Looker is a BI application with an analytics-oriented application server that sits on top of relational data stores. It includes an end-user interface for exploring data, a reusable development paradigm for data discovery, and an API for supporting data in other systems.
N/A
MicroStrategy Analytics
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
MicroStrategy Analytics is an enterprise business analytics and mobility platform. Key features include automatic big data analysis and reporting, data discovery and visualization, digital security credentials, and support for mobile devices.
N/A
Sisense
Score 7.4 out of 10
N/A
Sisense is a BI software and analytics platform. With what the vendor calls their In-Chip™ and Single Stack™ technologies, users have access to a comprehensive tool to analyze and visualize large, disparate data sets without IT resources.
N/A
Pricing
Looker
MicroStrategy Analytics
Sisense
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Looker
MicroStrategy Analytics
Sisense
Free Trial
Yes
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Required
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Must contact sales team for pricing.
Must contact sales team for pricing information.
Must contact sales team for pricing.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Looker
MicroStrategy Analytics
Sisense
Considered Multiple Products
Looker
Verified User
Engineer
Chose Looker
Sisense aims to do too many things, such as ETL, at the cost of not excelling at any one thing. Looker excels by keeping the focus on data exploration and doing it extremely well.
It was cheaper and less complicated. We were not ready to just into something as big as Sisense and quite frankly didn't need that level of product at the time. We also considered building our own tool but eventually realized that would be way more time and effort consuming so …
Tableau has an adoption issue of having to upgrade to the most recent Tableau reader. In my experience it was very difficult to get the sales team to do this.
microstrategy was the most overly complicated reporting software I have ever used. You need a consultant to do …
Looker is an off-the-shelf, free tool for Google business users. Other than the internal cost of time to build, we had no costs to set up what we needed to do. Knowledge sharing internally and using templates greatly reduced this cost, making the overall cost very low.
Most of the other BI tools are fairly similar in terms of charting capabilities and performance. Looker stands out with its modeling layer and SQL free end-user interface. It also has a feature-rich API enabling you to embed Looker into your own web app to customize it further …
Looker stacks up very well against the other tools we have evaluated and used. All the tools have their own pros and cons. Looker had a better edge in terms of visualizations when we chose to use it. After several updates, other tools began to have newer features. Looker still …
Unfortunately, I was not in charge of the decision to select Looker as it was before my time. I can see why the decision was made as I do see the potential. We have felt the need to supplement Looker with another free tool and, if our integrations weren't so deep and our …
I evaluated everything under the Gartner BI quadrant (i.e., Tableau, Birst, MS SSRS, MicroStrategy, etc.) — from the niche players, all the way through the powerhouse (supposed) "leaders" in BI. Looker was a nice fit for my company, because all though we are quite large (in …
Senior Manager Business Intelligence Data Architect
Chose Sisense
Sisense allows you to export individual widgets as iframes. It provides cube and row level security and can manage lots of data without interfering with the data sources. Tableau data sources were harder to manage and version. The customer support team with Sisense was head and …
Verified User
C-Level Executive
Chose Sisense
Before purchasing Sisense and began recommending it as a solution to our clients, we tested four other BI visualization tools. All four of these ranked high on the Gartner Magic Quadrant. We researched Domo, Looker, MS Power BI and Tableau. Looker could be a better solution if …
Verified User
Director
Chose Sisense
As someone coming from more of an enterprise tool level Sisense seemed like a step down at first. Compared to other tools in the market or tools that it replaced (Looker), it provides far better data integrations and the ability to build their data cubes meant less reliance on …
Each tool has strengths, but Sisense stands out for its ease of use, scalability, and robust data integration. We chose Sisense for its balance of robust functionality and ease of use. We are happy that it can handle complex data integrations that aligned perfectly with our …
Sisense does very well against most of the tools in the market. We chose this tool because of its great visualizations and easy to deploy procedures. The reports are very easy to generate and distribute them across departments and organization. It provides a great interface to …
When data drives potential for new orders, Looker earns its place in our tech stack. If, on the other hand, we are hoping for pipeline generation, Looker is useful if you are willing to repeatedly go check customer utilizations .... it is not appropriate if you are hoping to automate data analysis for this purpose.
MSTR is great for any organization that is looking for a way to deliver complicated data in an uncomplicated way. From business teams to marketing and finance, several departments benefit from using MSTR to keep track of KPIs enabling teams to make optimizations along the way. MSTR provides great visual representations of data enabling team members to distill thousands of data points into easily digestible charts and graphs
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.
Show visited pages - sessions, pageviews - which programs are viewed the most.
Displays session source/medium views to see where users are coming from.
It shows the video titles, URLs, and event counts so we can monitor the performance of our videos.
It gives a graphic face to the numbers, such as using bar charts, pie graphs, and other charts to show user trends or which channels are driving engagement.
Our clients like to see the top pages visited for a month.
I like the drop-and-drag approach, and building charts is a little easier than it was before.
