Sisense reviews

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.

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.

Ease of use, caching features, and customer support were all top notch. Absolutely nothing to complain about besides the price point. If you are well funded, you will not be

The price point is very steep if you are a startup or if you wanted to use Periscope for a home project.

We really liked the fact that sisense is a "full-stack" BI tool so we could keep a separate reporting data store without having to pay extra fees for SQL licensing. We have a LOT of data since we work in healthcare, and paying SQL licensing fees to store an extra set of data would essentially double our reporting costs. There are many plugins available that you can use in combination to build a very flexible system.

One of the issues we ran into was becoming dependent on plugins and non-standard setup procedure to support our unique needs. As our system grew, it was difficult to find reliable support people to work with us on the Sisense side. The support team did not have the technical expertise I would expect for such a complicated product, so we ended up learning a lot on our own and solving our own problems.

Power, flexibility, and ease of use.

Power: The speed at which Sisense can render complex connections and slice data dozens of different ways is truly incredible.

Flexibility: Even with junky data and funky structure in our data sources, we can produce powerfully useful dashboards for our business users through custom calculations at multiple points in the building process.

Ease of Use: Nearly every step to build and use the software is intuitive and simple. In many softwares you pay for flexibility with a confused nest of features that don't apply to you. Sisense has 90% of what you need right where you'd expect it and a whole host of additional features hidden away (but not impossible to find) to keep the user interface clean and intuitive.

This is highly sophisticated stuff, so its not surprise that there are still features being built. Most of those relate to the interactions between the Elasticube and the Dashboards. Certain things changed in the Elasticube require equivalent changes to the Dashboards (name changes, mostly). I expect the new web version of the Elasticube to fix much of this.

High performance with huge amounts of data and multiple tables, scalability for thousands of users, very simple to create and publish advanced data models and dashboards, no need to pre-aggregate data, no need to use additional ETL tools or to create an external and expensive data warehouse. Support is fantastic, if required they would literally access your server and take control of mouse and keyboard to help you solve any problem or to create any thing.

There is always room to improve and Sisense use to release new versions and functionalities every quarter or so, but I can say I am pretty satisfied and impressed so far.

User experience. People are always impressed when new dashboards are made available due to the excellent look and feel.

When working in the Elasticube manager there is no way to download the data, you always have to go into Sisense and create a dashboard and widget for the data you want to examine. This makes it more time consuming than it should be to test and validate the data in the Elasticube manager.

The Sisense customer service team is great. You will typically get a response within 24 hours and they are always willing to stay on the call until your issues are resolved. You also tend to get connected to the same support team members, so they already have context about your account, and where you might be having issues. The platform itself is fairly easy to learn and our onboarding process took about 1 month. So far, our clients have been very satisfied with Sisense, not only for its dashboarding capabilities but other features including Pulse notifications. From an agency perspective, you have the ability to easily brand dashboards with client colors, and out of the box widgets are fairly easily to style. Dashboards are clean and modern, and the support team is committed to helping you make the data as actionable as possible for end users.

Currently, it can be timely to pull data in from social platforms. While completely possible, there is a learning curve if you have not previous connected to these platforms via an API connection. I would also love to see more text editor options, including selecting a specific font size, or choosing from a wider range of fonts and styles.

What I like the most about SiSense is the easiness of use and how quick we were able to be up and running. SiSense is a feature rich application, which can be even "richer" by using community build plugins and scripts.

It must be said that the Customer Support is sublime. They take Customer Succes to an entire new level

As an OEM user management is bit of an hassle. With alot of users and groups it takes a while to do this manually. They do have a rich API, but you need to develop an application to use these apis properly.

Sharing dashboards among users and groups could also be more user friendly. Batch sharing dashboards or a folder is not possible at this time

Complete service from A to Z. They guide you through setup with custom support and provide an amazing learning program to ensure you have continued success at a reduced support level.

The only limit with this software is your ability to dream. We had over a dozen systems that we collected data within separately and had no idea how to get it into a central location let alone getting it connected so that we could glean valuable insights. Departments have been able to cut meetings in half & it has helped develop an inclusive culture as a result because we are no longer in the dark across our silos of data.

Learning curve would be steep if you don't have dedicated team focused on learning. They give you every available resource to be successful but it would be easy to purchase and fail without a clear objective in advance.

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.

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.

It can easily process up data from multiple different data sources.
Tool is self explanatory and it is easy to generate dashboard
Beautiful visualization capabilities.

Missing a few critical connectors (e.g. Teradata)