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There are hundreds of business intelligence tools available on the market today, but few of them focus on embedded, self-service analytics. Sisense is one of those tools, offering real-time embedded analytics for SaaS applications.
But how does it perform for end-users? Is it truly low-code and how difficult is it for your developers to set up and embed the dashboards?
Let’s find out.
Unlike enterprise BI tools such as Microsoft Power BI or Tableau, Sisense was built for an embedded use case. This means that every functionality is geared towards in-app analytics.
First off, Sisense querying is very fast, thanks to its use of columnar databases. This means that your dashboards load quickly and data is pulled in seconds, allowing for faster decision-making and overall better UI and UX.
If you’re working with large datasets, Sisense is a great choice because it handles them without hiccups. Other (and better known) data analytics tools such as Looker suffer from this problem.
It offers an three different types of setups: cloud managed service, deployment in your own cloud environment, and an on-premise solution.
There are two ways to get OEM analytics in your app with Sisense: Fusion Embed and Fusion Compose SDK, with the latter being the newest addition to the Sisense tool stack.
In theory, Sisense promises an easy embedding experience, but practice has shown that this is not the case. You’ll need developers who know their way around data modeling, data management, and their rest API to be able to quickly embed dashboards into your product.
While Sisense promises machine learning capabilities, allowing the end-user to type in a query in natural language. The reality is that Sisense is a code-first tool and to get to this stage, you need to clean, prepare, and model your data first.
But even more importantly, customization features in Sisense are very limited, even more so for the less technically experienced users. To get the most out of this platform, you really need a data scientist, an engineer, and a handy developer to tie things together so that the dashboard looks great on its own and within an app.
All of this adds extra costs to your everyday operations. Even if you don’t hire an extra set of hands, you’re going to have to invest in extra training. Add this to the existing costs of Sisense and the final invoice is going to be massive.
To create different workflows and enable effective data visualization, you can lean into more than 100 different data connectors in Sisense. There are too many to name, but some of them include:
You can review the full list on sisense.com. The great news is that no matter what your tech stack is, there is a good chance a handy developer (or a few) will be able to connect your data sources to the visualizations your end-users see.
To connect any other tool to your embedded Sisense setup, you can use their API. However, the marketplace offers a good assortment of integrations, sorted into three different buckets.
In terms of data pipelines, you can choose from Fivetran, Improvado, Keboola, Skyvia, Stitch, and Talent.
They also have the following integrations available: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe XD, Naveego, Kraken and Ovaledge.
Last but not least are the add-ons, which give you the ability to create interactive visualizations through external widgets. Some of them include advanced column charts, choropleth maps, dynamic buckets, embed images, and many others.
In the world of business intelligence tools, Sisense is one of the most notorious vendors when it comes to pricing. First, it’s very difficult to determine how much this analytics platform is going to cost you. There is no transparent Sisense pricing model and you have to talk to sales to learn how much it will cost for your own use cases.
The second problem is that when you consider the competitors, this analytics solution is fairly expensive. Our research shows that for a self-hosted version of this BI tool, you’re going to spend $10,000+ per year, while the cloud version costs a minimum of $20,000 annually.
Sisense has a good look and feel, it’s very fast, and has a large selection of connectors and data sources. It promises easy embedding with Sisense Fusion Embed and SDK, but for most teams, it fails to deliver on that promise. Couple that with the high cost, and it’s only natural that some teams look for Sisense alternatives.
At Luzmo, we have the embedded analytics setup your product manager and your end-users will love. Our dashboards are easy to create, embed, and run in any SaaS app and you can set them up in hours, instead of weeks.
Experience the power of Luzmo. Talk to our product experts for a guided demo or get your hands dirty with a free 10-day trial.
