Almost all companies today, irrespective of their market position or size, leverage Business Intelligence tools to analyze their business & customer data, and thereby make smarter and informed business decisions that help drive business growth and profitability. Business Intelligence tools allow businesses to visualize their data in the form of dashboards in order to gain insights and maximize revenue outcomes.
There are numerous Business Intelligence tools that are available in the market today. One of the most well-known tools is Sisense which is used by almost all departments in a business including Product, Marketing, and even Finance.
This article will provide you with a comprehensive understanding of Sisense along with its numerous features, integrations, etc.
Table of Contents
What is Sisense?
Sisense is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven Business Intelligence software that was founded in 2004 by Elad Israeli, Eldad Farkash, Aviad Harell, Guy Boyangu, and Adi Azaria. Its headquarter is in New York City, New York. It is used to simplify and analyze complex data, create visualizations, and discover and share insights with key decision-makers in an organization. It allows you to analyze complex datasets quickly and with its easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface and interactive dashboard.
It also provides different data source connectors and can integrate data from various sources and analyze them together. This capability makes it easier to generate insights and verify predictions on key business issues.
What are the Key Features of Sisense?
The key features of Sisense are as follows:
- Sisense allows you to create unlimited dashboards which can be shared with other users by email (on a scheduled basis or each data update).
- Its architecture efficiently utilizes the RAM, CPU, and disk space, allowing users to run Big Data analysis on affordable hardware.
- It allows you to export data to PDF, CSV, Excel, images, etc.
- Sisense uses the Single-Sign-On authentication, which reduces password fatigue and increases the user’s productivity.
- It allows you to use filters in the dashboard widgets to query complex data from your data source without writing SQL queries. The filters applied are translated into SQL queries your data source understands. This approach to querying data exposes the queries to only the data source, which provides ease of use to users.
- Sisense Pulse allows you to keep track of your most crucial Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) across all dashboards and build alerts. You can set alerts to notify you when certain thresholds are met, or irregularities occur on your data.
- It enables users to join data from multiple sources and perform the necessary analysis on them.
- Its connection to data sources (both On-premise and Cloud) is made via Elasticube, which allows seamless integration of this data.
- It connects to both SQL and NoSQL databases.
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Using Sisense Mobile
Sisense Mobile connects you to your dashboard on the go. You can apply filters to specific datasets and generate custom visualizations to derive insights.
The Mobile application has an intuitive User Interface (UI) and a Search Bar that gives users the ability to search for dashboards to view. The filters applied can be customized alongside the visualization to fit the user’s requirements. To use the Mobile platforms, download the official app from Google Play Store for Android or App Store for iOS and log in with your credentials. The Mobile platform allows you to access, share and customize your dashboards from anywhere.
What is Sisense Embedded Analytics?
Embedded Analytics makes it easier to fetch data from data-driven software used by companies and their users. It provides real-time statistics and gives descriptive and diagnostic information that improves decision-making in business.
Embedded Analytics in Sisense can be defined as the process of integrating dashboards into an application via iframes, Javascript APIs, or plugins. Developers can use the JavaScript API to build new widgets and fine-tune the application behavior for specific needs.
It also allows users to build their applications with Blox by choosing a prebuilt template and customizing it with HTML and JSON to their own taste. Blox uses a drag and drop interface to build applications and add functionalities to them quickly.
What is Sisense for Cloud Data Teams (CDT)?
Sisense for Cloud Data Teams was formerly Periscope Data before it was acquired by Sisense in 2012. Sisense for Cloud Data Teams(CDT) is made up of charts and dashboards that can be shared among users in an organization.
Sisense for Cloud Data Teams allows users to run SQL queries on a chosen dataset and get the results in a visual format such as a Bar chart, Pie chart, line chart, etc. The visualization result can be further analyzed with the built-in Python integration platform to make predictions with Facebook’s prophet library. The analysis result can be dropped on a dashboard and consequently shared with other team members if needed.
The two Cloud Data Teams (CDT) packages are as follows:
- Basic: includes CDT Analytics Reporting capabilities.
- Pro: includes CDT Analytics Reporting capabilities and Data Materialization capabilities.
What are the Key Features of Sisense for Cloud Data Teams?
The key features of Sisense for Cloud Data Teams are as follows:
- Unlimited SQL queries
- Unlimited Python and R Data Processing
- Data Filters
- Dashboarding and Charting
- PDF and CSV downloads
- iframe Embedding
- Git Version Control
- Two-factor Authentication
- Shared dashboards
- SQL, Python & R Chart Editor
- Data Discovery
- Shared JDBC connections to supported SQL databases and Data Warehouses
How to Connect to Data Sources on Sisense?
