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Sisense

Sisense

Overview

What is Sisense?

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.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Sisense is a versatile platform that addresses the needs of organizations across various industries. Users rely on Sisense to provide …
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Best BI Tool

9 out of 10
October 22, 2018
Incentivized
Sisense was being used by certain departments of our organization. Our organization is so huge that it could not be used in the entire …
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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

View all 20 features
  • Customizable dashboards (46)
    9.0
    90%
  • Publish to PDF (45)
    9.0
    90%
  • Formatting capabilities (46)
    9.0
    90%
  • Drill-down analysis (46)
    8.0
    80%
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Pricing

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N/A
Unavailable

What is Sisense?

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.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.sisense.com/get/pricing

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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What is SAP Crystal?

SAP Crystal is an analytics and reporting software solution for SMBs. SAP Crystal comprises Crystal Reports for pixel-perfect reporting, and SAP Crystal Server for automated distribution and self-service access to reports, dashboards and data exploration.

What is IBM Cognos Analytics?

IBM Cognos is a full-featured business intelligence suite by IBM, designed for larger deployments. It comprises Query Studio, Reporting Studio, Analysis Studio and Event Studio, and Cognos Administration along with tools for Microsoft Office integration, full-text search, and dashboards.

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Product Demos

Locked Filter | Sisense Tutorials: Filtering Dashboard Data

YouTube

Adding a Custom Field | Sisense Tutorials: Preparing your Data Model

YouTube

Working with Tables and Fields | Sisense Tutorials: Preparing your Data Model

YouTube

Adding a Custom SQL Table | Sisense Tutorials: Preparing your Data Model

YouTube

Date and Time Functions | Sisense Tutorials: Preparing your Data Model

YouTube

Layout and Responsive Design | Sisense Tutorials: Creating your Dashboard

YouTube
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Features

BI Standard Reporting

Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.

8.7
Avg 8.2

Ad-hoc Reporting

Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.

8.3
Avg 8.1

Report Output and Scheduling

Ability to schedule and manager report output.

8.2
Avg 8.4

Data Discovery and Visualization

Data Discovery and Visualization is the analysis of multiple data sources in a search for patterns and outliers and the ability to represent the data visually.

9
Avg 8.1

Access Control and Security

Access control means being able to determine who has access to which data.

10
Avg 8.6

Mobile Capabilities

Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

9
Avg 7.9
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Product Details

What is Sisense?

Sisense data & analytics platform is designed to make it easy to mashup data from across the entire data landscape and transform it into actionable analytics applications that can be embedded anywhere. The vendor boasts innovative startups and global brands like GE, Nasdaq, and Philips, as well as organizations worldwide are using Sisense to accelerate innovation and drive digital transformation by embedding Sisense into their businesses. Whether data is in the cloud, on-prem, or a mix of both, Sisense gives users everything needed to successfully deliver on analytics application strategy today, allowing you to:

  • Securely connect and ingest data into cloud data warehouses to create a single store for your data
  • Mashup data from dozens of sources for a complete view of your business
  • Leverage a combination of live or cached data models to optimize performance and manage resource utilization
  • Build beautiful visualizations and actionable application components using the robust library of integrated widgets and certified add-ons
  • Develop and white-label with ease using a full suite of APIs and developer toolkits
  • Differentiate products and services with fully integrated, white-label analytics in the office or on mobile devices for users on the go

Sisense Features

BI Platform Features

  • Supported: Administration via Windows App
  • Supported: Administration via MacOS App
  • Supported: Administration via Web Interface
  • Supported: Live Connection to External Data
  • Supported: Snapshot of External Data
  • Supported: In-memory data model
  • Supported: OLAP (Pre-processed cube representation)
  • Supported: ROLAP (SQL-layer querying)
  • Supported: Multi-Data Source Reporting (Blending)
  • Supported: Data warehouse / dictionary layer
  • Supported: ETL Capability
  • Supported: ETL Scheduler

Supported Data Sources Features

  • Supported: MS Excel Workbooks
  • Supported: Text Files (CSV, etc)
  • Supported: Oracle
  • Supported: MS SQL Server
  • Supported: IBM DB2
  • Supported: Postgres
  • Supported: MySQL
  • Supported: ODBC
  • Supported: Cloudera Hadoop
  • Supported: Hortonworks Hadoop
  • Supported: EMC Greenplum
  • Supported: IBM Netezza
  • Supported: HP Vertica
  • Supported: ParAccel
  • Supported: SAP Hana
  • Supported: Teradata
  • Supported: Sage 500
  • Supported: Salesforce
  • Supported: SAP
  • Supported: Google Analytics

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: Integration with R or other statistical packages

