Cloudera vs Sigma Computing

Last Updated:

Our analysts compared Cloudera vs Sigma Computing based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Business Intelligence Tools, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

Cloudera Software Tool
Sigma Computing Software Tool

Product Basics

Cloudera is a multi-environment analytics platform powered by integrated open source technologies that help users glean actionable business insights from their data, wherever it lives. With an enterprise data cloud, it puts data management at analysts’ fingertips, with the scalability and elasticity to manage any workload. It offers users transparency into the whole data lifecycle and the flexibility of customization through its open architecture.

It is available on an annual subscription basis with three offerings: CDP Data Center, Enterprise Data Hub and HDP Enterprise Plus. Each edition offers different components and pricing varies based on computing power, storage space and number of nodes.

The company merged with Hortonworks in 2019 to provide a comprehensive, end-to-end hybrid and multi-cloud offering.
read more...
Sigma Computing is an analytics solution that directly connects to cloud warehouses and delivers real-time insights that drive data-informed decision making. With a spreadsheet-like interface, it provides a familiar experience for business users and analysts to utilize formulas to analyze and visualize their data. Through a self-service model, users can explore their data and ask and answer questions for themselves. It streamlines complex data analysis processes and promotes teamwork throughout a business with a balance of collaboration and control.

It is entirely cloud-based and enables data access without the risk of extracting, moving and storing data. Suitable for companies of all sizes, this SaaS runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Pros
  • User-friendly interface
  • Affordable pricing
  • Scalable for business growth
  • Cloud-based accessibility
  • Responsive customer support
Cons
  • Limited data analysis features
  • Less powerful than competitors
  • Occasional performance issues
  • Restricted data storage capacity
  • Lower customization options
read more...
$833/User, Annually
Get a free price quote
Tailored to your specific needs
$300 Monthly
Get a free price quote
Tailored to your specific needs
Small 
i
Medium 
i
Large 
i
Small 
i
Medium 
i
Large 
i
Windows
Mac
Linux
Android
Chromebook
Windows
Mac
Linux
Android
Chromebook
Cloud
On-Premise
Mobile
Cloud
On-Premise
Mobile

Product Assistance

Documentation
In Person
Live Online
Videos
Webinars
Documentation
In Person
Live Online
Videos
Webinars
Email
Phone
Chat
FAQ
Forum
Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support
Email
Phone
Chat
FAQ
Forum
Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support

