Sisense Reviews

The most valuable feature is the ability to combine multiple/disparate data sources into one and derive intelligence from them. Also, the ability to easily visualize the data-sets via Sisense studio is a key feature.

The client we have deployed this for is now able to easily make decisions based on the visualizations from this BI solution. Top Executive Management is able to make decisions without necessarily relying on reports from the mid-level management. This has greatly improved the ability to make decisions based on trends from the past by making projections to the future.

The ability to handle larger data sets, tables in the hundreds of millions of rows range.

Two years.

No, the process for deployment was straightforward especially with the older version V4. However, IMO, the new v5 which is purely web-based has a lot of optimizations in order to be equal to or better the previous version. This has greatly hindered our upgrade to the newer version as some of the most obvious features are missing.

Yes. We have encountered some issues especially as far as importation of data is concerned. Sometimes the platform works great, but other times, it's a drag and users are always on our necks to speed it up.

Yes, as the number of rows or volume of data has increased over the past two years, the querying time has been gradually increasing and this has impacted user productivity.

Customer Service:

Satisfactory, with opportunity to improve. Some issues are speedily handled, however, others take forever to be taken care of and communication is sometimes lacking.

Technical Support:

Adequate. The team of engineers are adequately skilled to deal with whatever we throw at them.

No previous solution used.

The initial setup was straightforward. The installation process was very clear; it was/is very clear what one needs to do for the product to work or to derive the maximum use from it. Proper documentation has helped a great deal.

Vendor team; 9/10. They were adequately skilled to provide the solution.

Yes, other products such as QlikView & Tableau.

You should have adequate SQL skills as this will come in handy. Else, prepare to have some fun slicing and dicing data.

It's incredibly lightweight, and very easy to work with. Implementing it and linking it with existing resources was a breeze.

From what my customers have told me, regarding this product, it adds a layer of automation previously non-existent from their previous reporting service.

Deploying it was smooth as butter, and there was little to no down time after lab testing. Pretty much had the new environment up and ready, shut the old one down and transitioned to the new one overnight.

I haven't necessarily needed to scale past the original requirements yet, but the product seems to have potential for easy scaling to medium and large businesses.

From what little I had to talk to SiSense, their CS department was top notch and had an answer for any question I had. The reps were very knowledgeable about the product.

Surprisingly simple, to be honest. The API's included with it provide for easy access to existing data and resources, and creating custom resource links where there is no API was straightforward, not much room for error!

Implementation was done personally, but for 2-3 clients. A few cases it was simply a recommendation and it was implemented through another vendor or through a specific companies in house IT department.

The implementation cost was substantially lower than what I've seen of the competition.

Thoroughly research before you decide to implement. This meets the needs of most clients that I have offered it to, but some have outright rejected it due to lacking visualization and readouts.

• Rich integration features
• High customizability
• ODBC feature allows unsupported data sources (when drivers are available)
• Customizations features enable user interface modification (for someone who knows JavaScript)

We dropped Excel and saved hours of finance team work, with automated reports and dashboards.

Sisense has no native support for week as a data dimension, which is a major issue for us. They try to remediate this with plugins and custom SQL scripts and it works, but only to a certain degree.

I have used it for about 12 months.

I have had no major deployment, stability or scalability issues.

Sisense is easy to understand, support and scale.

I rate technical support extremely high. They put a lot of effort into support; guys even write plugins to enhance system functionality.

We evaluated Tableau, but chose Sisense because of its customisation options.

Installation was extremely straightforward; the installer took care of everything, up to IIS role installation.

We implemented Sisense with an in-house IT team. It was no hassle at all; the few queries we had, we found answers on a support forum.

As any BI solution, Sisense isn't cheap, and we had a long discussion before taking the decision to buy this system. It's hard to measure returns, but it certainly has saved a lot of our finance team time already.

It is very important to understand that Sisense is a startup-type company and you will not get a super feature-rich product (like Tableau). In exchange, you get dedicated support and a lot of customization options. As long as you're OK with this, you'll like the product.

It has a very easy-to-use interface and we are able to create custom tables and fields that allow us do advanced analytics.

We have MySQL, and we used to run queries to get data and generate reports in Excel and Google Doc. Sisense can do both in a much much faster way, which drives our reporting efficiency into another level.

Sisense doesn't have connections with statistical packages like R, SAS, etc.

Of course, all the visualization tools of the web interface are one of the things Sisense does best.

But also, the custom tables from the backend of Sisense is one of the most powerful feature of the software. It allows you to clean your data and prepare a frame for less experimented users to work with through the web interface.

Better tracking of the targets for our representatives, quick overview of the market by product categories , supplier, customers, states, etc. Ultra fast drill down capabilities that allows us to find answers to Ad Hoc business questions in a few second during business meetings.

Sisense also allowed us to achieve some less conventional projects like abstracting the effect of the price increases on our sales. As some of you might know the Canadian dollars had a lot of fluctuations during the last years. By attaching our multiple price increase list by items (300 000 skus) with a date stamp, to our real sales from our ERP, Sisense allowed us to develop a value that represent our sales without the effect of the prices increases of the last 3 years. With this we can look at the real growth of our market.

When your data cubes become to complex (many layers of custom tables), the performance of the tool might be slightly affected. Less speed, updates that are not triggered on your web interface without restarting the server. 

Embedded analytics for Financial Technology provider. We are a multi-tenant SaaS provider servicing large global organizations. Sisense is our embedded BI solution for visualizing descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics in our product. 

Prior to Sisense, we had very limited reporting capabilities in our product. Most analyses were performed manually and delivered to customers in Excel or PowerPoint files. Because these analyses could not stand on their own, we needed a lot of business analysts to guide our customers to make the right business decisions and execute the strategies manually. 

The Sisense data cube allows us to execute heavy, complex computations on the fly so customers can slice and dice the data based on their business needs. The visualizations are adequate and the support from their team has been outstanding. Whenever we have an issue or are unsure how to proceed, they manage to simplify the issue and help us execute it in a graceful and scalable way.  

We struggled a bit to get the data cube setup in a way that could be built in a reasonable amount of time. The initial version we purchased only ran on Windows servers, which was less than ideal for our DevOps team. I believe that has been remedied in the latest release. 

Still implementing.

- Ease of integration of multiple data sources (SQL databases, Excel files, etc)

- Rich and detailed documentation and very good support

- Ease of use and intuitive tools to build high quality dashboards in a very short period of time 

In a short period of time, my team acquired the necessary skills to deploy a very high quality BI tool across the company, integrating all our data sources and building dashboards expected by different business units for a long time. Today, no longer have hundreds of Excel files sent across the company to provide a limited view of the business and sometimes with conflicting data. Everything is available in one place, in almost realtime. Managers do not need to search for information, now the information they need comes to them directly.

We are exploring the combination of Sisense and R and fortunately, there is a way to combine the two. But during the training, we were expecting to be introduced to this.

During the introductory training, our trainer wasn't able to accompany us on this subject and there is no return on experience from the community, probably because integration with R seems to be new.