OpenText Magellan vs. Sigma Computing vs. Cyfe, by Traject

If you do not have a large budget and are a large organization, I would steer clear of Actuate. If you are looking to do very complex washboarding, I would not use them. Your developers have to be very skilled to work with this. Plan to bring in consultants if necessary to help your process. Adhoc reporting is weak. If your pricing is user based and you expand, this could be very expensive.

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• The report outputs can vary across different types such as HTML, PDF, and Excel
• Their open source offering is very sufficient
• There are great boards and blogs for developers and engineers to expand and use their features.
• The people from the company that I've worked with are professional and courteous.

Incentivized

• Allows end users to easily dive into the data without having direct access to the table in our database management software.
• Can easily turnaround dashboards that are detailed and visually pleasing.
• Sigma is intuitive and as new features are rolled out it is easy to adopt and incorporate them into new and existing dashboards.

Incentivized

• Has preset metric groups that pull similar stats together in one "bucket" saving you the time of setting up each stat-line one by one
• Allows you to easily adjust the timeframe for what stats you want to see, so you can find YOY stats or just last month's stats rather quickly
• Colored visualizations of stats make it easy to notice when campaigns are taking off

Incentivized

• The documentation on all the available features, but most importantly on the scripting side, can be improved
• The standard look & feel of some basic options, like parameter selection or sorting and filtering, looks dated and can't be customized
• The server portal needs to provide better tools
• More integration is needed with other OpenText products

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• 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.

I am no longer working for the company that was using Actuate but I believe they would continue to use it because the stitching costs would be to high. It would require a complete rewrite of the reports and the never version of Actuate (BIRT) even required an almost complete report rewrite

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

It is quite intuitive to use. It is fit specifically for doing sentiment, emotion, and intention analysis as well as text classification and text summarization. I would have given 10 if it is fit for the purpose of doing image processing and analysis as well. There is a huge market to analyze video and image data.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Yes, as long as you don’t conduct user error sigma is always up and running and waiting for you to complete your dashboards

Incentivized

It depends, it loads quickly for smaller dashboards but when loading larger amounts of data it takes more time to do so

Incentivized

Always there on the front and backend for us and the client.

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.

Incentivized

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.

Was not involved in implementation

Incentivized

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.

It is vastly superior to these in many ways, for complex reporting it is a much more sophisticated solution. Visualizations are very good. Javascript extensibility is very powerful, others don't support this or as well. Pentaho and MS are both OLAP oriented. Pentaho is moving more toward big data, which was not our primary focus. Others are stuck in the Crystal Reports Band metaphor.

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.

It is a cloud service offering that is able to expand based on your usage

Incentivized

• Actuate can handle 50 to 60 sub reports inside a report very well.
• Dynamically creating the datasource, chart, graph, reports are the main advantages. We can do any level of drilling, and can create a performance matrix dashboard efficiently.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Cyfe allows us to provide real time data to our clients
• Cyfe allows us to provide detailed analytics to our clients showing actual results
• Cyfe reduced our need to provide monthly "reports" to our marketing clients
• Cyfe allows us to have better situational awareness and know what is going on throughout our multiple organizations