Sisense

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.

Sisense is easy to install and setup. It easy to use, both on the data modelling and dashboard design aspects. It makes it the perfect tool to quickly set up added value dashboards and begin your shift towards understanding your data. Sisense is also easy to embed and therefore makes it easy to provide our users with self-service analytics. Sisense's customer success team is great and will make sure you quickly see the value of their product through a customized onboarding process.

The fact that multiple data models (elasticube) are competing for resources (mostly RAM) on a single server.

It provides a cutting-edge database tech with flexible product architecture and data visualization tools. It provides flexibility to get access to various data sources. It provides advanced tools to support business data with reporting and analytics visuals. It enables businesses to analyze disparate datasets and combine and club data into a single database. It then rearranges the data into a standard format. Users can then do slicing and dicing over the whole data set by using numerous built-in analytic tools and filters.

When the data begins to grow big, the cubes slow down. Cubes management is very painful and needs high system resources. Admins are unable to edit each other dashboards. This becomes very troublesome when admins change. Sometimes, there are random stability issues. Reporting and out of box visualization features are quite basic in comparison to other market leaders such as Tableau.

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.

Sisense is fast to visualize. In most companies, it is typical do a month-over-month revenue comparison (or just period vs. another period). Sisense makes it very easy to visualize that. It helps with decisioning. Sisense is also very quick to get started. Developers and non-developers can use it equally easily.

It is typical to run into several little bugs with Sisense. Most bugs don't bother us, but it showcases the need for Sisense to do better quality control. At scale, Sisense modeling system can choke without good architectural skills. Loop in Sisense architecture team before scaling.