Sisense Reviews

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used 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.

DOWNLOAD NOW

832,138 professionals have used our research since 2012.

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?

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?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What other advice do I have?

For how long have you used this product?
- 6 months

Which features of this product are most valuable to you?

- Agile development of dashboards & reports

- I like SiSense's agility in building the report and analysis. It's report development environment is fast, easy-to-use and sees results instantly. It's easy to build reports with business users together and going through multiple iterations in a short period of time.

- Manage unified data model & data mash-up.

- The ability to define unified data-model universes is imperative to build an enterprise-level BI solution. SiSense's ElastiCube allows us to do just that.

- To crunch large amount of data fast.

- We found that Sisense performs in large volume of data without heavy investment in hardware and IT expertise. The setup was fast and not much tuning was required.

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

- We reduced the report / analysis delivery time from weeks to days.
- The BI team is able to sit with the business user and build reports on-demand, making changes instantly and see the results.

- The business becomes much more agile in analysis, thereby responds faster to changes in the market and products.

What areas of this product have room for improvement?

- Sisense needs to improve the ability to build more complicated reports, such as merging two dimensions of the same type on-demand in one report.

- For example, business's wants to know the user signup-to-usage ratio by country. Both the signup and usage have country dimensions. The two country dimensions are same in attribute type but different in context. SiSense doesn't allow you to join the two countries dimensions on-the-fly in the report.

- Sisense needs to improve its security and permission management capability.

- We find it difficult to define user roles and permission rules to fine-control the data allowed to be access by different business users.

- Sisense needs to improve the capability to distribute analysis / reports via different channels.

- It's hard to implement distribution reports by email.

Did you encounter any issues with deployment, stability or scalability?
- Not much.

- SiSense has done a good job to make deployment simple and straight-forward. It's very stable and could handle failures gracefully. We are crunching hundreds of GB's of data without scalability issues.

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

- We used the SAP Business Objects SME solution prior to this. BO is powerful but cumbersome. It has many overlapping components doing similar things because the M&A over many years from different solutions that SAP acquired. It's doesn't fit the culture and circumstance of our business well.

- We decided to switch to SiSense after comparing multiple vendor solutions. We favor SiSense for its light investment, quick deployment, agile development and fast response to changes.

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

- Yes, we evaluated:
Tableau, QlikView, Microstrategy, Microsoft Suite, IBM / Cognos, Tibco Spotfire, SAP BusObj, EDGE, Info Builders, LogiXML and JasperSoft.

- We found that SiSense provides a solution that is best in supporting our business to respond to our market challenges.

How would you rate the level of customer service and technical support?
- 4.5 out of 5

Was the initial setup straightforward or complex? In what ways?
- It's straightforward.

- It's the simplest setup I have ever had among these BI solutions.

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 implemented the solution In-house.

What is your ROI on this product?
- I don't have the exact numbers now, but I would say it's the best BI investment we had.

What was your original setup cost for this product and what is your day-to-day cost of using this product?
- We are under SiSense's annual subscriptions for under $10,000 per year.

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

- Start small

- Try out the solution in one team or department, for one business domain, and then extend to the whole organization and cross-domain analysis.

- Engage business users

- BI team or analysts could sit with business users and build the reports together. Building reports in SiSense is fast enough for you to do that.

- SiSense is best fit for organizations in a constant-changing market that have large amount of data and constantly explore different ways in analysis.

- Look closely at SiSense's security / permission management capabilities if you have complicated data security and permission requirements. I found it limited and difficult to implement when a complicated scenario arose.

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

How is customer service and technical support?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Our company considers itself a next-generation technological company, and its organizational structure and operations are highly automated. Instead of employing a standard monolithic ERP system (e.g., SAP), we have built our IT infrastructure using corporate-environment open-source standards. Automation is approached from a decentralized perspective based on this open-source IT backbone. In other words, our company uses different software packages for different functions and ties them together to form an enterprise collaboration platform. The result is impressive: we enjoy no-compromise IT functionality and flexibility with extremely low software costs. It was into this environment that our company sought to integrate a reporting and analytics tool. Our company’s operational and historical data was consolidated into a homegrown data warehouse, based on a MySQL database. We were looking for a powerful and flexible business intelligence solution that would easily integrate with its existing system, which would not require rebuilding the data warehouse, which would allow non-technical business users to quickly create new reports and analytic queries and which would be relatively inexpensive.

