Domo vs. Microsoft BI (MSBI) vs. Sisense

I believe that companies that record large amounts of data about their product, service employers KPIs, etc, can make the best out of Domo for reporting and data analysis, but if a company handles little data and is not recording this consistently, it will not be of much use.

Microsoft BI is well suited for Stream analytics, easy data integration, report creation and UI/UX designs (limited but what all available are great ones) Microsoft BI may be less appropriate for handling huge number of datasets and difficult queries. It may also be difficult for a company with heavy data.

I believe Sisense is perfectly suited for any organization of any size that have access to the proper resources, as the tool is very expensive. The data connectors come in all shapes and sizes out of the box, which allows a great deal of data control within the ElastiCubes. Additionally, while the platform only runs on Windows platforms, the web application can be accessed on any client: mobile, Apple, Windows, etc. This allows a much more flexible user experience, resulting in data and dashboards reaching further than any other tool.

Incentivized

• Exceptional Transform area of the platform - any/all raw data can be manipulated and combined to create datasources that are very useful for our departments.
• Visualization layer is clean and is very business presentable. Its simple but includes depth. Visuals can be created/used by all roles throughout our firm, its not limited to analysts.
• Ability to communicate and talk about insights in the data - the communication tool is exceptional. I can @ mention specific users to bring attention to a discovery. I can start a private chat. I can annotate and communicate what I am seeing. I love it.
• Mobile experience is excellent. When I am on the road i can actively monitor and engage with my team due to my Domo dashboard on my mobile device. Its amazing to run the business and not worry while away from the office.

Incentivized

• Comparatively easy to use compared to other data analytics solutions, collaborating with other colleagues on data work is simple.
• Using Visual Studio for database, ETL, reporting, and analytics development save time and money.
• Transfer of data from one application to another via Excel and comparison of data attributes between applications
• Dashboard functionality, as well as Python support, are available, allowing you to add additional charts and graphs.

Incentivized

• Customization - lots of supported and community plugins available. Users can also adjust the look and feel through JavaScript.
• Innovation - Sisense is continuing to push the envelope by developing new features through Sisense Labs.
• Customer support - the commitment to excellent customer service and ensuring organizations get the most out of their investment.

Incentivized

• Copying Reports - In Excel or Google Sheets, I like to make copies of similar reports and modify them as necessary for users. In Domo, makes copies of reports (called cards) but all copies are connected. So if you adjust the copy, it changes the original. This means a user has to recreate the report from scratch and then adjust it.
• Unforgiving SQL - Domo does allow users to write their own SQL codes, which is great. However, Domo's SQL code is pickier than the other SQL database I've used (Metabase).
• Text Alerts - Domo's alerts aren't always the smartest. Some of my dashboards are about the sales teams monthly performance and I get notified when there is a change of more than 20%. I always get notified at the start of the month that reports have changed from 'x' number to zero. This is expected because it's a monthly report and I hate getting texts about it. The only reason I don't term them off so I can be aware if something breaks in the middle of the month.

Incentivized

• The race to perfect gathering of Non-Traditional datasets is on-going; with Microsoft arguably not the leader of the pack in this category.
• Licensing options for PowerBI visualizations may be a factor. I.e. if you need to implement B2C PowerBI visualizations, the cost is considerably high especially for startups.
• Some clients are still resistant putting their data on the cloud, which restricts lots of functionality to Power BI.

Incentivized

• The usability of the application on mobile devices needs some improvement, especially navigation and filtering.
• Dashboards that are created by multiple users can be a bit of a hassle to share by Admins.
• If you need to embed dashboards into your website, you are require to buy a license separate from the user and platform license. This is a norm on most BI visualization tools, but Sisense can seem a bit on the high side, cost-wide.

Domo is a great up-and-coming product. There are many fantastic features that are extremely compelling to our end users, which makes Domo a great fit for our organization. As with many BI tools, there are items on the wish list that could make implementation, administration and usage easier, but I believe these will be addressed over time as the product matures and evolves. The overall concept and approach of this solution has definitely raised the bar in this area of expertise and I would like to see things advance in giving the enterprise tools that will make decision making easier and more robust in the future.

Microsoft BI is fundamental to our suite of BI applications. That being said, Northcraft Analytics is focused on delighting our customers, so if the underlying factors of our decision change, we would choose to re-write our BI applications on a different stack. Luckily, mathematics are the fundamental IP of our technology... and is portable across all BI platforms for the foreseeable future.

I think the business and myself as a user has come to rely on SiSense as a dashboarding and quick ad-hoc reporting tool. I am hoping to integrate SiSense dashboards into more parts of the business in the future. We have reduced our report turn-around time for the most part from hours/days to minutes and in some cases almost the speed of thought. Reports are also easier on the eye and more easily distributed. I would also like to say that the support and professionalism from the SiSense team has been excellent.

The built-in user support and intuitive design of Domo makes it simple to learn and use. I find I can spend hours drilling deep, or else quickly gain an overview in just a few minutes. This is a great advantage since the flexibility fits well with the demands of my role. I enjoy using Domo since I know it will give me comparative data across almost every variable I might want to explore - I look forward to it!