Like all Business Intelligence (BI) tools, data sources are where you get data to work with. These data sources differ in connection protocols and nature. Sisense lets you connect to data sources, both On-premise and Cloud-based SQL and NoSQL data sources.
There are two ways to connect to a data source.
- Live: Live connection connects directly to the data source. To be used if the changes in data are frequent. These data sources include Google BigQuery, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB, MariaDB, Apache Spark, etc.
- Elasticube: Elasticube is a high-performance database built to withstand extensive querying by Business Intelligence (BI) applications. The most significant selling point of Elasticube is the ability to integrate data from multiple sources and query them as if they were one. It is efficient when a large amount of data is to be analyzed, and they would be from different sources. These data sources include Access, Amazon Athena, Microsoft Azure Synapse, CosmosDB, Airtable, Asana, CouchBase, Dropbox, etc.
Sisense supports seamless integration with more than 100 data sources.
What is the Sisense Pricing?
Sisense pricing follows a No-surprise Workflow. It works on a pay-as-you-go model. If an organization intends to use the tool, they would have to schedule a call with the Sales team who will understand the requirements and make a custom model based on them. Additional features such as Embedded Analytics will increase the normal price.
What are the Advantages of Sisense?
- It is Powerful, Yet Easy to Use: Sisense can be used for BI tasks by even non-technical users. At the same time, the app has a lot of functionality. You can get quick answers to queries using the software’s In-Chip engine, which eliminates the need to apply data rules for each query. Only after a query is made is the data prepared. As a result, the app optimizes CPU performance and, as a result, is able to adapt to commodity servers. This eliminates the need to invest in high-end servers. Sisense is a multi-tasking BI solution that lets you do everything from data modeling to complex calculations. This means you won’t have to buy multiple systems to meet your BI requirements. Additionally, the software has built-in connectors and seamless integration with popular third-party applications such as Google Adwords, Excel, Zendesk, and Salesforce, allowing you to maximize the software’s effectiveness. You can easily combine large sets of data using the system’s simple drag-and-drop interface. You can use a variety of visualization options to interpret data, such as charts, plot charts, and so on.
- It does Accurate Data Analysis in Real Time: When you use multiple sources to generate data and different users keep moving large amounts of data to different platforms, data errors can occur. Even minor errors should not be overlooked because they can lead to incorrect conclusions when interpreting large amounts of data. With Sisense, you won’t have to worry about this issue because it consolidates data into a single location, ensuring that all users are looking at the same information. The software makes use of web-based dashboards that allow users to collaborate on the same data. There is no need to download files, which eliminates the need for multiple copies. This reduces the chances of data manipulation. Sisense also employs Crowd Accelerated BI technology, which can handle hundreds of queries at once. As a result, the system provides users with an accurate and real-time working environment, ensuring that they get precise results. To get the most up-to-date information, simply refresh the dashboard. This is critical if you’re tracking online sales during a critical peak season, for example. The most recent data will reveal whether sales are increasing or decreasing. This real-time functionality makes it simple to predict trends and quickly intervene if necessary. In our in-depth review of Sisense, you can learn more about the software’s pricing and other benefits.
- The vendor offers excellent technical support, and its agents provide valuable insight and feedback on how users can get the most out of their data assets.
- It connects seamlessly to almost all data storage platforms, allowing users to view their data assets across multiple systems.
- This software is notable for its ability to rapidly extract large amounts of data from multiple data sources.
- It quickly builds powerful dashboards that can be accessed from any device.
- Finally, the system can be easily customized to meet the needs of a variety of users.
What are the Disadvantages of Sisense?
The vendor can improve the product in a few areas to make it even more effective:
- Admins could share dashboards created by multiple users in a more straightforward way.
- The mobile platform’s navigation and filtering could be enhanced.
Conclusion
This article provided you with an in-depth understanding of Sisense. In addition, it also provided you with a list of supported connectors and platforms that can be leveraged to make your dashboards.
Choosing a Business Intelligence and Data Analysis tool for your business can be a tough decision primarily because almost all departments in a business such as Product, Finance, Marketing, etc. now make use of multiple platforms to run their day-to-day operations and their is no single tool that can integrate with all these sources easily. Hence, businesses can consider using automated Data Integration platforms like Hevo.
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Hevo helps you directly transfer data from a source of your choice to a Data Warehouse, Business Intelligence tools such as Sisense, etc., or desired destination in a fully automated and secure manner without having to write the code. It will make your life easier and make data migration hassle-free. It is User-Friendly, Reliable, and Secure.
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Teniola Fatunmbi excels in freelance writing within the data industry, skillfully delivering informative and engaging content related to data science by integrating problem-solving ability.