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

Data Discovery and Visualization Features

  • Supported: Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
  • Supported: Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
  • Supported: Predictive Analytics
  • Supported: Support for Machine Learning models
  • Supported: Pattern Recognition and Data Mining
  • Supported: Integration with R or other statistical packages

Access Control and Security Features

  • Supported: Multi-User Support (named login)
  • Supported: Role-Based Security Model
  • Supported: Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
  • Supported: Report-Level Access Control
  • Supported: Table-Level Access Control (BI-layer)
  • Supported: Field-Level Access Control (BI-layer)

Mobile Capabilities Features

  • Supported: Responsive Design for Web Access
  • Supported: Mobile Application
  • Supported: Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile

Sisense Video

Infusing Analytics Everywhere with Sisense

Sisense Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsWindows, Linux, Mac
Mobile ApplicationApple iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry
Supported CountriesAll

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Tableau Public, GoodData, and Domo are common alternatives for Sisense.

Reviewers rate Multi-User Support (named login) and Role-Based Security Model and Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete) highest, with a score of 10.

The most common users of Sisense are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(129)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Sisense is a versatile platform that addresses the needs of organizations across various industries. Users rely on Sisense to provide accurate and fast insights, reducing report response time and development time compared to manual coding and web UI controls. With Sisense, educators receive real-time feedback on student performance through integrated dashboards, allowing them to make informed decisions and improve teaching strategies. For businesses, Sisense serves as the executive dashboard and managerial reporting platform, providing comprehensive business performance insights at all levels of the organization. The software is also used by various departments such as sales, product management, purchasing, and eCommerce to track key performance indicators - KPIs, analyze sales performance, and answer complex questions about datasets. Additionally, Sisense is utilized by executives and managers to present key metrics, division heads to make better decisions, and compliance departments to quickly identify issues and take corrective actions. Overall, Sisense helps automate time-consuming reports, eliminates error-prone reporting, and creates a centralized data warehouse and portal for better decision-making across the organization. Whether it's analyzing marketing campaigns, managing agent performance or consolidating information in a single tool, Sisense offers a wide range of use cases that cater to the needs of diverse businesses.

Based on the user reviews, here are the three most common recommendations for Sisense:

  1. Users highly recommend using Sisense as a cost-effective and productive tool for businesses. They suggest utilizing the Linux version and the managed cloud environment for optimal performance.

  2. Users advise structuring data properly to take advantage of Sisense's easy left join capabilities. They mention that the software is quick to learn and intuitive but caution against allowing unfamiliar users to access it.

  3. It is recommended to make Sisense more user-friendly for non-technical users and improve filtering options. Users appreciate the deep insight and advanced analytics capabilities of the tool, but suggest not setting expectations too high. They also mention that a strong foundation in Java is necessary.