Product Insights

  • Provides Data-Driven Insights: Make data-informed business decisions that boost efficiency, decrease risk and provide new insights. Features data discovery, analysis and interpretation tools necessary for businesses to make the right choices with confidence.
  • Industrialized AI: Takes an “AI factory” approach to BI and makes enterprise machine learning and artificial intelligence processes automated, repeatable and predictable, speeding up the time needed to go from numbers to outcomes.
  • Eliminates Silos: Move away from costly and inefficient data silos with a unified platform that performs a range of data analysis tasks simultaneously on the same data, right at the source. Speed up the data discovery process and improve productivity for the organization as a whole.
  • Capitalize on the Wealth of IoT: Contribute to overall business transparency by processing and integrating data from a huge reservoir of devices connected to the Internet of Things. Connects the information from these devices to its AI, which can monitor performance in real time, identify areas for improvement, reduce machine failure and improve overall ROI.
  • Secure by Design: Set up encryption across environments, ensuring consistent protocols and granular security policies across the platform. Built-in enterprise-grade auditing and lineage tracking capabilities provide comprehensive data governance to organizations.
  • Maximizes Interoperability: Ensures compatibility with all vendors through its 100% open-source architecture, and unlocks additional possibilities for enterprises. 
  • Deployable Anywhere: Safeguard and future-proof the company’s investment in BI. Stay immune to the cloud infrastructure battle with a single data management platform portable and flexible enough to move to and from the cloud as necessary. 
  • Scalability: Manage cloud costs and scale resources automatically as workloads increase, or scale down as demand falls, utilizing and paying for exactly how much is necessary.
  • Protects Your Business: Offers advanced behavior analytics, quick anomaly detection and visibility into every dimension of the enterprise. Protect data at all times with the assistance of both time-series and real-time threat analytics.
  • Free Trial: Sign up for a free 60-day trial of Cloudera Enterprise and many of its modules from the vendor’s website.
read more...
  • Fast Integration: Without coding experience, users can securely and directly connect to data warehouses and get started without wasting valuable time on importing their data. Analysts can lay the foundation for the entire organization to succeed with data in hours, rather than days.
  • Ease of Use: Users work with a familiar spreadsheet-like interface and formulas to generate insights, no code required. The system automatically translates all the front-end actions input by users into SQL on the back-end.
  • Real-Time Access: Users can leverage the power of the cloud to query data directly where it lives, allowing for live analysis of massive datasets and insights in real time. 
  • Keep Data Safe: Sigma never moves, stores, copies or caches users’ data, instead running queries against the data warehouses and passing the results back to the system, ensuring that data remains secure with robust data governance and platform security that exceeds industry standards. It complies with data privacy guidelines SOC 2 Type II, CSA, GDPR and CCPA.
  • Improve Collaboration: The system eliminates BI bottlenecks and inaccurate analyses by establishing a single, reusable and accessible source of truth for all users to query. Sigma transforms the data modeling process into a collaborative one; users can edit tables and create visualizations together, enabling better communication and decision making by forging a bridge between data teams and business users.
  • Self-Service BI: Users have the freedom to explore ad hoc analysis without waiting for IT teams to update models.
  • SQL Authoring: Users with SQL technical knowledge can create and edit reusable analyses to activate with one-click parsing.
  • Free Trial or Demo: Interested customers can try out the full platform for free for 14 days, or request a demo of the solution to try with their own data warehouse.
read more...
  • Data Science Workbench: Through a unified workflow, collaboratively experiment with data, share research between teams and get straight to production without having to recode. Create and deploy custom machine learning models and reproduce them confidently and consistently.
  • Real-Time Streaming Analytics: With edge-to-enterprise governance, Cloudera DataFlow continuously ingests, prioritizes and analyzes data for actionable insights in real-time. Develop workflows to move data from on-premises to the cloud or vice-versa, and monitor edge applications and streaming sources.
  • Machine Learning: Enable enterprise data science in the cloud with self-service access to governed data. Deploys machine learning workspaces with adjustable auto-suspending resource consumption guardrails that can provide end-to-end machine learning tools in one cohesive environment.
  • Data Warehouse: Merges data from unstructured, structured and edge sources. The auto-scaling data warehouse returns queries almost instantly and has an optimized infrastructure that moves workloads across platforms to prepare vast amounts of data for analysis.
  • Operational Database: The operational database promises both high concurrency and low latency, processing large loads of data simultaneously without delay. It can extract real-time insights and enable scalable data-driven applications. 
  • Open-Source Platform: Access the Apache-based source code for the program and make adjustments, customizations and updates as desired. 
  • Data Security and Governance: Reduce risk by setting data security and governance policies. The Cloudera Shared Data Experience (SDX) then automatically enforces these protocols across the entire platform, ensuring sensitive information consistently remains secure without disruption to business processes.
  • Hybrid Deployment: Leverage the deployment flexibility and accessibility to work on data wherever it lives. Read and write directly to cloud or on-premises storage environments. With a hybrid cloud-based architecture, choose between a PaaS offering or opt for more control via IaaS, private cloud, multi-cloud or on-premises deployment.
read more...
  • Data Warehouse Connectivity:  Sigma connects directly with many popular data warehouses, including Snowflake, Google Big Query, Amazon Redshift and PostgreSQL, or users may pull their data from other partners like Matillion, Fivetran, Alooma and Stitch to create their central source of truth by indexing all the tables in those sources. 
  • Dataset Preparation: Sigma creates reusable datasets from individual or joined tables using one or more data sources. These Datasets can be edited either with a no-code worksheet-based interface, or with Sigma’s SQL Runner. 
  • Links: Users can add context to their Datasets by setting up the relationships between datasets in a guided, contextualized way. Non-technical users can preview and create pre-model joins without needing knowledge of the join creation process. The system also pulls pre-existing relationships in databases upon connection with a data warehouse.
  • Data Visualization: Users can create assorted kinds of charts and graphs from their worksheets, including bar charts, line graphs, pie graphs, tables and more. These visualizations can be formatted in various ways. 
  • Object Badges: Users can flag datasets and worksheets as Endorsed, Warning or Deprecated, guiding others to the most accurate and relevant data with a glance.
  • Shareable Workspaces: The platform has both individual and team workspaces, allowing for collaboration on data analysis. These workspaces can be shared externally, providing access to insights to partners or third parties who may benefit from them. The system also has an organization-wide workspace that everyone can search and explore through filters, descriptions and file names.
  • Role-Based Permissions: The system has tiered permission levels from highest to lowest for admins, authors and viewers, to allow different permissions and access settings on a role-by-role basis. Permissions may be granted on an individual or team level, allowing for organizations to add and remove users from access levels based on function, department or other categorization.
  • Data Security: In addition to role-based access control, the platform provides single-sign-on (SSO) and row-level security to ensure safe data analysis. The application has a secure infrastructure, with firewalls, credential and vulnerability checking, peer review, static code analysis, threat and anomaly detection and encryption in transit.
  • JSON Support: The visual interface enables business users to create views with JSON that unlock the value of semi-structured data. These strings of JSON can be stored, referenced and reused for analyses and visualizations across the ecosystem. 
  • Third Party Integrations: The system integrates with Slack and Google Sheets for enhanced collaboration.
read more...