They sell the product well, and make promises you will actually believe
"checks the box" for most features a company would need. Doesn't actually deliver them though
They answer the phone in a timely manner. Can't answer your questions or provide support, but the queue time isn't bad
They have online documentation. It's not up to date, and likely doesn't reflect the version of software you are using, but hey... they can point to it.
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 give it this rating because it deems as effective, I am able to complete majority of my tasks using this app. It is very helpful when analyzing the data provided and shown in the app and it's just overall a great app for Operational use, despite the small hiccups it has (live data).
I would always choose to renew MicroStrategy as long as they lead the market in features, functionality and price. The support of MicroStrategy is timely and professional, I frequently get answers to my questions within 24 hours and normally have solutions within 48 hours. Training available for MicroStrategy completely covers everything required to be able to expertly use MicroStrategy and understand data warehousing.
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.
Looker is relatively easy to use, even as it is set up. The customers for the front-end only have issues with the initial setup for looker ml creations. Other "looks" are relatively easy to set up, depending on the ETL and the data which is coming into Looker on a regular basis.
The standard grid reporting could look more like the styling and object used for the Import and Visual Insight products. In addition, object properties almost seem to be hidden when first using the product. It's as if they are asking the engineers to only use the presets we make available...and, these presets are 10+ years old. On the positive side, Microstrategy seems to be the only product, not named Cognos, which can scale to Big Data. The product is "hackable" via the SDK or tricking the Intelligence Server to do uncommon things. The Microstrategy development team also seems to be very involved with their OEM partners; especially when it comes to features and enhancements. A large majority of the improvements we suggested have made it into the product or on the roadmap for future enhancements. Only suckas fall for the shiny objects from most other vendors; Microstrategy is really the only choice for Enterprise BI.
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
I've never had an issue with MicroStrategy not being available due to MicroStrategy application malfunction. It is very robust and only failures I've seen were due to user error or the platform the machine running the service failed some how.
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.
Somehow resources heavy, both on server and client. I recommned at least 50Mbs data rate and high performance desktop comouter to be abke to run comolex tasks and configure larger amount of data. On the other hand, the client does not need to worry when viewing, the performance is usually ok
Being able to customize the performance based on the business need is extremely powerful. Proper configuration and understanding of the usage pattern is key, if the technical ability of the architect is not at top level, then the product will not be configured correctly which will lead to poor performance.
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.
Never had to work with support for issues. Any questions we had, they would respond promptly and clearly. The one-time setup was easy, by reading documentation. If the feature is not supported, they will add a feature request. In this case, LDAP support was requested over OKTA. They are looking into it.
Good user community. Support team is available if you are under AMC. You get decent support after raising the support ticket. If it is product bug they will inform you and let you know which patch will resolve the same.
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.
I have attended many trainings offered by MicroStrategy; both distance and in-person training. I earned my CRD (Certified Report Developer) certification via the online training. I found the training to be well organized and concise. Overall I will definitely continue to increase my knowledge with MicroStrategy via the online training offering.
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.
Looker Studio, you can easily report on data from various sources without programming. Looker Studio is available at no charge for creators and report viewers. Enterprise customers who upgrade to Looker Studio Pro will receive support and expanded administrative features, including team content management. So it's good.
Tableau is probably MicroStrategy Analytic's biggest competitor I've noticed over time, and I'm not sure why. Tableau only covers visualizations independently for each business user, which then creates the issues of every employee creating their own version of the data, and then you have 20 versions of the truth. A enterprise data warehouse and MicroStrategy's Visual Insight is a better method.
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.
This software is extremely scaleable, one can add more core servers which performs as a load balancing. The configurations available to manage usage patterns and daily activity are as high a caliber as any other enterprise level software. This product can be installed on both a windows and unix platform allow for integration on a budget.
Looker has a poignant impact on our business's ROI objectives. As an advertising exchange we have specific goals for daily requests and fill, and having premade Looks to monitor this is an integral piece of our operational capability
To facilitate an efficient monthly billing cycle in our organization, Looker is essential to track estimated revenue and impression delivery by publisher. Without the Looks we have set up, we would spend considerably more time and effort segmenting revenue by vertical.
Looker's unique value proposition is making analytical tools more digestible to people without conventional analytical experience. Other competing tools like Tableau require considerably more training and context to successfully use, and the ability to easily plot different visualizations is one of its greatest selling points.
MicroStrategy was helpful for reducing the amount of time we needed to spend number crunching large data sets, and in doing so, allowed me as the primary users to spend more time gleaning insights from the data that in turn informed our leadership team to make strategic decisions.
By creating numerous canned reports available to all members of the team through email distribution or basic access to the platform, we were able to reduce the time I spent showing people how to pull the data in Microsoft Excel by nearly 40% .
We ended up needing to make many changes to the way our DMP was feeding data into MicroStrategy due to incorrect reporting that caused complications in accounting and finance.