Overall, users highly recommend Sisense as an advanced analytics software and one-platform solution. They praise its comprehensive data analysis and visualization capabilities, as well as its simplicity, intuitive use, and continuous feature improvement compared to other BI vendors. It is suggested to engage with the Sisense community, conduct a tool evaluation, and have a comprehensive criteria and a senior BI sponsor in place. Implementing Sisense either in the cloud or on-premise with an in-house team of BI developers and data engineers is also advised. Additionally, following best practices when building dashboards and elasticubes is recommended.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 26)
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Surbhi Singhal | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I have been using Sisense for many years now. Sisense is a data visualization tool, and it is the greatest step and latest in the Business Intelligence market. It provides the in-chip technology for accessing millions of data in the shortest span of seconds and provides the best visual efforts for your business data.
  • Fastest - due to its in chip methodology.
  • Using great visualization, BI becomes easier with Sisense.
  • Millions of data can be loaded in fewer seconds which didn't seem possible with other traditional reporting tools.
  • Robust Architecture and provides Rest APIs to access it externally.
  • Instability of the data cubes, runs and failures.
  • Unknown issues in widgets, dashboard, filters.
  • Republishing of the dashboards for every single change.
  • Variables, parameters cannot be used in the front end.
Well Suited when your company size is small and having billions of records and concurrent users are less.
If data can be stored in form of elasticubes and can be accessed offline. But for large organization, its not appropriate as large number of users required more logins and it leads to costing and maintenance issue.
Also, at times we have observed its instability.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sisense is our system of record for integrating a number of different data feeds (Google Analytics, SalesForce, Call Tracking, Internal Systems). It is used across all of our sales and marketing organization and is used in a variety of ways by different teams. The portability, ability to build data cubes in the tool, and the low learning curve have made it a major gain for the group after transitioning from Looker.
  • Ease of Use
  • Accessability
  • Better graphing tools
  • Better alerting systems
Sisense is a great cost-effective middleware and frontend for any organization that has multiple data feeds and is looking for a large amount of usage without a ton of cost. While it doesn't have every feature of far more expensive enterprise tools for a cost/benefit analysis, it has been one of the best tool values we have. I would not use it if you are still in a Google Analytics phase, nor if you are overly reliant on attribution, but for daily use and combining data systems, especially for a multi-touch call center or lead generation organization it is a great cost-effective way to get the data out without huge development costs.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Sisense as part of our EMR platform to provide our customers and internal development team statistics and analytics on how to improve patient care. Being able to compile data into an easy to understand format enables us to see what patient treatments are working and what treatments aren't working.
  • Technical support has been great and the on-boarding process has been straightforward.
  • Great customization with a vast array of plugins and API integration capabilities.
  • Sisense is constantly adding new features and being innovative.
  • They need to get the Linux version out of beta. Having to run a Windows Server is not too big of a deal but it does require more resources if you devops team only develops in Linux.
  • Management of Cubes is a pain and requires high system resources.
  • Random stability issues.
If your company produces tons of data and you need to analyze a vast amount of data then Sisense is great for compiling easy to see and understand statistics. If your data keeps growing Sisense will start to bog down. In enterprise environment this could become any issue since it's not very easy to scale up.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sisense is used across the whole organization, both looking at internal data from our accounting software as well as looking at the aggregate data collected from our software solutions deployed worldwide. For our internal executive and sales team, it addresses visibility into sales numbers and trends. For our product managers, it provides insight into usage of our software and needs that may arise. For external purposes, we provide reporting to our customer base on their personal usage of the system.
  • Combining data from different sources
  • Cleaning up and modeling data
  • Dashboard creation
  • Cubes get very slow once your data starts to grow big.
  • Admins currently cannot edit each others' dashboards. This gets very cumbersome once admins change - it takes duplicating and republishing dashboards to let them take over.
  • Maps can be done better. The ability to compare to some standard benchmarks such as population density, demographics, GDP, etc., would be very useful.
Sisense is well suited for many applications as long as the data does not get too big. We use it to analyze sales, active vs. canceled subscriptions, usage of features in our software, etc. For big data it becomes a problem. Our software is deployed to several hundred thousand users worldwide - and continually reports back. This means the data grows exponentially.
Jonathan Ganucheau | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is currently being implemented to replace our organization-wide data warehouse and BI reporting platform. We've initially completed the data migration, and we are starting the build out of all of our organization reports as Sisense dashboards. Secondarily, we are utilizing their API capabilities to serve data to new websites we've recently launched.
  • Visual ETL and UI for data relationships and modeling within ETL.
  • Drill down and interactive reports with varying levels of filters for each dashboard.
  • Data alterations and updates are fast.
  • Their technical support has no option for immediate phone support in the event of a disaster or emergency. Their support staff is mainly located in Israel, so a ticketing system is relied on no matter what the urgency.
  • Their tech support also doesn't easily remote into your instance if you're hosting yourself to be able to quickly diagnose issues.
  • We've still been experiencing many random issues with Sisense like corrupt files and unexplained failures in production which seems very buggy.
  • Anytime deeply advanced SQL is used in the ETL section (Elasticube Manager) Sisense kind of falls apart. It needs any complex queries to be broken down into multiple, separate queries at the simplest denominator.
Well suited
You don't need an actual data warehouse with historical and live data
You don't need separate solutions for ETL, DW and Reporting
You need all your data available via API's automatically

Less appropriate
You want to be to run stored procedure or cursor logic as part of your ETL (not possible in Sisense)