Before we implemented Prism, we relied on the technical expertise of a small number of people to create manual queries. Upon request from business users, the queries were run manually using a MySQL client and the results were exported to Excel for delivery.

Before selecting Prism, we evaluated a well-known open source package (with paid premium service and support) and also looked at a Microsoft product.

We wanted a powerful and flexible business intelligence solution that would easily integrate with our existing systems, which would not require rebuilding the data warehouse, which would allow non-technical business users to quickly create new reports and analytic queries and which would be relatively inexpensive. After evaluating the alternatives, we concluded that Prism was the only solution to deliver on all of the company’s requirements. Whereas our previous approach required hours for each new report, Prism enabled non-technical personnel to create reports in minutes.

During the trial phase, we set up a test database and tested the software successfully using very cheap PC hardware. After selecting and purchasing Prism, more powerful hardware was used. Setup was very easy.

We use Prism to generate all of our standard operational, managerial and financial reports. As adoption within the company is increasing, more and more managers are creating and customizing their own reports. Technical staff is still available to help, but demands on their time are now a fraction of what they were before.

The biggest benefit of having Prism is that we quickly achieved uniform and comprehensive monitoring and reporting on all key performance indicators. Additionally, management now has very fast and easy access to any information they want, via custom reports, and are able to quickly test "what-if" hypotheses using Prism.

We were looking for a way to easily track and analyze key business metrics, such as revenue channels and customer segments, and to generate detailed operational performance reports. Since the company’s operational data consists of about 20M records in a 100GB MySQL database, the solution had to easily integrate with MySQL and quickly process large amounts of data.

Before using Prism, we used various piecemeal solutions to try achieve the reporting and analytics it needed, including manual analysis and home-grown software. Some of our analytics requirements were not being met at all.

Our company explored the possibility of expanding development of its in-house analytics software development, but deemed it too expensive and time-consuming. Our company then evaluated BI solutions from several leading BI software vendors before selecting Prism.

We chose Prism because it had four primary advantages over the competition, which made it an easy choice:

1. The agility of the Prism software to answer current and future questions in a very simple and efficient way

2. The ability of the company’s in-house team to easily create, maintain and modify Prism reports and analytic applications for any future needs without the need for expensive maintenance and support services

3. The rapid analysis of large amounts of data using inexpensive hardware, as demonstrated even before purchasing the software

4. The extremely short implementation time: it took only three hours of planning and ten hours of implementation to be up and running with all the initial reports we wanted

Even before making the decision to purchase Prism, SiSense worked with us to implement a thorough demonstration of Prism running over our actual data. This was accomplished via Web conference only, with Prism running on standard desktop PC hardware. Following the purchase decision, our personnel traveled to SiSense’s offices for ten hours of implementation and training. Overall, it took only three weeks from the initial demo to the live, fully-functional BI solution.

Our management now enjoys the benefits of a comprehensive dashboard which presents live transaction and project data, as well as drill-down views into specific customer, transaction and translation project data. All the managerial and operational reports required by our company are available, and the ability to easily make modifications means that the dashboards and reports are improving all the time to answer new business questions.

The ability of our management to monitor all business processes in realtime allows fast responses to take advantage of new business opportunities as they arise and to prevent small problems from becoming big ones.

Valuable Features

Improvements to My Organization

Room for Improvement

Customer Service and Technical Support

Other Advice

Valuable Features

Improvements to My Organization

Deployment Issues

Customer Service and Technical Support

Initial Setup

Implementation Team

ROI

Pricing, Setup Cost and Licensing

Other Advice

We chose Sisense for a rip-and-replace of Tableau 9.0. After our initial implementation of Tableau, and as our data set grow, we quickly ran into major performance, stability, and usability issues.

We went with Sisense because of its ease-of-use, visualizations built for the web, easy-to-use API, and, most importantly, its performance and ability to handle very large datasets.

Other key features are how Sisense manages multi tenancy and its visualization plugin support. This give sus the ability to support our use case and build our own custom visuals as needed.

We have been very pleased with our experience with Sisense to date. Our sales team is very excited about the slick dashboards we can put together with very quick turnaround times.

Although its plugin support mitigates this, Sisense could use additional out-of-the-box visualizations. Additionally, the maps feature could also be improved.