Sisense Reviews

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What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Buyer's Guide

Sisense

January 2025

Free Report: Sisense Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Sisense. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2025.

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How are customer service and support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What was our ROI?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What is most valuable?

For how long have I used the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What other advice do I have?

On a scale from 1-5 (1=worst, 5=best), how would you rate this product overall compared to similar products?

- Hard to answer because I have little experience with other products. The ability to deal with large volumes of data is excellent, and is very valuable for us.

For how long have you used this product?

- 1.5 years.

Which features of this product are most valuable to you?

- Flexibility and ease of design of dashboards.

- Handling large data sets.

Can you give an example of how this product has improved the way your organization functions?

- SiSense has allowed us to offer a browser based business intelligence solution for our customers much faster than we could have done on our own.

What areas of this product have room for improvement?

- SiSense is lacking in richness of data analysis capabilities, particularly standard deviation, median, percentiles, and other aggregates. Mean, min, and max only take you so far.

Did you encounter any issues with deployment, stability or scalability?

- No significant problems.

Did you previously use a different solution and if so, why did you switch?

- No.

Before choosing this product, did you evaluate other options? If so, which ones?

- Yes. Tableau, Qlikview, Dundas

How would you rate the level of customer service and technical support?

- Excellent. Very responsive, and when necessary they go above and beyond what is typically expected. It was the responsiveness and eagerness to help us solve problems, along with the ability to handle large data sets, that led us to choose SiSense over other competitive offerings.

Was the initial setup straightforward or complex? In what ways?

- Very simple.

Did you implement through a vendor team or an in-house one? If through a vendor team, how would you rate their level of expertise?

- We do it all on our own.

What is your ROI on this product?

- Hard to fully quantify at this stage, but the SiSense tool has brought in a significant new capability and has opened a sales channel that was previously closed to us.

What was your original setup cost for this product and what is your day-to-day cost of using this product?

- Sorry, but we don't have that level of sophistication in our accounting.

What advice would you give to others looking into implementing this product?

- I'd suggest paying a visit to the team in Tel Aviv.

What is our primary use case?

How has it helped my organization?

What is most valuable?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

How was the initial setup?

Valuable Features:

Improvements to My Organization:

Room for Improvement:

Use of Solution:

Customer Service:

Other Solutions Considered:

My team needs to provide information and analysis about numerous aspects of the company’s activity to a wide range of business functions across the company. Examples include detailed Web behaviour analytics, Google Adword spend tracking, email marketing activity tracking, booking pattern analysis for each type of booking and Financial P&L. We require dashboards and reports that include interactive drill-down features so that each user can quickly find information and discover useful insights without requiring the involvement of IT or external consultants.

Before implementing Prism, we were using Excel and an OLAP cube, but this approach didn’t provide an effective way to build nice dashboards or deliver an easy drill-down interface. Also, IT involvement was required to modify the cube every time a new view was required. I have lots of prior BI experience with tools such as Cognos, Hyperion and Business Objects, but I felt that these tools were too expensive and resource-intensive for our needs.

I downloaded and installed a number of modern BI tools in order to evaluate them for our purposes. It didn’t take me long to discover that Prism was much easier to use than the other tools. It was easy to get all my data into Prism and I was able to get a first dashboard up and running without reading any instructions at all, just drag and drop. The other tools required much more time, effort and had a steep learning curve. For example, Qlikview’s 1000-page manual scared me off, plus it was clear that implementing it would have required bringing in a consultant and spending more time and resources than we wanted.

We now use Prism to deliver interactive reports and dashboards across alpharooms.com’s various functional units. We run a number of Elasticube datastores, currently handling about tens of millions of rows, until recently on one standard Windows 7 machine with 8GB of RAM. We have recently replaced our Reporting Server with a new server running Windows Server 2012 with 32GB of RAM, with SSD drives and have now moved our main Elasticubes over to this new server on one of the SSD drives. This was not due to any performance issues with Prism, it was just to centralise all business critical reporting.

We use Prism to analyse bookings activity from a number of different angles. One of the most valuable ways we’re using Prism is to discover opportunities for directly approaching hotels for which we have enough bookings – so that we can avoid the extra cost of going through wholesalers. We now have efficient reporting around each type of booking (hotel, flight, car, etc.) in a very easy, fast, do-it-yourself environment.

Other ways we use the software include analysing website usage patterns, optimizing email marketing campaign performance, optimizing purchasing strategies, tracking and analysing our multi-million pound Google Adword spend, tracking call centre performance and conversions by rep and running reports on all customer activity by search keywords, travel destination, common packages and so forth. We also use Prism to analyse our website content to identify missing or incomplete destinations so that the content team can fix them.