Victor Arana | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Sisense across our Business Finance models in the Financial and Accounting departments. We use it to develop and redesign the information stored in our Project Management Software and our ERP systems for the Construction and Real State Field. It gives us the perspective to consolidate everything in a single, easy to manage tool. Sisense reduces the time it takes to obtain complex reports from many different data sources, and controls a variety of formats in one single tool that enhances our BI platform and our internal and external resources delivered to our end clients.
  • Sisense is easy to set up and connect to a wide variety of formats and platforms.
  • Sisense reduces the time it takes to obtain an optimal ROI.
  • Sisense really delivers the instant analysis required to merge financial numbers and statistics with a pretty accurate dashboard landscape.
  • Sisense could work on their management strategy for dashboards that are created by multiple users, reducing the complexity and improving their management options and security premises.
  • The navigation and filtering options could be useful in the mobile version, but Sisense needs to work on the layouts to improve the UX.
  • Sisense is a heavy app so be careful if you deploy this powerful tool in a resource that is under its system requirements--it can drive you crazy waiting for optimal performance.
Sisense is the best choice if your company is seeking a reliable, powerful and very accurate tool that can connect to a wide variety of standard and unconventional databases or data sources. With the proper assessment before its deployment, you can make it a win-win solution to deliver amazing dashboards and business reports that can consolidate different data sources, becoming a useful resource for both your business and your customers. If your company runs data analyses from multiple sources in the under 40 million rows or lower range, Sisense may be out of your league as a data analysis software.
Joseph R. Sweeney | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We made the decision to try out several dashboard type data services with Sisense being one of them a few years ago. We were using it to put together easy to read and accessible dashboards to display high level information for our senior executives. This became an ad hoc type of request and pulled in data from finance, sales, and security.
  • Drag and drop feature for creating a dashboard is very easy to use and intuitive.
  • Easy to share with other users especially if you want them to have a read only file.
  • Depending on the machine you have, it can be very fast and responsive when pooling data together.
  • Mobile system is wonky and not as intuitive as the desktop version. I would recommend against viewing the dashboards on a mobile device as well.
Sisense is well suited for any organizational situation where you want to display data in an aesthetically pleasing and comprehensive way. It provides users with a way of communicating real time data with others in a company without having to constantly send updates or schedule meetings but rather having the data ready to present and accessible anywhere by anyone.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
As a Business Intelligence professional, I live to learned about new solutions to create opportunities in different sized organizations. We implemented Sisense in order to help visualize data across different organizations. As of now the tool is used to display performance indicators and to help develop and maintain the performance-based budget.
  • The biggest pro I found with Sisense is that you do not need a DBA in order to manage the system. This makes the learning curve really easy, which helps lots when thinking of implementation across a whole organization. This reflects well for the tool, since it is powerful, but easy to use.
  • ALL-IN-ONE! Sisense answered all of my customers and our company's requirements, to include data modelling and complex calculations.
  • Sisense is as accurate as your data, and best of all, it is real time. After using other visualization tools, I learned that when using multiple sources, errors occur. Sisense prevents this risk by allowing all of the resources to be managed at their engine, maintains connections, and as a developer, the EliastiCube allows you to source large volumes of data with an easy click.
  • 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.
Sisense offers multiple flexible pricing plans that can be suitable for all types of industries and company sizes. From a small business as ours, to a large enterprise. The Vendor allows you to try the product and develop a proof of concept before buying the product. So why not? Test drive your solution. This is what allowed us to understand how this BI tool would boost our company's productivity.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our company was in need of a comprehensive analytical tool in which we could develop actionable insights in relatively real-time dashboards. Most departments have some form of reporting tool that does not play well with others and organizational data is as disparate as they come. Sisense was demoed in hopes of alleviating these pain points for a detailed view into all areas of the organization based off data aggregated into a single, flexible platform.
  • Great management of large amounts of data from numerous sources.
  • Beautiful visualization capabilities.
  • Fantastic support of customizations through custom JS plug-ins.
  • Implementation requires very little effort allowing users to start working with their data in a short amount of time.
  • After initial implementation, learning spikes up rather quickly in regard to SQL joins and custom table manipulation.
  • There is plenty of documentation surrounding how to do specific tasks, but not as it pertains to errors and why other things do not work. However, this is constantly improving as the community grows and collaborators contribute content.
  • There are quite a few tasks that require significant manual input and design. This is ideal in many situations; however, many users would like a more intuitive engine that can create working widgets automatically based on the type of data fed. Again, this is already a work in progress and will likely need much more data to establish a learning engine.
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.
June 06, 2018

