Microsoft BI is a business intelligence product used for data analysis and generating reports on server-based data. It features unlimited data analysis capacity with its reporting engine, SQL Server Reporting Services alongside ETL, master data management, and data cleansing.
$14
per month per user
Sigma
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Sigma Computing headquartered in San Francisco provides a suite of data services such as code free data modeling, data search and explorating, and related BI and data visualization services.
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Cyfe
Score 4.0 out of 10
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Cyfe is all-in-one dashboard software for analyzing data from online services like Google Analytics, Salesforce, AdSense, MailChimp, Amazon, Facebook, etc, from Traject.
Sigma Computing is significantly faster and more versatile than Data Studio integrations for marketing data. While it is less powerful than Tableau for data visualization, it is much easier to use due to its spread sheet like user interface. Microsoft BI is a middle ground but …
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.
We were able to set up client-facing embedded reports with ease and security. The interface is not difficult to learn, although we may not be aware of or lack the necessary expertise to utilize more advanced features that would likely benefit us.
Cyfe might be for you if you are looking for a cost-effective way to display all of your marketing metrics in one place. If you are looking for a detailed, fine-tuned, niche, or extremely specific metrics, this might not be the best solution. Cyfe is good for a general health check-up of marketing, but not a finely tuned examination.
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.
Sigma Computing does not allow custom ordering of pivot fields in pivot tables easily
Sigma Computing lacks functionality for creating tables or sections that dynamically adjust to the browser window's height while maintaining a fixed height textbox at the bottom
Sigma Computing does not provide straightforward options for formatting totals in tables, such as renaming 'Total' to 'Average', 'Team Total', etc
Sigma Computing does not support searching by individual tab names within a workbook
I'd love to see additional functionality to customize colors. The light/dark option is very nice, but a little more flexibility in the colors would go a long way, especially if it was possible at the dashboard level rather than just the account level. Along the same lines, being able to customize the charts a little more, for example being able to show an x-axis on single data type graphs, could make them easier to read in some cases.
Being able to choose to report on converted clicks or conversions in AdWords would be helpful.
Needs the ability to show the date range on the shared URL dashboards. Would be even better if the date range was adjustable on that view, too.
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.
Sigma has helped us a lot and has become an integral part of our daily workflow. It would be difficult to switch to another platform and have to rebuild the numerous metrics and performance reports that we have already established
It has become a part of our internal tools so unless a competitor comes out with similar functionality as a similar price point it is unlikely that we would not renew. One area that would cause us not to renew would be if a competing service came out with more third-party integrations that match our needs. Price at this point is no longer an issue as it would allow us to automate a somewhat manual process that we have now connecting Cyfe widgets to Google Sheets.
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.
It has a clean and modern interface. However, it is not completely intuitive. I think it would be better and easier to navigate with more Windows style drop down menus and/or tabls. There is a significant learning curve, but that may be due in part to the technical nature of this type of software tool.
I gave it a rating of 7 because it does a good job at what it does, but there are missing that are missing which I would have benefited from. For instance, if I was able to drill down more on the specific metrics I was able to see, that would have been helpful.
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.
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.
They are very friendly and informative. They are quick in resolving our queries and help us understand very minute things as well. They are quick in creating feature tickets based on our custom requirements, and they would also create a bug ticket if there is any discrepancy and get that checked on time.
Because I had a very minor question and I was able to speak directly to the founder through LinkedIn and through email. I know that as they grow this may not always be an option but the fact that he made himself available to answer my questions said a lot about his passion for the product.
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.
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.
Cyfe is a 15 minutes implementation, then some time to get your data sources created. This is an easy one person job that will not result in down time or unnecessary wasted man hours.
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.
With Looker, to be effective, a substantial amount of coding & modeling needs to happen in LookML. Being another language to learn, users have to context switch again from at a minimum either SQL or Python into LookML. The concept of being able to source control, code review, and deploy your models is a plus though.
Tableau is the gold standard for data visualization, no question. Power users will be able to create dazzling content that Sigma won't necessarily be able to easily match. However, since development usually happens via an extract, helping other users troubleshoot is an arduous process. Trying to re-do or un-do all the transformations and calculations that cause a certain number is very difficult.
With Sigma, all the queries happen directly against Snowflake and you can see the query logs. The data modeling happens right in a tabular, spreadsheet-like manner, so within only a few minutes, substantial transformations can happen, with visualizations just a few more clicks away.
The Salesforce dashboard is comparably flexible and intuitive, but designed more to its internal CRM focus. SumAll shares the social media dashboard capabilities, but lacks all others. Its interesting feature is side-by-side graph analysis for cross-channel performance. Cyfe might borrow from SumAll's default weekly email summary of performance from the dashboard, but implementation could be too complex. Nuvi dashboard is exclusively for social media marketing, but lacks Cyfe's flexibility for third party integration and window customization settings.
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.
Monitoring health of cloud platform has allowed the company to anticipate issues before they affect customers – Sigma prompted us building a canary monitoring process that provides customer container health.
Customer success has used an activity report to discover customers running runaway processes that they were unaware of, creating an alert to contact the customer and prevent an embarrassing situation.
Customer success uses the activity report to prompt conversations regarding increases or declines in behavior that led to increasing contract limits or addressing churn concerns.
