Sisense Reviews

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

Sisense is used in our organisation to perform the following tasks:
- Bring together data from multiple data sources (mysql databases, google spreadsheets, google analytics, web analytics tools)
- Dashboarding - various sales/metric dashboards are displayed around the office on large plasma screens. Individual users also have access to the dashboards.
- Adhoc reporting - we also use Sisense to perform adhoc reporting and do data extractions across different sources

The product has a long way to establish a single source of truth for our sales data, but to also allow for the quick and timely extraction and presentation of data in dashboards which was previously done in a very laborious way.

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

Drag and drop dashboarding

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

Very solid solution for the price.

Slick interface.

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

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

Not sure how it performs with truly big data sets.

High performance with huge amounts of data and multiple tables, scalability for thousands of users, very simple to create and publish advanced data models and dashboards, no need to pre-aggregate data, no need to use additional ETL tools or to create an external and expensive data warehouse. Support is fantastic, if required they would literally access your server and take control of mouse and keyboard to help you solve any problem or to create any thing.

There is always room to improve and Sisense use to release new versions and functionalities every quarter or so, but I can say I am pretty satisfied and impressed so far.

It is easy to pull in data and get a dashboard created quickly. It is also easy to use the elasticube manager to quickly manipulate data with the GUI and basic SQL.

The connectors are limited as are the functionality of the dashboards. If Sisense had native connectors to more data sources it would be able to gain many more users. It is most effective if you already have a database built out and the resources to develop the data connections that you need. The dashboards also have some very basic limitations, like being able to change the orientation/order/size of labels on graphs. Also there is no way to have a widget cover more than one row, which greatly limits the possibilities for layouts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sisense makes it easy to collect and analyze data to support the improvement and digital transformation of our businesses.

there is nothing bad to say about this application it works very well

First encounter with Sisense for me as a product manager. The way this product is embedded in our application is very much a seamless experience.
Sisense does not stop at the traditional BI tooling, they innovative and (to me) are leading the BI landscape into new opportunities every release

Not fully cloud based (getting there but not there yet)
No support for Elastic Search
Somewhat pricey

Sisense is easy to use because of its nice and intuitive UI.
The drag and drop feature is a very easy way to create great looking dashboards.
It's very fast when it comes to pooling data from different sources.
It's easy to customize it using custom Javascript plug-ins.
Sisense has one of the best support. They are always ready to help with any issues.

The mobile version is not as good as the desktop version and really needs to be improved.
It's not easy sharing dashboards with other users.

Using their tag line.. we are beginning to understand the benefits of having a single source of "truth". The ability to pull in separate sources of data is huge for us. User adoption has been infectious.

Exporting to Excel would be improved. We still have a lot of users that just want to do that. It would be nice to have some more "advanced" joining capabilities in the cube designs. The auto joining works great, but there are occasions you want to force a left join.

Sisense is super fast to deploy and roll out. It is feather light on traditional IT resources allowing focusing on analytics instead of never ending implementation meetings. Super fast and easy value delivery through dashboards on any screen. The Pulse feature with which users can pick their own selection of KPIs is superb. Meshing up live data with any data source allows for adding the platform to digital products as well as be the go to tool for the business with deployment times under a day. Sisense is the way to go if you are aiming for a flexible analytics function that is deeply embedded in every business area.

I would not really call these cons, Sisense development is fast with a huge dev community. Yes, you still need to build your semantic layer and there is room for further improvements from Sisense. Some basic formatting options are missing that makes export to PDF a pain, no option to export to PDF. Some Java related stability issues and the function set has much room for improvement.

Look and feel. Ease of learning. Customization options. Ease of integration with our software.

Some of the customization options require javascript and workarounds that I feel should be part of the delivered, standard options.

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

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

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

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

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

- Ease to install and use
- Intuitive interface
- Excellent product support and active community
- Lots of plugins to customize your product (look for Blox)
- Data security allow us to provide views of different set of data for different users

The solution is easy to use; you drag what you need and Sisense will aggregate the data. Not having to write the query is both a pro and a con, since sometimes your need will be slightly different and you'll have to be creative to reach it. The recent merge with Periscope (summer 2016) will most probably help this issue.

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

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

This is an extremely valuable tool because if offers many types of functionality, for users with varying technical skill levels. The evolution of this application, in just the 3 years we have used it, is also impressive. It is continually expanding its set of features and capabilities.