Using Sisense

Peter Breglio | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Currently, Sisense is being used to pull data from various systems and sources giving our Financial Planning & Analysis team a one-stop shop for analysis.
  • Ease of use especially when it comes to building widgets
  • Customer Support & Professional Services
  • Implementation Support
  • Accessing NetSuite data through ODBC has been a bit of a challenge if you are not 100% familiar with the data structure
  • Some of the widget labels that need to be updated/maintained via script can be challenging to a novice user (non-technical user)
If you are currently transacting/maintaining multiple systems Sisense "sits" on top of them nicely. the ability to not only link to existing systems but add flat files to the Elasticube directly gives you additional flexibility.
Shahar Beil | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Initially, Sisense was used only by top management but now it's being used by almost all managers in some scale. We use the platform before taking business decisions and to monitor new procedures and projects.
  • Give junior and medium level managers more control over data and take data driven decisions.
  • Take control over large users data and attributes
  • Visualization and aesthetics of dashboards and widgets is top tier
  • No immediate support for extremely urgent issues like system errors/crashes or phone support
  • Viewers option to drill into data is somewhat clumsy and needs adjustments
  • Build time and duration expectancy changes a lot for no apparent reason.
  • There are no proper metrics regarding dashboards/tables use and workload. Effects optimization and schema size
Would highly recommend Sisense for small-medium companies.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sisense is being used by a number of areas within our organization.
  • Our board of directors appreciates the ability to present key metrics about our company on a single page. The graphs are easy to understand. The ability to gather information from disparate divisions and present a unified picture saves time and aids decision making.
  • Our division heads use it to get a picture of how their individual divisions are working. The ability to show the data in graphical form with minimal programming allows them to make better decisions for their departments.
  • Our compliance department uses the graphs to quickly find issues within the company. By highlighting outliers from a number of different systems, corrective actions can be taken quickly, eliminating potential legal issues.
  • Sisense can display data in a variety of formats, tabular or graphical, with no programming necessary for the display logic
  • One 'elasticube' or back end data source, can collect data from any number of different systems. Sisense provides connectors to more than 20 different back end technologies, including all of the leading databases and flat file formats. The Elasticube can contain a query that joins together data from disparate data sources.
  • The graphical front end facilitates filtering the back end dataset, both at design time and at run time, allowing the user to see just the necessary data set.
  • Graphical views can be linked, allowing the user to drill down to see more details of any part of the database.
  • My non-IT users are often confounded by the techniques necessary to build beautiful dashboards
  • The web version of the elasticube manager does not do everything that that the desktop application does. With version 7.1, this seems to be getting better. More to follow...
  • Our primary contact person keeps changing, leading to difficulties in continuity of support. On the plus side, it is nice having a dedicated support person.
  • Sisense is a dashboarding tool. It is very appropriate for delivering summary or exception data to the users, presenting it in a fashion that is easy to digest.
  • It is not as good at presenting tabular or raw data, showing the details that support the conclusion. If you need to see reams of data for the application, a reporting tool will be better suited to the job.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized

We are using Sisense as platform for providing reports and business intelligence for our customers. In essence, we are using the platform as OEMs.

With Sisense, we provide reports and insights for contact center solutions which we implement to our customers.

  • Excellent single-stack BI solution, allowing great flexibility for data-modelling within the Sisense platform itself, with no need to perform the data modelling on a separate platform. The data modelling is implemented using standard SQL which makes anyone familiar with SQL already able to use the system.
  • Virtually unlimited customization options using Java Script, allowing you to modify and enhance existing functionality.
  • Great support from the both customer support and the user community.
  • Some functionality is missing as built-in functionality, and can only be added by using Javascript, which requires technical knowledge of JS from the dashboard designer to implement. So although almost anything is possible to implement, some things which should be basic require high-level skills.
  • Viewers of dashboards have very limited customization options, almost any customization requires the dashboards designer to implement.
  • Particularly, viewers are unable to select conditional formatting, rename fields, change the order of items, etc.

Well suited for almost any BI implementation across any subject matter, and especially where a lot of data modelling must be performed on the data before used in the reports.

Somewhat lacking where the users/viewers of the dashboards need to have customization options of the dashboard per-user, such as when the same report might be used by different customers.

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Sisense is being used through our entire organization. It allows us to provide data analysis and reporting to external customers as well as internal users. It drastically reduces the volume of reports being manually run.
  • Simple, clean user interface. Sisense offers the most options to the designers and admins. Leaving the end-user the abilities only they need. No confusing layers of options they can't use or understand.
  • Fast building of metadata layer over millions of records.
  • Ability to interface (reliably) with various databases/systems including IBM iSeries.
  • Better ability to download data to excel in a readable format close to what appears in the dashboard.
  • Knowledge base is vast but not easily searched.
  • More customization options for UI.
Great for simple, clean reporting to all customers. Particularly appreciated by customers who get intimidated by too many options in other tools.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We brought Sisense into our company because we needed a solution that : (1) could scale for enterprise deployment, (2) enabled self-service analytics, and (3) allowed end-user customization. Our team provided data analytical support for the entire organization (100K+), so we needed a tool that would put the power of data mining and visualization back in the hands of the users. We compared other BI tools like Tableau, Pentaho, and Spotfire and found that Sisense was truly a leader in these three categories. In fact, bringing Sisense in-house for self-service analytics allowed us to scale back our development resources and focus our energy on other, value-generating endeavors.

However, the best part of using Sisense was the partnership. Not only where we assigned an account rep, but we had a dedicated product engineer at our finger tips to help with questions related to data modeling, dashboards, and custom enhancements. The service and attention we received from that duo was world-class. It is rare to work with a company of this size and consistently receive same-day service with high quality, knowledgeable engineers.

