Item: Sigma Computing
Rating: 6
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I am currently a Data Scientist at Doordash. Around one year ago, we switched our dashboarding vendor from Chartio (Atlassian) to Sigma. I use Sigma on a near-daily basis to build data reports for my teammates. The main use cases for my dashboards include: Providing experiment result updates Provide high-level metrics around my focus area. Some of my teammates do not know how to use SQL, so they are unable to retrieve even basic functions out of our database. This means that any tables/charts that I produce in Sigma are extremely valuable.

Pros and Cons

I really like the tabs feature, which allows the creation of several different sections within the same worksheet.
Their support has been extremely helpful. We have a Slack channel with them.
The dashboards are extremely easy to share via link to coworkers.

The dragging feature is pretty buggy - sometimes, I'll drag something, and the adjacent graph does not adjust alongside it.
I'm not aware of a feature that allows me to delete multiple tables/graphs at once, meaning I have to manually click through a bunch of them to delete them.
No Markdown support for text boxes.

Return on Investment

Saved time - instead of answering a bunch of questions I can just share a link.
Increased transparency - others can see the SQL code i'm using.

Key Insights

Do you think Sigma Computing delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Sigma Computing's feature set?

Yes

Did Sigma Computing live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Sigma Computing go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Sigma Computing again?

Yes

Self-Service Analytics

Sigma is used broadly by data roles at my company. It has definitely allowed for a more data-transparent culture, in which many people are using Sigma not just for dashboarding purposes, but also for ad hoc analyses as you can easily translate SQL code into visualizations and tables.

Ad Hoc Analytics

I mainly use Sigma for dashboarding purposes, which needs to be shared with my business partners and stakeholders. For this, Sigma is extremely useful. For Adhoc analyses, I actually tend to use Snowflake directly or work in R. In R; the visualization functionalities are much more feature-rich.

Alternatives Considered

Chartio (discontinued)

I was not involved in the decision to migrate from using Chartio to Sigma. That being said, I think that Sigma compares favorably to Chartio. The thing that I liked more about Chartio is that the appearance of the dashboard had more functionality. You could drag/drop charts into more configurations in Chartio, as well as use Markdown for the text boxes.

Other Software Used

Slack, GitHub, The Okta Identity Cloud

Likelihood to Recommend

Sigma is a straightforward dashboarding platform that is pretty easy to learn if you have used other dashboarding systems in the past. I haven't really noticed any issues with Sigma that prevented me from doing my best work. That being said, there are a few small things that can improve my Sigma experience, such as markdown support, the ability to modify/delete multiple dashboard components at once, as well as a pretty small 300-second timeout limit for SQL queries.

DoorDash Data Scientist Reviews Sigma.

Overall Satisfaction with Sigma Computing