requiring the involvement of IT or external consultants.

Before implementing Prism, we were using Excel and an OLAP cube, but this approach didn’t provide an effective way to build nice dashboards or deliver an easy drill-down interface. Also, IT involvement was required to modify the cube every time a new view was required. I have lots of prior BI experience with tools such as Cognos, Hyperion and Business Objects, but I felt that these tools were too expensive and resource-intensive for our needs.

I downloaded and installed a number of modern BI tools in order to evaluate them for our purposes. It didn’t take me long to discover that Prism was much easier to use than the other tools. It was easy to get all my data into Prism and I was able to get a first dashboard up and running without reading any instructions at all, just drag and drop. The other tools required much more time, effort and had a steep learning curve. For example, Qlikview’s 1000-page manual scared me off, plus it was clear that implementing it would have required bringing in a consultant and spending more time and resources than we wanted.

We now use Prism to deliver interactive reports and dashboards across alpharooms.com’s various functional units. We run a number of Elasticube datastores, currently handling about tens of millions of rows, until recently on one standard Windows 7 machine with 8GB of RAM. We have recently replaced our Reporting Server with a new server running Windows Server 2012 with 32GB of RAM, with SSD drives and have now moved our main Elasticubes over to this new server on one of the SSD drives. This was not due to any performance issues with Prism, it was just to centralise all business critical reporting.

We use Prism to analyse bookings activity from a number of different angles. One of the most valuable ways we’re using Prism is to discover opportunities for directly approaching hotels for which we have enough bookings – so that we can avoid the extra cost of going through wholesalers. We now have efficient reporting around each type of booking (hotel, flight, car, etc.) in a very easy, fast, do-it-yourself environment.

Other ways we use the software include analysing website usage patterns, optimizing email marketing campaign performance, optimizing purchasing strategies, tracking and analysing our multi-million pound Google Adword spend, tracking call centre performance and conversions by rep and running reports on all customer activity by search keywords, travel destination, common packages and so forth. We also use Prism to analyse our website content to identify missing or incomplete destinations so that the content team can fix them.

I'd say that the greatest benefits of SiSense Prism are usability, rapid time to insight, no need to read a manual or learn a lot, no requirement for outside consulting, low-IT overhead, very fast processing speed and low total cost of ownership.

I love the data hierarchies in Prism – it is extremely easy and flexible to drag and drop any fields you want without worrying about indexes or joins. One of the DBA’s, an expert in Microsoft BI tools and reporting services asked me why we needed a separate tool when we had the Microsoft stuff. I told him about a particular report that I needed and asked him how long it would take to create that with Microsoft’s tools. He said 4-5 days. I told him that I completed it with SiSense in less than two hours.

Disclosure: PeerSpot has made contact with the reviewer to validate that the person is a real user. The information in the posting is based upon a vendor-supplied case study, but the reviewer has confirmed the content's accuracy.
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it_user86730 - PeerSpot reviewer
it_user86730Senior Development Manager - Innovation - ERP Protheus with 1,001-5,000 employees
Vendor

Did you try Gooddata? It's a great solution for cloud BI.

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