I'd say that the greatest benefits of SiSense Prism are usability, rapid time to insight, no need to read a manual or learn a lot, no requirement for outside consulting, low-IT overhead, very fast processing speed and low total cost of ownership.

I love the data hierarchies in Prism – it is extremely easy and flexible to drag and drop any fields you want without worrying about indexes or joins. One of the DBA’s, an expert in Microsoft BI tools and reporting services asked me why we needed a separate tool when we had the Microsoft stuff. I told him about a particular report that I needed and asked him how long it would take to create that with Microsoft’s tools. He said 4-5 days. I told him that I completed it with SiSense in less than two hours.

Recently, we have added our Google Adword and other Marketing spend in to Prism and have linked this with our bookings, giving a ROI (Return on Investment) at Company Level, Destination, Resort and Hotel Level, so we use Prism to drill down showing the Gross Profit and Cost down to Hotel Level, we also then link in competitor pricing data in to the report also, this by far is the most useful report in the Business so worth some sort of mention.

There is a bit of history to this report, we contracted a Developer who had been working for the company for a while to use the Google Adword API to get to the stage where we can use this data linked with our booking data to automatically adjust bid prices, and also use this to add new campaigns etc, and the dashboard reporting was a big part of the development, we use MongoDB within the business for storing user sessions and some caching stuff as its great for handling big data of that type and is widely used for this purpose within the travel industry, and the developer decided to build the Adword data in to MongoDB from the API and also build the booking data in to MongoDB from the SQL database as this is fairly big data and thought using this technology would allow fast reporting. He built an entire website to handle this process and created reporting on the website, this whole process took about 9 Months and then the contractor decided to leave (for tax purposes as he was coming up to 2 years continually working in the same place), there was then a process for about 4-6 weeks of other developers and the MD (who has a Developer background) trying to get this MongoDB & website to report how we wanted it.

So 11 months down the line I and Prism got involved, I had to come up with a way of getting the Google Adword data into SQL and in the format required with additional information, for speed I downloaded a report from Adwords client reporting with the information required and set up a stored procedure to automatically upload this report, link it to additional data from our databases and create the reporting tables in SQL.

We then put all this data into a Prism Elasticube and I recreated all of the reporting plus a number of the backlog requests outstanding on the old method into the Prism dashboards, It took about a day of effort to do SQL work and about half a day to do all of the Prism work, and due to changes in how we were going to alter bid prices within a couple of days of it going live in Prism we ended up scrapping what was a six figure development, although some one does have to run a couple of reports each day and paste them onto a Server, and kick off a job that runs all the SQL stuff and at the end kicks off the Elasticube build using Prism Shell all from a SQL Server job. This process takes a couple of minutes a day.

This is another demonstration of how you should use the right tool for the right job.

I am COO of an on-line travel agency which advertises and lives on-line but handles all bookings by phone or email. Our data analysis requirements span the usual gamut of online advertising via multiple search engines, direct advertising, call center management, lead conversion and efficiency as well as product and demographic performance analysis. To this end, we had assessed competitive products and IT was already testing a leading in-memory technology – but the that product fit was sub-par and we quickly stopped the trial. The solution required specialist IT resources to work with the tool proprietary scripts and consultants to work with and modify the application for our needs. This was not a cost effective way for our business to invest in BI, nor did it simplify our decision making. We assessed that such a tool might have increased our cost by as much as $80,000 a year, given the need for incremental headcount and hardware.

I set a goal where everyone in the company should be able to work quickly and efficiently with the underlying data and reach effective decisions, so we needed a solution that could address three main requirements:

1. Provide near real-time feedback for agents and managers on any metrics (such as sales closings, destination performance, advertising conversion rates) that would help them better serve our clients;

2. Support dashboard and report-building mechanisms that are simple enough for non-technical users to use while still sophisticated enough to provide the ability to drill down and manipulate the data; and

3. Nimble and scalable enough to not require major infrastructure upgrades or impact the existing infrastructure as reports are generated.

SiSense delivered a solution that met the requirements. Within a few months of purchase, we had what we needed: a near real-time dashboard that didn't bog down the company’s servers no matter how many data sources it accessed, and a solution, intuitive enough to allow non-technical users to create their own reports.

SiSense Prism has helped our IT department reclaim time, provide booking agents with near real-time updates, and allowed sales managers to coach and counsel agents to meet their sales goals. The rest of the company can call up reports immediately and manipulate it on the fly, instead of waiting for IT to publish it. IT now has time to focus on core projects while retaining their role as the data authority and interact with users as resources rather than script writers.

Beyond the operational benefits of the solution, the company data-driven culture is also greatly reinforced: Everyone is much closer to the data. All decision makers, managers and agents can now analyze data and share insights in a snap. The travel industry is highly competitive and the fact that we glean insights in real-time across marketing, sales and operations is a key strength for us.