Product Ranking

#72

among all
Business Intelligence Tools

#184

among all
Business Intelligence Tools

Find out who the leaders are

User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 216 reviews
we're gathering data
82%
of users recommend this product

Cloudera has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 82% when considering 216 user reviews from 4 recognized software review sites.

we're gathering data
4.0 (26)
n/a
4.2 (5)
n/a
4.3 (144)
n/a
3.4 (41)
n/a

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Scalability: Cloudera can handle massive datasets and complex queries, making it suitable for large-scale data analysis and reporting.
Security: Cloudera offers robust security features, including data encryption and access control, ensuring sensitive data is protected.
Performance: Cloudera's optimized architecture and distributed processing capabilities deliver fast query execution and efficient data processing.
Integration: Cloudera integrates seamlessly with various data sources and tools, enabling users to connect and analyze data from different systems.
Community Support: Cloudera has a large and active community, providing access to resources, support, and best practices.
Show more
User-friendly interface: Sigma's intuitive design and drag-and-drop functionality make it easy for users with limited technical expertise to get started and create insightful reports.
Affordable pricing: Sigma offers a competitive pricing model with a free tier for individual users and small teams, making it accessible to businesses of all sizes.
Scalable for business growth: Sigma's cloud-based architecture scales seamlessly to accommodate growing data volumes and user bases, ensuring your BI solution can grow with your business.
Cloud-based accessibility: Access your data and insights from anywhere, anytime with Sigma's cloud-based platform, eliminating the need for on-premise infrastructure.
Responsive customer support: Sigma provides responsive and helpful customer support via email, phone, and live chat, ensuring you get the assistance you need when you need it.
Show more
Steep Learning Curve: New users often find Cloudera's interface and complex architecture challenging to navigate, requiring significant time and effort to master. This can be especially problematic for teams with limited technical expertise.
Costly Implementation: Cloudera's pricing model can be expensive, particularly for large deployments. The cost of hardware, software licenses, and ongoing support can be a significant barrier for some organizations.
Limited Scalability: While Cloudera offers scalability, some users have reported challenges scaling their deployments to meet rapidly growing data volumes. This can lead to performance bottlenecks and slow query execution times.
Complex Management: Managing a Cloudera cluster can be complex, requiring specialized skills and knowledge. This can be a burden for organizations with limited IT resources.
Show more
Limited data analysis features: Compared to more robust BI solutions, Sigma offers a less extensive range of advanced data analysis capabilities.
Occasional performance issues: Some users have reported encountering occasional performance issues, such as slow loading times and data refreshes.
Restricted data storage capacity: Sigma's free and lower-tier plans offer limited data storage, requiring upgrades for larger datasets.
Lower customization options: While Sigma offers some customization options, its capabilities are not as extensive as other BI platforms.
Less powerful than competitors: Although Sigma excels in user-friendliness, it may lack the power and flexibility required for complex data analysis needs.
Show more

Is Cloudera the answer to your data management woes, or is it just a bunch of hot air? User reviews from the past year paint a mixed picture of Cloudera. While some users praise its flexibility and ability to handle large datasets, others find it cumbersome and expensive. Cloudera's hybrid cloud approach, allowing users to deploy on-premises or in the cloud, is a major selling point for many. However, some users find the platform's complexity a barrier to entry, especially for those without extensive experience in data management. Cloudera's integration with other tools, such as Apache Hadoop, is a key differentiator, but some users report issues with compatibility and performance. Cloudera is best suited for large enterprises with complex data needs and a dedicated team of data engineers. Its robust features and scalability make it a powerful tool for organizations that require a comprehensive data management solution. However, smaller businesses or those with limited technical resources may find Cloudera's complexity and cost prohibitive.

Show more

While Sigma Computing receives praise for its user-friendly interface and affordability, some users feel it lacks compared to similar BI tools like Tableau and Power BI. One user noted, "Sigma is great for beginners, but I quickly outgrew its capabilities. It just doesn't offer the depth of analysis I need." Another echoed this sentiment, stating, "The lack of advanced features was a dealbreaker for me. While Sigma is easy to use, it's not powerful enough for complex data analysis." However, others find Sigma's strengths outweigh its weaknesses. One user commented, "For the price, Sigma is a fantastic tool. It's simple to use and allows me to create insightful reports quickly and easily. I don't need all the bells and whistles offered by other platforms." Another user praised its scalability, saying, "Sigma has grown with my business. As my data volume increased, Sigma seamlessly scaled to accommodate my needs." One differentiating factor is Sigma's focus on real-time data and collaboration. One user highlighted this, saying, "Sigma's ability to work with real-time data is a game-changer. It allows me to make decisions based on the latest information, not outdated data." Another user noted the benefits of collaboration, stating, "Sigma's collaborative features make it easy to work with my team on data analysis. We can share insights and brainstorm ideas in real-time." Ultimately, the suitability of Sigma Computing depends on individual needs and priorities. If you're a small business or individual user who needs a basic, affordable BI tool, Sigma is a great option. However, if you require advanced data analysis capabilities or extensive customization options, you may be better served by a more powerful BI platform.

Show more

Screenshots

Top Alternatives in Business Intelligence Tools


Cognos Analytics

Domo

GoodData

Grow

Logi Symphony

Looker Studio

MicroStrategy

Oracle Analytics Cloud

Power BI

Qlik Sense

QuickSight

SAP Analytics Cloud

SAS Visual Analytics

Sisense

Spotfire

Tableau

Related Categories

WE DISTILL IT INTO REAL REQUIREMENTS, COMPARISON REPORTS, PRICE GUIDES and more...

Compare products
Comparison Report
Just drag this link to the bookmark bar.
?
Table settings