Sigma Computing Review
We use Sigma Computing for our brokerage, business development, ops, and product dashboards. They help us understand how our team is …
Overview
What is Sigma?
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.
Recent Reviews
How Sigma Differs From Its Competitors
Awards
Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards
Popular Features
- Drill-down analysis (150)8.585%
- Report sharing and collaboration (156)8.282%
- Customizable dashboards (155)7.777%
- Formatting capabilities (157)7.373%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
N/A
Unavailable
What is Sigma?
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.
Entry-level set up fee?
- Setup fee optional
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Would you like us to let the vendor know that you want pricing?
153 people also want pricing
Alternatives Pricing
What is Microsoft Power BI?
Microsoft Power BI is a visualization and data discovery tool from Microsoft. It allows users to convert data into visuals and graphics, visually explore and analyze data, collaborate on interactive dashboards and reports, and scale across their organization with built-in governance and security.
What is Tableau Desktop?
Tableau Desktop is a data visualization product from Tableau. It connects to a variety of data sources for combining disparate data sources without coding. It provides tools for discovering patterns and insights, data calculations, forecasts, and statistical summaries and visual storytelling.
Features
Return to navigation
Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- Downloadables
- FAQs
What is Sigma?
Sigma is a business intelligence (BI) and analytics platform purpose-built for the cloud. With Sigma, anyone can use the spreadsheet functions and formulas they already know to explore live data at cloud scale, down to the lowest grain of detail. Its familiar spreadsheet-like interface delivers SQL into the hands of any user while keeping data fresh and secure within cloud data warehouses.
Data-first companies can use Sigma to empower their employees, customers, and partners to break free from the confines of the dashboard and explore data for themselves to make better, faster decisions. The software was built to capitalize on the performance power of cloud data warehouses to combine data sources and analyze billions of rows of data instantly – no coding required.
Sigma Features
BI Standard Reporting Features
- Supported: Pixel Perfect reports
- Supported: Customizable dashboards
- Supported: Report Formatting Templates
Ad-hoc Reporting Features
- Supported: Drill-down analysis
- Supported: Formatting capabilities
- Supported: Predictive modeling
- Supported: Report sharing and collaboration
Report Output and Scheduling Features
- Supported: Publish to Web
- Supported: Publish to PDF
- Supported: Output Raw Supporting Data
- Supported: Report Versioning
- Supported: Report Delivery Scheduling
- Supported: Delivery to Remote Servers
Data Discovery and Visualization Features
- Supported: Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
Sigma Screenshots
Sigma Videos
What is Sigma?
Cohort analysis with Sigma
Sigma for Sales Teams Demo
Rapid Data Prototyping with Sigma
Building Pivot Tables with Sigma
Embedded Analytics with Sigma
Parsing JSON in seconds with Sigma
Sigma Demo at Snowflake Summit
Sigma Integrations
Sigma Competitors
Sigma Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | Mobile Web |
| Supported Countries | United States, Canada |
Sigma Downloadables
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
Reviewers rate Report Versioning highest, with a score of 9.4.
The most common users of Sigma are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(287)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-17 of 17)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
January 11, 2024
A data analysis tool that is easy implement and easy to learn.
I utilize Sigma to visualize datasets that I have curated in Snowflake. Sigma allows us to identify issues within our products and services to improve efficiency and effectiveness.
- 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.
- Improved period over period functionality within the KPI Visual that would allow me to compare one year to another without including all years in the visual. I.E. the primary value is 2022 and the comparison line is 2021.
- Greater ability to customize aspects of different visuals such as color, font and font size.
- The ability for certain elements or blocks of elements to move as one scrolls down the page. I.E. I would enjoy the ability to create a set of filter elements along one side of the dashboard that scrolls with the user as the user scrolls down the page to view various visuals.
January 09, 2024
Getting data into your users' hands quickly and easily
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We're in the process of rolling Sigma out to our entire company as our "Analytics-endorsed" BI tool, replacing Domo. We're looking to facilitate easy self-service for business users to answer 80% of their own questions. For explorer and creator users, they have a ton of flexibility in slicing, grouping, and aggregating the data as they see fit.
- Easily connects to Snowflake.
- dbt Integration to show column level definitions and dataset metadata (freshness, size, rows, etc.)
- Very quickly create workbooks and content.