Incentivized

The Microsoft BI tools have great usability for both developers and end users alike. For developers familiar with Visual Studio, there is little learning curve. For those not, the single Visual Studio IDE means not having to learn separate tools for each component. For end-users, the web interface for SSRS is simple to navigate with intuitive controls. For ad-hoc analysis, Excel can connect directly to SSAS and provide a pivot table like experience which is familiar to many users. For database development, there is beginning to be some confusion, as there are now three tool choices (VS, SSMS, Azure Data Studio) for developers. I would like to see Azure Data Studio become the superset of SSMS and eventually supplant it.

Incentivized

New V5 is ground floor of an exciting collection of possibilities. Weekly Sisense developers come up with new functionality that they share with us in their forums. The move to HTML5 has been pleasing in that widgets auto size themselves into appropriate forms in the board but everyone of them can be popped out to full page size to be looked at in more detail

The product has been reliable.

There are very few situations when there is unexpected downtime. Mostly during development, new dashboard implementation and during upgrades. other then that there were very few crashes.

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) can drag at times. We created two report servers and placed them under an F5 load balancer. This configuration has worked well. We have seen sluggish performance at times due to the Windows Firewall.

SiSense is usually performing better then other solutions even if going for complex reports/dashboards(of course within reasonable frames). I haven't noticed any bad influence on other systems, usually if something happens it stays within SiSense.

Pretty responsive. It took a while to get a response in selecting data points for our particular cards. Might have taken about a month? I am not sure if this was something on our end or Domo's end. But haven't had any other issues yet that required additional support from Domo.

Incentivized

While support from Microsoft isn't necessarily always best of breed, you're also not paying the price for premium support that you would on other platforms. The strength of the stack is in the ecosystem that surrounds it. In contrast to other products, there are hundreds, even thousands of bloggers that post daily as well as vibrant user communities that surround the tool. I've had much better luck finding help with SQL Server related issues than I have with any other product, but that help doesn't always come directly from Microsoft.

SiSense's support ninjas are very knowledgeable and are exceptionally responsive. So far, all of the issues we ran into were resolved within minimum time. My sense of dealing with the support staff at SiSense is that they are very focused on not just answering your immediate question, but also to delve into the cause of the matter.

This training was more directed toward what the product was capable of rather than actual programming.

Easy and free training that allowed us quickly understand basics in SiSense and start using them. More advanced features requires some browsing through SiSense forums, but there is always support to help, and SiSense support is one of the best whith which I worked so far.

I have used on-line training from Microsoft and from Pragmatic Works. I would recommend Pragmatic Works as the best way to get up to speed quickly, and then use the Microsoft on-line training to deep dive into specific features that you need to get depth with.

Many examples, videos and scenarios which you try on your own right away. This combined with in-person training gives you enough to utilize most of SiSense's power.

It is a true web-based application so implementation is much easier and smoother compared to other non-web based BI solutions. Also, they offered consulting services during the implementation process, which was helpful. Also, they provided lots of on-demand training courses and videos, which I liked.

Incentivized

We are a consulting firm and as such our best resources are always billing on client projects. Our internal implementation has weaknesses, but that's true for any company like ours. My rating is based on the product's ease of implementation.

Remember to migrate the plugins. The documentation however is pretty straight forward.

At the end of the day, end-user adoption and taking the burden of IT to build reports was my goal. Demoing and testing many BI tools, DOMO is the one that allowed both to happen.

Incentivized

We have used the built in ConnectWise Manager reports and custom reports. The reports provide static data. PowerBI shows us live data we can drill down into and easily adjust parameters. It's much more useful than a static PDF report.

Incentivized

1) Easy to use, really, there is nothing too much to say. The set up is easy and not confusing. You can use it internally or externally.

2) Customer Service, having spoken to various product reps from similar industry. Sisense rep provides you with the best support to get started, and it is really appreciated.

Product is quite easily scalable. The whole installation can be easily moved to stronger machine if needed.

• I mentioned a "previously un-analyzable" dataset that we were able to visualize in Domo - the result was business re-alignment for increased productivity, cost savings and ROI.
• It's tough to quantify the ability to provide insights that have been desired for years but not possible - we continue to amaze our executives and product managers with the analysis we can provide.

Incentivized

• As a SaaS provider we see being able to provide self-service BI to our client users as a competitive advantage. In fact the MSSQL enabled BI is a contributing factor to many winning RFPs we have done for prospective client organisations.
• However MSSQL BI requires extensive knowledge and skills to design and develop data warehouses & data models as a foundation to support business analysts and users to interrogate data effectively and efficiently. Often times we find having strong in-house MSSQL expertise is a bless.

Incentivized

• Report development time is reduced from 2~3 days to 2~3 hours.
• Report querying time is improved from 0.5~10 mins to 2~30 seconds.
• A 2-staff team delivers 10 times the BI output that we did on the old system.
• We were able to deliver BI and data analysis for all business functions instead of a very limited group of users