Overall, Sisense has a great, innovative product and is an excellent partner. You will not be disappointed with their service.
  • Service
  • IoT integration
  • Self-service
  • Not 100% web-based ....yet
Great for ...
(1) orgs that want to abandon the traditional DWH model and allow users to ingest data from ANYWHERE
(2) orgs that want teams to collaborate and move fast
(3) orgs that want to explore IoT integrations
Eric Zuehlke | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We are in the early stages of implementing Sisense to our sales and executive teams. We have been a company that relies heavily on the use of Excel to export data from our ERP system and prepare pivot tables for our teams to use to help understand the performance of the business. Sisense was chosen to move us from a company that was using Excel-based data that was up to 30 days old to a real-time data-driven company that can analyze and talk to data that is refreshed multiple times a day. The ease of use of the backend and frontend have allowed us to build the environment, validate the data, and roll out the initial dashboards in less than 4 months.
  • Sisense owns the implementation by assigning a customer success manager that has the power to assign resources as needed to help you accomplish your goals.
  • The GUI (both front-end and back-end) is very intuitive and user-friendly, which allows the company to adopt it quickly and allows the administrators to focus on the layout and usage of the dashboards.
  • The technical support team and professional services team are both very knowledgeable and helpful.
  • The onboarding process that you start with misses the mark. The concept is for you to start slowly and build over time, which can be a challenge if you are a technical person and want to move rather quickly.
  • The exporting feature could use some improvement. There are four total options for getting the data out of the browser to be able to share, but there are no templates that allow administrators to have control of the output of the exports.
Sisense is a great tool to provide non-technical users in your business [a way] to gain visibility to dashboards that display metrics defined by power users. It is well suited to bring in multiple sources of data and provide them in one interface to your user community. It is not well suited if you are looking for a tool to allow multiple users to perform analysis on your data and constantly change the metrics and parameters that are being investigated. The focus is on power users and administrators deploying dashboards that allow users to view metrics and slice data based on filters. The dashboards look very modern and the flexibility that the designers have to shape the dashboard is great.
Alex Placito | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Sisense across many departments within our organization. Primarily by our sales team who uses it to track their KPIs (revenue vs target by rep/department, open AR by rep, current and projected pipeline, etc), as well as our product management team, our purchasing department and our consumer sales / eCommerce team. It helps us give a clear picture of our sales performance at a category or even SKU level and compare that against our target revenue as well as give the margin story. It enables us to ask and answer more complex questions about our dataset.
  • In particular, the ability to easily model data within the Sisense ElastiCube, re-build the data and see the changes reflected within our dashboards is great.
  • SiSense's ability to make short work of large data sets to answer questions is impressive.
  • Sisense allows you to easily pull data from multiple sources. If you have data, it can use it.
  • The filtering and formula capabilities within Sisense are strong.
  • Being so powerful, the ElastiCube must be carefully built especially with larger data sets - too many connections or the wrong ones between tables can lead to queries that eat up all system resources, requiring a reboot and disrupting the production environment.
  • Sisense is very customizable and flexible, but sometimes it is surprising that some simpler features are not available; for example, you cannot change up or control your font size/color or other presentation elements at all without scripting.
  • Emailing dashboards is very limited, particularly with larger widgets (like pivot tables). Furthermore the email scheduling doesn't allow you to choose a specific schedule or certain recipients.
Sisense is especially well-suited to a company without a data warehouse already. Further, for companies like us who have a smaller number of users, we found it to be fairly affordable. For customers with a larger need for redundancy of data, stronger uptime etc., the basic version would not suffice but Sisense does have some options now for building a more sophisticated architecture.
Michał Becker | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I was using SiSense PRISM as platform supporting our own www service. Our service provided a complex info about public contracts around Poland and we used PRISM as BI platform to generate Dashboards. Those Dashboards were used by our costumers to analyze situation on public contracts market and support them in decision to start with a given contract. Overall I see PRISM as a great tool, which requires not so much IT knowledge to operate and is not time consuming in terms of deployment and report or dashboard preparation. It is also very low on Hardware resources consumption.
  • Great at mashing up data from multiple different data sources.
  • Easy deployment, ETL process, Dashboard or Report preparation and distribution to end users.
  • Very low hardware usage so you probably wont need to invest huge money on new servers.
  • JS Extensions engine which allows to create really powerful tailored features.
  • Plug-ins in ETL tool are powerful, but configuration could be a little easier. Also JS extension in PRISM Web is powerful but could be a little more clear how to use.
  • Need to catch up with several common features for BI platform.
From my point of view it is perfect tool for any company which just starts with its first BI solution and are limited with money. Also great for companies which do not want to have a time consuming project to deploy. It depends on how large your data sources are, but probably you wont need to invest in any new hardware.
TJ Houk | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
SiSense is used across the organization. It's managed by an anaylitcal but nontechnical team. It's used primarily for dashboards which are consumed by executives, managers, and front-line employees. It allows us to have transparency into key metrics, allowing all users to have timely information about the state of the business regarding key metrics.
  • Managing data such that there is a single source of truth
  • Processing large quantities of data
  • Connecting to many different data sources
  • Building dashboards is very mouse-heavy and often a slow process
  • Provide more training upfront so companies use best practices from the start
  • Types of visualizations should be improved to look better and have more functionality & flexibility
SiSense deploys quickly and has a light footprint on a company's systems, so it's ideal for companies that need to launch and get results quickly. Admins will need a knowledge of the back end data sources and have an ability to manipulate them, but part of SiSense's value is in allowing users to be outside IT. For relatively novice analysts and managers, this is not the tool for report-writing; it's more appropriate to be used by sophisticated analysts pushing information to business users.
March 18, 2015