- Unlimited viewer model, so everyone in the company can have read-only access.
- Viewer level license is quite limited. These users can't download data or even add filters on datasets. Something to keep in mind.
- Directly querying the underlying data warehouse will lead to increased usage. Not a big deal on something like Redshift, but your Snowflake consumption will increase, potentially by a lot.
August 02, 2023
Sigma Computing is an amazing BI solution if you want to build self-serve data product
Provide self service data solutions to internal and external users. Dashboards to provide insights to internal teams like ops, sales, marketing, finance etc. Also have dashboards for external customers to understand their business with us.
- Export function in Sigma Computing is amazing.
- Speed compare to Tableau
- easy to get started for non technical users
- release updates all the time
- Love the live chat function
- some new features are released with a log of bugs
- aesthetically not as good as some of the competitors
- not addressing open requests fast enough. or at least provide some updates
January 04, 2023
Great, but Limited for Now.
It is our main business intelligence tool, and is used in tandem with Google BigQuery to be a connection point where teams and stakeholders can draw analysis and create reporting from our multiple data sources. The business problems this address includes ranges from internal analysis (such as providing cohesive reporting for our finance teams) to external problem solving (product, customer success, sales, and marketing).
- Disseminate workbooks and information through user profiles and features with a relatively low learning curve.
- Customization tools for colors/branding.
- Limitation in visualizations that lead to long workarounds to get features we want, or to be able to display data in the way we like it.
- Limit choices in customization when it comes to fonts, text size, and element sizing.
- Difficulty in handling complicated dashboard designs that require multi-element/section movement and a higher number of elements.
January 04, 2023
Sigma: As easy to use as Excel, as powerful as Tableau.
The team I am on, has a small headcount for the number of clients we're supporting. Sigma has helped us massively reduce the amount of time it takes for us to compile reports and actionable business intelligence from dozens of hours a week down to 1-3 hours. Moreover, it's helped us in supporting our sales reps with information on their specific clients. The scope of use for our team has only continued to grow as other teams realize use cases based on what I've built so far for my team.
On a daily basis, use it to determine a broad range of things:
Product performance:
On a daily basis, use it to determine a broad range of things:
Product performance:
- Observing past trends and predict future trends in product usage
- Identify broad trends that could lead to product improvements
- Help clients get the maximum potential from our product by observing how its being used
- Identify areas where costs to us, or the client, may be unnecessarily high and address
- Proactively identify issues and reach out to clients for troubleshooting and resolution
- Reach out to clients who are not using the product to its maximum potential and assist in helping their projects succeed
- Maximize delivery to our clients by identifying the causes of shortfalls
- Customer Support: They've always been very quick to respond, willing to help work to come up with solutions for anything I'm stuck on.
- Very quick and easy to create reports with, once a solid dataset has been built.
- Low Code/No Code UX is intuitive to any excel users.
- Many options for joining different data sources.
- Adding new features regularly
- 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.
November 08, 2022
Sigma is Success for Any Size Data Program
Sigma is a toll that works in the same way a spreadsheets work. But with data joining functionality similar to SQL and far easier to create visualizations. We chose Sigma because it makes data easy to access and use for a business user. IT resources are scarce for creating new reports and versions of reports.
- Guides business type users through a JOIN
- Allows for some types of data engineering in the dataset creation.
- Provides instantaneous user help and support
- The Join functionality in worksheets is incredibly useful but that same view is not available in worksheets. Is there a way to combine that?
- Make the datasets about data engineering models. Leave worksheets to using those models and other data.
August 25, 2022
Good enough, worth spending time with.
We use Sigma as our primary data visualization tool for delivering operational metrics throughout the company. Astronomer is a fast growing cloud-based software startup and we faced the typical scaling issue of delivering a wide range of operational metrics to a broad audience. The metrics covered platform health, customer activity and behavior, trouble tickets, contracts and order, HR activity. For the most part employees are generally sophisticated data consumers and wanted the ability to parametize and drill into the metrics that help them run the business – Sigma a good fit for this use case.
- Pivot tables, allowing user control for navigating summary/detail views of data
- Visualization
- Speed to delivering dashboard, we have generally been quick to at least prototype dashboards
- Smart comprehension and options for date, numeric and text fields.
