Lightspeed Retail vs. Sisense

It is perfect for any small business looking for inventory control, Tracking purchase history, and just an all round easy to use software for retail and beyond. I would not use it if I have only a few hundred items or was a larger company that can afford to build my own POS software.

Incentivized

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

• Lightspeed Retail has great reports that are very easy to read and understand.
• Lightspeed Retail is great to train new employees on because of its ease of use. There are not lots of different things that you have to learn just basics.

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

• With a larger SKU assortment size, the software really starts to struggle with doing physical inventory after scanning in a few hundred items.
• Several times throughout each year Lightspeed went down on us (not our internet connection but actually Lightspeed verified).
• Special order system could use a lot of modern improvements (ability to schedule ahead of time, etc.)
• Reports are very basic, and will likely require there Lightspeed Analytics to actually get reports useful for day to day operations.
• Weak system for receiving purchase orders.
• Does not handle items and cases for reordering very well. Have used multiple Point of Sale systems in the past 10 years that allow to set reorder points based on single items, but reorder the case automatically, Lightspeed has no support for this.

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.

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.

Very easy to use and figure out without calling customer support which is also very responsive and helpful.

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

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.

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.

I gave the rating of a 9 because ninety percent of the time when I talk to their support they're very helpful. One of the only real issues I have is there are times where the queue will be 7-9 people deep. When you have an error you don't know how to fix, sometimes this is very troubling. But overall their support is usually quick and friendly.

Incentivized

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.

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.

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.

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

Lightspeed is faster, sleeker and more modern than our previous POS system. I can’t express enough how easy the online store portion of Lightspeed is - it just intuitive and sometimes, is TOO easy, I feel like I have to be forgetting something. Lightspeed is staying modern and current where our previous POS was not

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.

• Certainly has saved money on cash-outs/ accounting due to QuickBooks integration.
• Faster processing through tills means happier customers and more sales per hour.
• Expensive product at $5K a year has taken away some profitability for this small business. It's way, way over priced.

• 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