BI Solution SiSense

James Levine | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
SiSense is being used in our organization to:
•Get better insight into the data we already have
•Automate time consuming and labor intensive reports
•Eliminate error prone reporting, multiple spreadsheets, no audit trails etc…
•Create a centralized data warehouse and portal for all levels of the company.
•More time in analysis state than data collection
•Clear business driven BI Dashboards to allow executive level management to make clear educated decisions.

SiSense is being used across our organization to help manage agent performance and maintain important KPI's
  • Ability to snapshot critical data that shows us the lifecycle of a customer and make intelligent predictions that drive change to our business model.
  • Direct access and visibility into real-time performance metrics for coaching and performance improvement.
  • Unified single source of truth for metrics company wide
  • Central web portal for all data
  • Email notification when new dashboards are created
  • Web UI for BI Studio so it can be used across multiple OS
  • East/West Coast US Support Hours
Any customer looking to join multiple data sources into a single BI solution should look to SiSense for an incredible solution.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Sisense is used in our organisation to perform the following tasks:
- Bring together data from multiple data sources (mysql databases, google spreadsheets, google analytics, web analytics tools) to form a single source of truth.
- Dashboarding - various sales/metric dashboards are displayed around the office on large plasma screens. Individual users also have access to the dashboards.
- Adhoc reporting - we also use Sisense to perform adhoc reporting and do data extractions across different sources

The product is used across multiple departments from the CEO's office, through to marketing and accounting.
The product has a long way to establish a single source of truth for our sales data, but to also allow for the quick and timely extraction and presentation of data in dashboards which was previously done in a very laborious way.

  • Easy to generate dashboards
  • Easy to link up your different data sources (drag and drop)
  • Pleasing UI
  • Professional and responsive customer support
  • Smooth integration (hosted solution was seamless)
  • Cost effective
  • Would like to see conditional alert feature - ie if a value
  • Manual builds of the Elasticube (back end) can sometimes take a long time, for unknown reasons
  • Better mobile integration/UX
  • Can't print to PDF (yet)
We are a small-medium ecommerce business with a LAMP stack. If you were an ecommerce bohemoth you may wish to test your data for speed. SiSense does allow a trial period so you are able to do this.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Sisense is used to give our educators on staff real-time feedback on the performance of their students. Using various coding techniques the dashboards are directly integrated into our student management system. All staff members across the state utilize the product. It addressed the need for all key performance data located in one place and in a timely manner.
  • Elasticube technology simple to use - extremely flexible and easy to use. You have many built in plugins to connect to multiple sources of data and the ability to build an API connector if needed.
  • Short Development time - build comprehensive dashboards on the fly and push changes instantly to the web
  • Customer service - big strength here. They have a very responsive support staff that will help you figure out any issue. I have them all on Skype if that tells you how accessible they are.
  • Discrepancies between what you see in the designer and how it is displayed on the web. It does not look as polished when published. Fortunately I have been already shown a sneak peek into the upcoming v5 and they moved the designer completely to the web.
  • Documentation on how to accomplish some things is sometimes left to much to the interpretation of the user. I would like to see a more comprehensive guide in different areas such as their API designer and some of their SQL design pieces.
  • Some stability issues within the prism web environment. Not sure if this is something at fault on my end or theirs.
I don't write many glowing reviews but this company has all the right things going for it. This product is particularly suited to companies with little fat in the IT side of things. One person with middling to good computer know-how can create everything they would need. Your prism web and elasticube can run on some pretty inexpensive hardware. The place where I placed emphasis was in lots of RAM and a fairly decent multi-core processor. To round it off, my biggest measure of how my experience is going to fare is the priority of the vendor in the area of customer service and it is superb.
Ken Hui Zheng | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We implemented Sisense to be the executive dashboard and managerial reporting platform across the whole organization. It provides business performance insight to people at all levels, including C-level executives, business function managers, product managers, and analysts.