- The interface is busy with multiple modes to accomplish similar tasks, so not always intuitive to do some tasks
- While a more specific case of my first point, the relationship between different screen elements is particularly not obvious
- On chart annotation, allowing comments that overlay chart data
August 23, 2022
Sigma Computing : for the modern Data Driven world
Sigma Computing is at the center of our Data-Driven model within the organization. We use it for everything from displaying the state of the business on screens to automated report generation, providing our internal users the ability to quickly make data-driven decisions. Everyone from power users to regular users within our organization is utilizing the analytics, and business insights my department provides via Sigma Computing which reduces duplicate work and promotes self-service
- Ease of use when creating and implementing new worksheets
- Quick iterative development of datasets
- Adoption metrics of new datasets
- Access to query our own metrics
- Having workbook visualizations to pull from 1 source yet provide different information
- Usage metrics of workbooks and any tabs contained within them
August 19, 2022
Sigma Good and Bad
In our organization, we use Sigma for external users, we create and embed dashboards in our application.
We try to replace all our existing tabular reporting with Sigma's new good-looking workbooks. For this we have set up a new warehouse, which is directly used by Sigma for presenting production data.
We try to replace all our existing tabular reporting with Sigma's new good-looking workbooks. For this we have set up a new warehouse, which is directly used by Sigma for presenting production data.
- Support
- Ease of use
- Embedding
- Visualizations
- Tabular reports
- Customization
August 19, 2022
Wouldn't recommend
I use Sigma to analyze company data as well as creating dashboards to support other employees in understanding company data.
- Charts look pretty good, not as good some other bi tools
- Its somewhat easy to work with very simple datasets
- It does a good job of making it take much longer to develop visualizations than any other bi tool I've used, and I've used a lot
- No support for any kind of scripting, everything must be done via gui which makes it harder to re-use previous work
- Copying from one dashboard to another is not supported. Which is weird
- Logic for a calculation is difficult to see, it gets lost in "children" datasets
- Lots of minor ui issues, hover over in charts often stick on the screen obscuring other things, long column names are cutoff
- Filters can be applied upstream of a table making it difficult to tell which filters are impacting a given output
- Would be helpful to pass input parameters to SQL queries.
- Version control approach is baffling. If you click edit you might go to a previous unpublished version from months prior, ui is somewhat confusing to get to the current version. Also very problematic if working on the same workbook as a coworker
- Its much harder than it should be to view sql for a dataset, and most users roles do not have access to view it
Sigma is our BI tool for internal reporting/dashboarding and data-driven decision-making. We use it primarily for sales, marketing, inventory, and operational needs, but finance and other departments also use it. It enables us to answer ad hoc business questions, build dashboards for repeated, frequent use, and other analytics and monitoring.
- The similarity to spreadsheet tools (G Sheets, Excel) enables end-users to quickly get up to speed without much training.
- The end user interface is clean and clear.
- Sigma support is great - they're friendly, always available for a quick chat or a screen share, and knowledgeable about the product and able to provide solutions and workarounds to any issues or reporting needs.
- The flexibility of using SQL, analytics-created datasets, CSVs, or any combination of those is ideal for a smaller organization like us - it enables us to be more responsive to evolving user and business needs, especially as we grow.
- Because it's spreadsheet-based, the UI can be tricky or unintuitive to use at times (especially for those used to other BI tools).
- Options and functionality for things like charts or dashboard filters can be clunky or non-existent but Sigma is great about taking feature requests and is continually rolling out new features and improvements.
October 01, 2019
An easy way to expose data
The data team introduced Sigma in order to find a self-serve solution for other teams especially the non-technical roles. We want to enable people to get the data without writing SQL.
- Easy way to get aggregated data without writing SQL.
- Easy way to visualize the data.
- Easy way to manipulate the data by built-in functions.
- It's not clear what's the implementation if we are doing more complicated join and filter.
- It can only support to export the data up to 10,000 rows.
- Little online resources for use cases or questions.
September 28, 2019
My Sigma Review.
Some members of the organization use it to tap into Snowflake.
- Queries Snowflake.
- Automated reports.
- Working in the individual tables.
- Adjusting the screen size for some menus on the left.
- The layout of Sigma in general needs improvement.
- It needs more report automation functionality.
