Looker Studio is a data visualization platform that transforms data into meaningful presentations and dashboards with customized reporting tools.
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Sisense for Cloud Data Teams
Score 6.6 out of 10
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Sisense for Cloud Data Teams (formerly Periscope Data) is a data visualization tool that allows users to connect to their SQL databases to create sharable, interactive dashboards. In addition to SQL, its analytics integrate with R and Python, allowing users to prep datasets, perform analysis, and create their own visualizations. Sisense acquired Periscope Data in mid-2019.
Does great at open canvas editing and letting you fully customize without the need for a grid. It is democratizing self-service no-code analytics. You do not need to be a data or analytics engineer to get started, and you can go very far based on how intuitive and straightforward the UI is. Some of the biggest challenges with Looker Studio relate to user management/security, embedding options, and issue support. For a long time, every user needed to have a Gmail to invite them to view a dashboard via login, not sure if that has been improved yet. You can let any user view without logging in, but that is not always recommended due to security reasons. In terms of embedding, you can only iframe dashboards. More sophisticated BI tools let you embed elements via API or Javascript. Iframing dashboards also make drill downs and dashboard to dashboard navigation tricky/near impossible. There is also no ability to contact Google for support when bugs or outages happen. They point everyone to the Data Studio community. There is some ability to get in contact with Google if you have an enterprise-level contract with Google Cloud, but the path for support is very ad hoc and not always fruitful.
Sisense for Cloud Data Teams is suited so well for our project that works with lots of data and needs some ways to share data internally or externally with our clients. It's very easy to pull out the data from the sense in best and in a suitable format and moreover a huge number of options are available there to represent the data. All features of this Sisense for cloud data teams software can be taken advantage of if you have a team who are well versed in data analytics, data management, and programming.
Rapid deployment of polished T-SQL-based data visualization charts and dashboards. Periscope supports a variety of database technologies, and allows users to write custom queries to display data.
Included caching to reduce server load.
Outstanding customer service/support, with expert advice as needed.
Constant updates and new features.
Built-in SQL formatters take the pain out of manipulating date/time objects.
Include more appropriate updates in their monthly newsletter as opposed to the general overview that doesn't always have the most pertinent information at the forefront.
There are bugs at times when certain dashboards are down, though not in an overwhelming way.
If you do not tag something it shows up in multiple views and may be accessible to people that it should not be, though that is a user error it may make sense to prompt for a tag and security setting.
It is the simplest and least expensive way for us to automate our reporting at this time. I like the ability to customize literally everything about each report, and the ability to send out reports automatically in emails. The only issue we have been having recently is a technical glitch in the automatic email report. Sadly, there is almost no support for this tool from Google, but is also free, so that is important to take into consideration
Google Data Studio has a clean interface that follows a lot of UX best practices. It is fairly easy to pick up the first time you use it, and there is a lot of documentation on line to help troubleshoot, if needed
My company has had Periscope for various use cases in the past and I think that this program opens up complex data reports to non-technical people in a really accessible way (even though the learning curve is a big one). We are now integrating Sisense for Cloud Data Teams at a larger level both for internal data exploration and for customer facing dashboards and reports.
I give it a lower support rating because it seems like our Dev team hasn't gotten the support they need to set up our database to connect. Seems like we hit a roadblock and the project got put on pause for dev. That sucks for me because it is harder to get the dev team to focus on it if they don't get the help they need to set it up.
Google Data Studio provides a great feature set considering its price point, especially when compared to commercial options from Microsoft and Tableau. While it may not be as versatile when it comes to working with and developing complex datasets, there is enough charm in its simple, easy-to-use UI to allow not-so-complex analytics to be conducted without having to hire a data analyst.
Google Analytics works well but it does not have all of the bells and whistles that Periscope Data offers. Google Analytics is best used in a Google environment but if you are using other tools and programs outside of the Google universe, then Periscope Data is a much better option.
