Sisense Reviews

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. 

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. 

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.  

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. 

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

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

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

Two years.

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

Top notch.

We implemented this in-house.

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.

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.

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

Four years.

No.

No.

No.

Very good.

Very good.

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

Pretty straightforward.

In-house.

Tableau, Qlik.

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.

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

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

I have used it for two years.

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.

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

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

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

Some flexibility with the labeling of visualizations would be nice.

I have used it for 2.5 years.

We have not encountered any deployment issues.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer service is very good and responsive.

Technical support is good.

We did not previously use a different solution.

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

An in-house team implemented it.

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

It is much cheaper than competitors.

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

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

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.

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.

4 months.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

I have used it for about 12 months.

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

Sisense is easy to understand, support and scale.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Rich and detailed documentation and very good support

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

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

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

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