Before SiSense, we used SAP Business Objective as our BI application; however, BO fell short of business mandates, and we had to look for an alternative solution. SiSense was chosen and implemented successfully to meet the business demand.

  • It is fast to setup, develop, and deploy.
  • It requires no tuning to handle large amounts of data.
  • it is easy to maintain and has low software license and hardware costs
  • Elastic Cube makes it easy to maintain consistency in data relationship / data definition across all reports,
  • The dashboard builder could construct complicated dashboards from the data model with lowest granularity level (minimal or none data aggregation before loading data to SiSense ).
  • SiSense doesn't have a comprehensive data permission authorization capability. It could be difficult to manage the data access permissions for an organization with a large hierarchy structure or for complex authorization requirements.
  • SiSense does not support merging two dimensions on-the-fly when building reports in BI Studio (the report development tool in SiSense). For example, there were a user table and a revenue table in the ElastiCube. To show user growth and revenue growth in one chart, I can not build the chart directly. Instead, firstly, I needed to bridge two date dimensions, the user sign-up date and the revenue date, from the two tables in ElastiCube Manager ( the cube management tool in SiSense). Secondly, I used the bridged date dimension to build the chart in BI studio. This leads to a complicated data model and the reduced flexibility in ElastiCube.
  • ElastiCube does not support outer-join tables when modeling data. Though it's always feasible to build reports that have outer-join logic, some minor work-around is required.
SiSense is very approachable and implementable, compared to other BI applications with similar functionality in the market.

SiSense is a great for
- companies / departments that need agility and fast delivery in BI and data analysis
- small to mid size companies
- companies that need to analyze large amounts of data

SiSense is less appropriate for
- companies that have a large hierarchy structure and complex data permission requirements

Erik Luxhoj | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We used SiSense to deploy a solution for a customer. The customer needed a reporting solution and business information analysis to partner with their Wonderware HMI system. The product is being used by a specific department in one of their manufacturing facilities.
  • The data cube feature of SiSense is extremely powerful. It allows you to integrate with many different data providing systems. For the application we used it for, we had to use an ODBC driver to interface with an Allen-Bradley data collection system. SiSense was able to handle that data exchange very well.
  • The visual front end of the SiSense reports is very sharp looking. The reporting and monitoring screens look very clean and professional. You can pretty much match any GUI you are using on the customer's manufacturing floor. In the application we deployed SiSense for, we were able to seamlessly match the Wonderware HMI screens and then run SiSense on an external monitor so that it looked like the SiSense data monitoring screens were part of the HMI.
  • SiSense is easy to learn. When we were trying to decide if we wanted to purchase the license, we were able to download a trial version of the product to get a feel for it. SiSense also setup a webinar for us and walked us through a typical setup. It was very helpful.
  • One area that was not exactly perfect for us in terms of SiSense was the licensing system. It was very expensive, and the license was not a lifetime purchase. Their license has to be renewed yearly.
  • SiSense does a great job making the reports look awesome. However, what if the customer wants plain/jane reports? I wish there was a "simple" mode or something similar for a functional but clean and simple report interface.
  • SiSense's tech support was adequate, but I would only give it a 6.5 out of 10. They were not able to answer our data cube problem. We found the solution on our own and copied them on it.
I would ask the following questions if I did it over again: 1) What type of tech support do you offer? Is it a ticket submittal type support system? Online chat? How robust is that system (support)? 2) Can you give me an example of an super high end looking report? 3) Can you give me a clean, simple type report formatted perfectly for printing?
Josiah Sternfeld | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Sisense to gather data between multiple systems, cleanse it and display it in meaningful ways for our clients and ourselves. We are an advertising agency, so we primarily use Sisense to pull paid search data (from Adwords), web analytics data (from GA), and sales performance data from Salesforce to build end-to-end performance dashboards. It has made a big difference in our ability to produce in-depth reporting for our clients in an ongoing way without having to spend hours-upon-hours pulling and cleansing data for each reporting cycle.
  • Great value for the cost from a BI standpoint.
  • The Elasticube is pretty intuitive in terms of adding data sources and cleansing/joining them.
  • The BI studio has many different report building features, allowing you to customize each clients dashboards to their needs.
  • The web version of the dashboards doesn't have the full functionality that the BI studio does, which can cause some issues
  • The elasticube's can sometimes be finicky and have failure to build errors which can cause headaches. This is primarily due to all of the different APIs that they try to maintain, but I'd like for their to be an easier way to pinpoint why the error occurred to remedy it versus a lot of manual investigation.
Overall I think it's a great tool for the money. Many BI tools that have similar features cost 5-10x what Sisense does. There is a heavy learning curve as I'd expect there is with any tool with this many features. But, all in all I think it's a solid product.
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