Domo vs. Sisense: Which is the Better BI Tool?

Want to improve decision-making in your business and have access to key metrics in real-time? You’re probably looking at getting your next business intelligence tool. Domo and Sisense are two great options - solid data visualization libraries, a variety of data sources and APIs and every functionality a data-driven team might need.

But which of the tools is better for your needs and provides actionable insights that fit into your workflow? Let’s find out.

Domo and Sisense at a glance

Domo is a cloud-based business intelligence software company based in the USA. Since 2010, Domo has been committed to providing real-time data analytics insights to teams of all sizes, with no-code and low-code solutions. The end result is a SaaS analytics platform that can help you create dashboards easily.

Domo is known for its variety of data integration options, varied visualizations, real-time analytics, and collaboration in the cloud.

Sisense is a business intelligence tool that excels in providing analytics dashboards for on-premise and cloud use cases. The main focus of Sisense is embedded analytics - dashboards that integrate into SaaS applications.

Sisense is also known for its ease of use, scalability and AI and machine learning capabilities.

Both are solid choices for data analysis and visualization, but Sisense has a bigger focus on embedded analytics. While neither tool is a Gartner Magic Quadrant champion like Tableau or Power BI, they have their merits.

Domo: pros and cons

One thing that Domo prides itself on is the data connectors. There are thousands of them and thanks to clever automation, you don’t need to write complex SQL code to connect your favorite database or third-party app with Domo.

It has great dashboard and reporting capabilities with a good amount of customization. If you have basic SQL knowledge, you’ll be able to manage scripting in Domo too.

As for the cons, many users complain about Domo’s pricing, which we’ll talk about in a minute. While it is more transparent than most BI tools, the issue is that the costs you see on the pricing page are barely scratching the surface. If you need the full suite of Domo tools (including data warehousing), you can easily end up paying thousands of dollars per month.

Besides cost, many users state that “easy to use” and “beginner friendly” are just marketing buzzwords for the C-suite and that in reality, Domo is very difficult to use. Similarly to Sisense though, the customer support and technical documentation is only decent. In any case, there is still a steep learning curve.

Sisense: pros and cons

Sisense offers three different packages, for on-premise, cloud and embedded data analytics. Whether you want to create detailed dashboards for your stakeholders or pull ad hoc reports for your customers, you can do it fairly easily. Sisense dashboards can easily be accessed on Windows, Android or your team’s preferred platform.

The basic unit of measurement is called an elasticube - an analytics database that helps with fast data querying.

Sisense is built for the cloud, which means you can scale up and down easily and add new users without much hassle. For embedded analytics users, there are advanced features such as user permissions and roles, in the form of single and multi-tenant architecture.

When it comes to downsides with Sisense, there’s quite a bit to unwrap. First, there is the pricing issue that we’ll talk about in a minute. Sisense pricing is hidden from the public and once you talk to a sales rep, you’ll learn that Sisense is prohibitively expensive compared to Domo and other BI tools.

Their customer support is not the best, which wouldn’t be so much of a problem if they had a big online community like Tableau by Salesforce. Unfortunately, you’ll have to do a lot of troubleshooting on your own, especially because the documentation is not that great. This is not a concern for the end user, of course, but your developers might not be your biggest fan if you purchase Sisense.

Last but not least, the customization options for dashboards are not that vast. What you get out of the box is what you’re going to be stuck with, unfortunately.

Domo vs Sisense: pricing

Before going into actual pricing, it’s worth pointing out that Domo is transparent about its pricing. In other words, you don’t have to talk to sales to find out the costs, unlike Sisense.

Domo offers a free plan with up to 300 credits, which is the basic unit of measurement in Domo. For example, one credit translates to:

• One million data rows in Domo
• One table created or updated
• One table written
• One for every output table in the ETL tool
• Two for every output table created or updated in the science tool

Paid plans start at $300 per month, which gets you 400 credits. Each additional 100 credits takes the price up. For example, getting 500 credits a month in Domo costs $600, 600 credits costs $900, etc, as you can see from the screenshots below.

In theory, this means you can predict your monthly usage and costs. In practice, if you have self-service use cases and apps where your end-users can create dashboards, you could be in some trouble. For every action a user takes, you have to spend a credit.

On the other hand, Sisense pricing is hidden under a veil of secrecy. We’ve done our research to find out that the most basic on-premise plan costs $10,000 per year, while cloud-based plans are $20,000 per year.

This is on the low range of what Sisense offers, though. According to many user reviews, you could easily spend double that, going all the way up to $60,000 annually if you have a large number of users and viewers.

Which tool is better?

If you want a user-friendly tool that does data preparation, data analysis and visualization and is suited for in-house data teams, Domo is probably the better choice. It’s the ideal solution if you can predict your monthly usage, because you can get it fairly cheap compared to Sisense.

On the other hand, Sisense key features make it a better choice for embedded analytics and use in SaaS apps. You also need a big budget because Sisense can get very expensive if you have a large number of real users for your app. Most Sisense competitors are much cheaper by comparison.

The better alternative to Domo and Sisense

Looking for a business intelligence tool with lots of data connectors, ease of use, transparent pricing and superb embedded analytics features? Luzmo may not be better than Sisense or Domo in everything, but we do one thing really well: embedded analytics.

Create engaging dashboards from your datasets and embed them in your SaaS app with just a few lines of code. Superior customization and white labeling options make sure that Luzmo dashboards look and feel like native parts of your app.

Want to learn more about how Luzmo can help? Book a free demo with our team!