What is our primary use case?
My main use case for Sisense is data analytics, as I work a lot with data, using Sisense for visualizing my data to do data reviews, data reconciliations, and vendor reconciliations.
For example, in my field, I work with data sets that have hundreds of thousands to millions of records, and to work through that data in an Excel file is a tedious job that requires VLOOKUPs and filtering every time I get a new extract. Using a dashboard, every time my data is refreshed, the dashboard is automatically refreshed, and then I have my data visualized. I can filter it, export it much better, visualize it much better, spot trends, identify anomalies, and do forecasting much easier than I would in tedious CSV or Excel files.
How has it helped my organization?
Sisense has impacted my organization positively because it is a service that I offer to my clients, as they don't have the technical abilities but want to look at the data, so I make it easier for them to look at the data.
For instance, my clients don't necessarily go into their EDC every day, and if they want to visualize the data, they typically have to export and build something in Excel every time, which isn't automated. Now, they can just go into their Sisense dashboard, look at the dashboard, and see the data immediately.
What is most valuable?
The best features Sisense offers are the ease of use, ease of building dashboards, and my ability to use different connectors to collate different data sources into one central place where I can wrangle and combine my data and reconcile and review it all in one place, making it much easier.
In my day-to-day work with Sisense, by importing data, I have automated my data ingestion with scripts that run daily to ingest the data, allowing my users to get up-to-date data every day. This makes it much easier than manually going to EDC systems, exporting the data, and manually importing it, saving a lot of time and ensuring no human mistakes because the automation is validated.
Regarding Sisense's AI capabilities, I think it handles data compliance very well, as it doesn't send my data around to the LLM, which is much more compliant with my industry's requirements. This ensures my data isn't used for training without my knowledge, making it much safer.
What needs improvement?
Regarding Sisense, the AI functionalities of the AI assistant are lacking compared to others, and I think they can work on that to make it easier to use and broaden the scope. At this moment, it is much more focused on finances, which if improved would be a big gain.
I believe they are working on it, so it remains to be seen what they will add. I know they value my input, so I provided many comments to see which ones they implement. While I won't mention everything, I think they are aware of the needed improvements.
As for the accuracy and reliability of Sisense's AI capabilities, I think especially for my industry, it is not there yet and still lacks context, which results in it not being that accurate. However, they are working on it, and with support from newer LLMs, I hope it will get better.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Sisense for about five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Sisense is fairly stable, as I don't have any issues.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Sisense is scalable, but the scalability comes at a price, particularly when scaling my Elasticube sizes.
How are customer service and support?
Customer support is very good.
I rate the customer support a 10 because they are very good.
What was our ROI?
While I can't share specific metrics, I can say that I do see a return on investment because my clients pay me for services they can't do, and it speeds up my data reviews.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
My experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing was that it was cheaper than the bigger competitors. Those competitors have a bit more functionalities, so I think Sisense is fairly priced. However, the downside is that all the additional plugins come with a price, which isn't ideal.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing Sisense, I evaluated other options including Tableau, Spotfire, and Microsoft's solution, though I cannot recall its name.
What other advice do I have?
On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate Sisense a nine.
I give Sisense a nine because the AI component just needs to be perfected. However, they are very close to doing that, which means a nine is close to 10 and is a good score.
Sisense is deployed in my organization via a private cloud. I use AWS and Azure.
My advice for others looking into using Sisense is to consider scalability and plan for it from the beginning to avoid surprises later on if you need more scalability and realize it comes at a price.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Private Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?