Sisense

Avantages

Great experience. We use Sisense both internally and resell (OEM) to our clients. Sisense implementation team did a great job helping us to complete our first use cases, which was a great source of hands-on education. We've been running with Sisense for more than a year and have seen useful new features, design updates, and bug fixes. Their support people are efficient, professional, knowledgable, and just nice people. There have been challenges as we push the limits of functionality, but support from both the sisense community and the Sisense support people has allowed us to push through those challenges. Sisense has a incredibly useful and valuable product today, and I look forward to seeing the product roadmap come to reality.

The speed at which we constructed our original solution, and several solutions since, is outstanding. That speaks to the production functionality and performance, and the people at Sisense that have helped us along the way.

Inconvénients

The product does not have the ability to view it's own operational metrics on a dashboard. We pointed this out during our implementation more than a year ago, and this is still lacking in the product. We've built our own functionality around this since, but it should have come out-of-the-box. The mobile experience also isn't nearly as rich as we'd like. They've grown quite a bit there in the last year, but still needs more capabilities.

Avantages

Able to get a demo up very quickly - basically a full functioning demo product.

Sisense is used in our organisation to perform the following tasks:
- Bring together data from multiple data sources (mysql databases, google spreadsheets, google analytics, web analytics tools)
- Dashboarding - various sales/metric dashboards are displayed around the office on large plasma screens. Individual users also have access to the dashboards.
- Adhoc reporting - we also use Sisense to perform adhoc reporting and do data extractions across different sources

The product has a long way to establish a single source of truth for our sales data, but to also allow for the quick and timely extraction and presentation of data in dashboards which was previously done in a very laborious way.

Once you bring in your data from multiple sources you can use custom SQL language to bring all data sources together. This is a great way of doing things

Drag and drop dashboarding

Sisense support was also excellent and they were able to provide us with a cloud solution as a one stop shop.

Very solid solution for the price.

Slick interface.

Inconvénients

Drag and drop dashboards also mean there is less customization of dashboards. Not as flexible as Tableau.

If you get your data model wrong the product can hang - you need to self-verify your work. Which you should.

Not sure how it performs with truly big data sets.

Avantages

The dashboard creation wizard is pretty robust and fairly easy to use. You will need an SME within the organization - this isn't a tool that I would simply throw at someone and expect them to learn in a few weeks, but that's largely due to the wide range of capabilities the tool has. However, the wizard is much more intuitive compared to a tool like Tableau.

The UI of the dashboards is beautiful and offers a nice range of customization features. It's a much prettier dashboard than Tableau.

Finally, the ability to write custom Javascript for formatting preferences has proven to be a very nice feature.

Inconvénients

The cube processing itself is quite limited - this is not a big data tool. Cube builds on our dataset take almost two hours. Part of this has to do with our Elasticube design being suboptimal, but I would argue that just provides evidence that you need a very technical SME within your organization who has experience designing OLAP models.

My major objection is pricing - they charge on multiple vectors; by cube and also by a user. It's complex and the costs ramp up very quickly. I wish they'd pick one vector to price on, as it would make both budgeting and affordability much better.

Avantages

The front end of Sisense is what I like the most about this Software. Whether you are designing a Dashboard or using it you can expect and smooth and intuitive experience.
From a designer standpoint: the basic charts and features of data visualization are available in the standard tool. Once you are familiar with them, you find the need to take it to the next level. Next thing you know you find yourself leveraging Sisense online resources, adding new widgets, and updating javascript very easily to make your dashboard look the way you want.
From a user standpoint, looking at data, drilling and exporting is simple to figure out even without training.

Inconvénients

I have experienced a few limitations with Sisense. When you export a dashboard into an image it doesn't look too good. I find myself taking screenshots instead which can sometimes become time consuming.
I've also been a little frustrated with not being to sort data as wanted in ascending, descending or alphabetical order.
I experienced a situation where I identified a design flaw for a supported widget and we were asked to financially support the development to fix the flaw. Which we didn't.
We still really appreciate the tool and its many benefits overall.

Avantages

Developing widgets for a dashboard (even complex ones) is far easier and faster than it is with competing products. User community is a strong asset. Elasticubes are able to accommodate many different files types with ease.

Inconvénients

The initial set up turned out to be complicated and required IT investment, but perhaps that is due to the unique nature of our company's setup. Product is a bit costlier than Power BI, but the feature set and ease of use makes the cost well worth it. Though Sisense is Elasticube allows the software to quickly pull large data sets, it's difficult to create for the average user and requires a lot of technical expertise. In many cases, users must write SQL code, even though Sisense promotes its codeless reporting. However, to get to this codeless reporting you must have a very technical person to write the SQL to build their Elasticube and there are some limitations such as join types and such that create difficult workarounds. We have had former Sisense users complain to us that they experienced a lot of errors getting the Elasticube to load, and because the system relies upon the cube, Sisense won't work if the cube isn't working.