Item: Sigma Computing
Rating: 10
Author: Nicholas Monje

Overall Satisfaction with Sigma Computing

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Sigma across the entire company to conduct all our business intelligence research. We have lots of dashboards to track company and team level metrics of all sorts, as well as ad hoc sheets to answer specific questions. Pretty much all our understanding of our business besides event-based analytics (for which we use Mixpanel) comes from Sigma. We migrated from Looker.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Segmenting data.
Building dashboards.
Incredibly powerful slicing and dicing of input data with its "levels" system.
Building visualisations.
Ability to create ad hoc data sets to share between multiple sheets allowing you to quickly update shared information/criteria.

Cons

Complicated queries can be slow.
More customization of visualisations, especially the number metrics.
Ability to collaborate on a shared sheet.
Ability to more easily create pivot columns within a sheet.

Return on Investment

Better understanding of customer segments.
Ability to understand performance of our business.
Creating audit-level views of financial information about our platform.
Easily create and share dashboards for full team and company monitoring.

Usability

My learning curve with Sigma was very quick but also very steep. When I first looked at it, I was rather confused by the new paradigm but after playing with it for about 15-20 minutes it "clicked" and suddenly I was performing the most powerful non-handwritten-SQL queries of my career, and everything since then - visualisations, etc - have been a breeze. Their support team is also immensely helpful when I have been unable to find things, with chat right there in the app at all times (unlike some companies that like to bury it or hide it behind a crappy kb interface).

Support Rating

Immensely helpful. Incredibly available, with chat right there in the app (and not buried behind a kb - though their kb is also quite helpful). Great followup if they don't know how to solve my problem in the moment (including messaging me weeks later when a bug or feature request is added later).

Alternatives Considered

Tableau Online, Looker and Amazon QuickSight

Sigma really was the powerful Swiss army knife for parsing and slicing all our data. A bit of the dark horse in our evaluation, against larger players (Tableau, Amazon) and the incumbent Looker, Sigma was at first almost overlooked but then quickly became my favorite by far, for the sheer power of its level-based sheet building and its reusable, custom data sets. While not the fastest of the set - mostly for Sigma's letting you build incredibly complex queries without you necessarily realizing it - it was by far the most powerful, at least for the average non-data-scientist user. Ability to create your own join tables, and store those joined tables as data sets to use across multiple sheets, was absolutely a game changer for those of us who don't/won't/can't write SQL and build our own tables in our warehouse. (Some of the performance issues we have seem to come from it liking Snowflake better than Redshift, for what that's worth. I don't know why our organization is attached to Redshift over Snowflake, but I'm not on the data team, either.)

Likelihood to Recommend

Sigma excels at being able to take data and segment it in very complex ways, and build data sets that do that and then extend from them even further. It is hands down my favorite BI tool I have ever used, for the sheer power of its spreadsheets with its level system alone. Its visualisations are also great, though not always the most customizable (though my standard for that is MatLab which is probably unfair). It is not the best for event-based analytics, mostly for solving session de-duping, for which I rely heavily on a more dedicated solution like Mixpanel. Other than that, though, it really is the most powerful tool for any BI job.

Sigma Feature Ratings

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The Business Intelligence tool of my heart