A flexible and straightforward data visualization and collaboration platform
September 09, 2014

A flexible and straightforward data visualization and collaboration platform

Arthur Zubarev | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Business

Overall Satisfaction with Sisense

At Vital Insights SiSense is used both as part of a web application, where the dashboards are embedded, and internally for generating ad-hock or custom reports. The web based dashboards are accessed by more than 200 customers presently. As in our organization accurate, fast insights is the paramount, SiSense was able to address the so called "agility" and "latency" problems by significantly lowering the report response time thanks to its in-memory data layer and the development time to product release as oppose to how long it took to produce a report using code and web UI controls only.

Pros

  • Fast data layer. It can reside entirely on the Elastic Cube side and/or datasource driven. The former helps crafting reports in quite a restricted mode and still being able to format data.
  • Connects to a wealth of data sources. With SiSense installing third party drivers typically is unnecessary as most of the connectivity options come "out of the box".
  • Interoperability and extensibility with JavaScript. This makes the reports (dashboards) able to incorporate 3rd party JavaScript libraries or used just for some "face-lifting" on the UI layer.

Cons

  • SiSense needs more functions added to the Elastic Cube formula (expression) editor to cover more basic SQL operations.
  • Currently, JavaScript needs to be updated in several places and quite hard to debug (at least in ver 4).
  • The ability to define left/right joins should be available at the Elastic Cube level.
  • Requires a modern browser which may not be always available in large corporate environments.
We evaluated SiSense against several other players having SSRS and custom reporting (ASP + third party controls). SiSense stood up out of the crowd in how economical it is to get a license and we later found out the product support team is great. None of the solutions other than the costly PowerBI offered much self-service BI, and none offered a fast in-memory intermediate data store.
The support for SiSense is almost immediate, the product is very intuitive to use, but it seems that its greatest strength is in ROI which comes in form of quickly building robust dashboards. SiSense has very efficient APIs e.g. it allows users to create remotely without the involvement of an administrator.
SiSense is well suited for self-service BI, large web-scale applications accessing heterogeneous data-sources where the data retrieval directly is slower than it is possible to fine-tune. It is easy to extend, and apply security on top of the database layer. SiSense is less suitable for software shops not that familiar with the web technologies, or web-scripting techniques.

Using Sisense

12 - Data analysts, ETL, developers, DBAss, data processing, reporting and customer service people.
4 - Just basic infrastructure people (2 to cross-cover) and two DBA/BI developers.
  • Fast data retreival
  • Self service
  • Row level data security
  • We are able to visualize database performance and disk space
  • We can combine data from heterogeneous sources (e.g. SQL Server + Excel)
  • With ver 5 it can be an almost 0 effort involved to implement end to end self service BI solution

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