As with any product that is aggressively growing its suite of components, platforms, and overall degree of usefulness, some new offerings need corrections before achieving full implementation in certain environments. E.g. it is a little frustrating to see an awesome new capability (like BloX), but have to wait for it to be fixed for Linux, but that will hopefully be resolved soon.

Sisense is constantly growing and adding new capabilities

Being constantly changing, the software presents bugs frequently

Many BI solutions require significant infrastructure and/or IT resources to administer/manage its implementation. SiSense does not require this, and its ease-of-use, speed of performance, and broad feature set will satisfy most BI needs.

Pricing based on user discourages widespread adoption. There could also be some improvement in the front-end/UI feature capabilities, with less reliance on custom plug-ins and scripting.

Dashboards are easy to set up and intuitive for end-users to navigate. Installation and configuration of the software/environment was streamlined and quick to start development and launch. Customer Success team is very valuable, providing proactive guidance on best practices, feature roadmap and putting us in touch with the necessary resources needed to be successful.

Elasticube design can be challenging for multi-tenant database environments (at the present time). Limited customization capabilities from a white-labeling perspective.

It's so easy! You pull up the application, you select go live, and then you are connected with the planet. It doesn't cost anything which is a big plus. The ability to connect and interact with students, family, and friends is a remarkable opportunity. The picture quality is sufficient.

The fact that anyone can comment can be more than an annoyance. As a teacher there are some things that you can't control and ugly or profane comments are a constant concern. I go live from around the country in an effort to connect students as well as family and friends to my summer travels, so there are moments where people can comment and be inappropriate. You want the ability to interact, so this is the downside.

Complete service from A to Z. They guide you through setup with custom support and provide an amazing learning program to ensure you have continued success at a reduced support level.

The only limit with this software is your ability to dream. We had over a dozen systems that we collected data within separately and had no idea how to get it into a central location let alone getting it connected so that we could glean valuable insights. Departments have been able to cut meetings in half & it has helped develop an inclusive culture as a result because we are no longer in the dark across our silos of data.

Learning curve would be steep if you don't have dedicated team focused on learning. They give you every available resource to be successful but it would be easy to purchase and fail without a clear objective in advance.

This product is robust and works great with complicated data models. The product also works with little to no technical knowledge but can be greatly expanded with the knowledge of SQL and other scripting. The roadmap is possibly one of the pros that I'm most looking forward to. I can't wait for the new funcationality to roll out

My least favorite experience was after the purchase. We had a slow onboarding (some of it due to internal resources), and scattered data modeling sessions. This was unfortunate as getting the model correct is critical with any BI tool. Otherwise, great tool and only getting better

Sisense really has a nice feature set that is quick and easy to mold to our business. We found that once we have data available in Sisense our users would keep asking for more and this was easily accomplished as opposed to previous BI tools we used. Overall we love making dashboards quick and easy with Sisense. It has freed up a lot of time that allowed us focus on our core business metrics.

If there was a weakness it would be in the very thing that gives it strength, Customizations. We rely heavily on customizations either directly from the vast library of supported plugins or from a very mature on your own customer marketplace and that is a great option but we would like to see more of the widgets taking on more features directly out of the box.

I get very valuable visualizations from ERP data which are indispensable for our sales management and sales people. Easy to use and customize, e.g. get data from different data sources (even from Domino database), create dashboards, synchronize update intervals, manage user groups. Very flexible dashboard use: via web browser or embed to ERP, great mobile application to see own dashboards. Good documentation. The best part is unparalleled customer support.

You have to invest your time to learn the concepts of BI (same for all BI tools) and to setup data sources. It is essential to plan what you need to show and how. I investigated all major BI software and I am very pleased with Sisense. Not cheap but the value for money is great.

Powerful data-mapping GUI with great support for custom SQL and pre/post build plugins/scripts.
Intuitive dashboards for non-techies and tech-savvy users.
Dashboards support customisable plugins (with strong community support) and scripts to satisfy the power users.
Great API support for automation.
Solid technical support to help you with any technical challenges.
Access to features request.
Speedy delivery of new and useful functionality to increase the value of the product over time.

The new features can't come soon enough, but the roadmap looks solid and promises to deliver lots of goodies.
The API documentation could be improved, some more advanced functionality is not as clear as it could be, but there is always tech support to compensate for that.