September 24, 2019
Democratizing Data: From a Non-Data/Engineering Perspective
We are beginning to implement it across the organization as a way to democratize access to data. Decentralize the access so that it's not just within the data/engineering team and so that it's accessible and workable for other departments like sales and marketing management to use as a way to power informed decisions as well as identify key insights.
- Clean UI makes the powerful system approachable and inviting to begin sandbox testing.
- Modular approach. You can pivot and pull and plug away so much. The permutations are endless with lots of visualizations and integrations to keep the data and insights flowing.
- Great for multi-user and getting people set-up across the org.
- Though the tutorial click through at initial sign-up is done great, I wish there were some additional ways to learn about the product at the early stages. It's almost as if they begin with lots of help and support and then expect you to be great on your own and help becomes overly technical. Probably not bad for data scientists but definitely affected the want to use the tool daily (it kind of plateaued).
- I'd like to see better sales material/education. My org has lots of people familiar with Mode & Tableau, so we wanted to have clearer comparisons of why it's worth switching over to this new tool. Why is it so much better? That needs to be clearer.
September 21, 2019
A non-technical, user friendly analytics tool
We use Sigma Computing to develop business reporting from our business analytics data. Sigma Computing effectively solved the problems of accessibility to the data and adoption of usage with our non-analyst users. Our front line managers found it to be very easy to use and understand because its interface modeled after simple spreadsheet sheet usage which they are already familiar with. Thu,s they did not need to learn the language of analytics to do more complex tasks like regressions and correlations.
- Simple spreadsheet-like user interface. If you know Excel or Google Docs, you can use Sigma Computing to do complex analysis.
- Flexible in that power users can narrow down result sets directly if they know how to do SQL, but SQL knowledge is not required to to analyze data.
- Easy to share completed reports and graphical data with teams, without requiring team members to have paid accounts.
- Because Sigma Computing sits directly on top of the analytics data warehouse it queries live data. Not the most efficient when it comes to speed and requires attention from data specialist to make sure the warehouse is optimized to support the queries.
- Access control is loosely governed. Meaning pretty much granular access to specific tables or schemas hard to manage. Sharing a report means granting implicit access to the source data.
- Change management is tricky. Renaming of tables means re-creating reports, rather than just being able to point existing reports at a new table.
We use Sigma Computing as one of a set of data tools for analyzing customer behavior. I maintain it as a marketing tool, but also build our dashboards for other departments, such as product developers, and biz dev.
The big win for me with Sigma Computing, is that it allows me to take a set of queries that I would normally run by hand once a week, or once a month, and lets me view the data almost instantly without having to pull and manipulate it. I set up my queries one time, perform any translation or added layers I need (which Sigma is great at, stuff I can't do in Excel or anywhere else automatically) and then push them to a dashboard that I can load each morning.
The big win for me with Sigma Computing, is that it allows me to take a set of queries that I would normally run by hand once a week, or once a month, and lets me view the data almost instantly without having to pull and manipulate it. I set up my queries one time, perform any translation or added layers I need (which Sigma is great at, stuff I can't do in Excel or anywhere else automatically) and then push them to a dashboard that I can load each morning.
- Allows a quick look at important data that moves every day.
- Frees up a lot of my time from manually running, downloading, loading, and translating data.
- Allows me to easily share my findings with a quick link.
- I would love to see some additional visualizations added. I find myself using the same 2 or 3 on all of my dashboards, which is functional, but I would like some choices to make things a little more visually appealing.
- I would like to adjust the timeout options I have when querying the data. It would be nice to force a longer timeout for some of the tables I have that are larger and take a while to get data from.
- Scheduling dashboards to send snapshots to Slack fail more often than they work. It is a feature I do not use much, because I cannot rely on it.
- The ability to set the screen size of the VM that takes the snapshots would be useful. I have a high resolution screen that I set my dashboards up to be visible on, and when I get a report emailed to me, it is always cut off because the resolution on the VM that takes the snapshot is much lower.
September 19, 2019
Why did it take us so long to get Sigma?
It is used across the whole organization to dive into and compile the data that we had to source individually before. We are able to do many things with it depending on the department but my biggest use of it is to get a full-picture of each of our partnerships and gauge how successful they are.
- The different options to display data, whether it's a chart, just numbers or a combination of both.
- The ability to expand deep into the numbers with a simple click
- Sometimes it takes a while for data to load depending on size of the database
- Had some issues with errors coming out or database not loading properly