Phocas Business Intelligence vs. Sigma Computing

If you would like your data in one place with easy access, this is the software for you. You can have data from multiple systems and bring it into one view so that you have a quick and easily visible dashboard for the data you wish to see.

Incentivized

Whenever there’s data that need to be analyzed, visualized or simply aggregated in a pivot table, Sigma is the perfect tool for the job: it helps build rich data dashboards, including charts, tables, colors and more. It connects with several alternatives of external sources such as Google BigQuery, Google Drive, other database engines or tabular data files.

Incentivized

• Custom reports are simple to create.
• The ability to manage users and their dashboards is solid.
• Easy to navigate web interface makes the software accessible from anywhere.

Incentivized

• Provides a familiar data analysis format with its spreadsheet interface.
• Fast; by querying the warehouse directly, it's much more performant than other cloud-based BI tools.
• Allows non-technical users to interact with and analyze warehouse data without needing to know SQL.
• Easy-to-use templates are great for monitoring aspects of our data stack.

Incentivized

• Phocas needs to make it easier to connect to different types of databases.
• The data in Phocas needs to be updated faster in some cases.
• It needs to provide functions to create better charts and graphs.

Incentivized

• Formatting: On workbooks and dashboards, it can sometimes be difficult to make the page elements align correctly.
• When creating and setting up datasets, having a temporarily row-limiting option when editing would help a lot, particularly on anything with a large number of rows.
• Scheduling reports to be sent out can be tricky if the request is something like "Last Monday of each month".
• Being able to export an xls with conditional formatting would be helpful in some cases.

Incentivized

Because we are very satisfied with the product and would most likely renew because of the services it provides. It is a tool that you bring into your organization and let it change the way you analyze your data, present your data and share you date within the Respective teams

Incentivized

It is a very user-friendly product and is easy to understand. You can get your data from just a quick click and the dashboard loads. You can take the data and drill down easy to find what you are looking for.

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

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

Support is responsive. You log a call and they will respond quickly and resolve your issues. We have only had great experiences with the support team.

Incentivized

Support team is helpful in answering questions and providing help with using the UI. There are knowledgeable people within the support team. There are also good online support tools. There are significant community support resources available. There is however lack of a live support. It would be useful to have live phone number or chat to use.

Incentivized

Was not involved in implementation

Incentivized

Phocas is easy to use for end users and can be used on desktops, laptops, and phones.

Incentivized

Sigma is by far the best. It is easiest to learn and easiest to use on a day to day basis. I never have to wait for dashboards to load and it's very easy to understand the variables that are going into my visualizations. Best of all I can manipulate the data within Sigma very easily. In these other platforms data manipulation is difficult or must be done in the data warehouse

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• It has given our business a view on data
• We can access it from anywhere
• You can have multiple dashboards for different information

Incentivized

• 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