Top Sisense For Cloud Data Teams Alternatives & Competitors For 2024

Sisense for Cloud Data Teams is a powerful BI tool that excels in the hands of data analysts with coding knowledge. These analysts will be able to model, manage, prepare, manipulate and analyze data with ease. As the platform supports SQL, Python and R programming languages, the sky's the limit when it comes to extensibility, development and coding support. The platform allows for strong collaboration within an organization, designed to alleviate the time-consuming burden of reporting and data visualization on IT teams while allowing business users to access insights on their own time. Most of the features are built around making the analytics team’s job easier, with reusable code, built-in collaboration and more. The support team earned universal praise from users who contacted them, citing their swift, in-depth and informative answers as immensely helpful in resolving any issues they had with the solution. In addition to hands-on support, a speedy implementation process ensures that customers can get the platform up and running in no time. We found that users’ opinions of the platform’s functionality and ease of use differed significantly based on their own roles; analysts generally praised its robust data visualization and data querying features, while decision-makers often found it hard to use, due to the SQL language barrier. SQL is necessary for most functions, and even though there is a visual query editor that attempts to make SQL more accessible, some users said that the platform doesn’t do enough in this regard. Overall, users did agree that the tool makes it easy to collaborate with each other to bridge that gap, with most of the analytics being done on the technical end, letting business users simply access those results. Still, it’s difficult to accurately call Sisense for Cloud Data Teams a self-service analytics tool, as it requires an IT or analyst team’s involvement to truly shine. Additionally, the cost can be prohibitive to smaller businesses. Overall, Sisense for Cloud Data Teams can be extremely powerful in the right hands - for those who know SQL and how to use it, it’s a dream for querying data and delivering analytics, but for those who don’t have the necessary IT resources, it could prove difficult to fully maximize the value of this data solution.

MicroStrategy is a patchwork quilt of products on the web, desktop and mobile. There’s MicroStrategy Library where you can access published content and Auto Express for dashboarding and bot creation. Anyone with basic data skills can feed information to a bot and gain insights in seconds.You don’t need a credit card to sign up for the free trial, but you won’t be able to publish content to the server without a paid upgrade. As for choosing which edition to use, there’s the web and the desktop instance. Which one will suit you? Maybe both?MicroStrategy Workstation is for developers and data analysts and is more robust for manipulating data. It provides administrative control, even when offline, and helps prototype content before it goes live. Combining multiple visualizations on a single page provided me with more context for the same data.On the other hand, the Workstation version lacks the same level of natural language processing as the web version.MicroStrategy Web is for delivering content to your clients. Being online, it’s open to seamless upgrades and customization, and identity management and collaboration are built in. If you have a small organization, the web version might suffice, but you might want to consider going for both if you deal with large data volumes.Metadata mapping was immensely useful to me when designing a bot using MicroStrategy Auto Express. All I needed to do was feed it the data, and it generated a slew of questions I might want to ask.With a semantic layer, Microstrategy is among the BI tools that work best with large data warehouses. If you’ve just started in business or haven’t got large data volumes yet, you might want to consider a simpler tool.An oft-repeated sentiment in user reviews was that this motley crew of products — web, desktop and mobile — didn’t always sync. The vendor positions MicroStrategy One as a unified solution that’ll, hopefully, eliminate these annoyances.On the flip side, quite a few users said it could be clunky for inexperienced users. Also, some reviewers said it slowed on occasion. Most people said the solution was expensive and found its learning curve quite steep.In summary, MicroStrategy is worth considering, especially if you’re a medium or large-sized company looking for a web reporting tool with a user-friendly interface.

Our researchers ranked products on a whole bunch of features. They include data management, querying and visualization, advanced and embedded analytics, mobile BI, and IoT and location analytics.In our rankings, Power BI scores 87 for connectivity, leaving behind Tableau, Oracle Analytics and Dundas BI. Robust Microsoft technology is one reason, for sure. Besides, intelligent techniques like DirectQuery and easy data modeling make it popular among users.In product reviews, some users mentioned a lag when sharing reports from the desktop to the cloud. For me, the platform was a tad slow to start, but otherwise, it stayed performant for my average-sized dataset.When dealing with sales data, total sales, the top-performing products, seasonality and period trends are common queries. Creating a sales KPI report in Power BI was an excellent way for me to answer them. My CSV files included sales, calendar, products and store data.Connecting to sources is straightforward with Get Data on the home screen and toolbar. Once I had pulled in the data, I clicked on Transform Data and opened the Power Query editor. It automatically detects the data type for strings and numbers but can get confused with dates and currency, which it marks as text. It involved some manual wrangling, but I had it sorted in no time. Read my article on KPI Reports to learn how I did it.But I wouldn’t call it a deal-breaker as it’s not a tedious task. I had the same experience with Qlik Sense, but Tableau was way better as it recognizes seven data types — string, number, date, date and time, boolean, geographic and cluster values.Tracking sales over periods required a greater level of detail, so I added new columns to the calendar data — start of month and start of week. Column statistics were immensely helpful in identifying unique, distinct and null values and correcting incomplete records. Clicking on the number of products selling at a particular price allowed me to see which toys sold at that price.Creating a relational data model by defining primary keys is a manual process and seems dated once you’ve used Qlik Sense. Adding calculated measures is where DAX shows its magic. For data workers well-versed with SQL, DAX is a ready-to-go tool they’ll be glad to have in their corner.Creating visualizations wasn’t as intuitive as Tableau as it involved drag-and-drop onto the canvas, and frankly, I felt like I was flying blind. I didn’t feel that way with Tableau, and it’s slicker.Power BI offers a paintbrush tool that lets you define the layout, the card arrangement and the maximum number of cards. You can define the canvas settings, background and headers and determine the filter pane settings. It took me longer to create a dashboard from scratch than it took in Tableau.Some users found the pricing structure too complex. While using Azure data in Power BI for basic queries is free, costs can add up when you go for text and sentiment analysis. With Microsoft Fabric, the pricing complexity is set to rise. Though Power BI is available separately too, you’ll need to rely on Fabric to manage users, licenses and other administrative tasks.About 31% of the users mentioning cost complained about onboarding difficulties, possibly because DAX introduces the complexity of learning syntax. It can daunt non-technical users initially, but guided formulas can make the task easier. That said, I agree with the majority of user reviews that training will speed up onboarding and help your team maximize the investment.Overall, Power BI has many powerful features and will give you value for your money. If you’re not a Microsoft user yet, it’s worth checking out for the baked-in vendor technologies like Azure and SSAS. If you are an MS user, Power BI might be a no-brainer, though be prepared to shell out a little extra for advanced functionality and additional modules.

Domo has everything data teams could wish for — self-service ETL, advanced analytics and data science. Its rich set of connectors makes users happy as they praise its robust integration APIs. Its scripting language is similar to Power BI, and knowing SQL will shorten your team's learning curve. The vendor offers daily refreshes, currently capping them at 48.On the flip side, the interface seemed a bit clunky to me. Dashboards don’t display in the edit mode by default, which was a tad annoying. The Getting Started documentation is dated and doesn’t match the new interface. I could find my way around with help from user forums.While the vendor earns praise for releasing frequent updates, quite a few users say some much-needed features lack depth. According to our research, Domo offers only 64% of the required functionality out of the box, which is much less than what Power BI and Tableau provide. It also underperforms in data querying, scoring only 53 in our analysis.Some reviews mention bugs and that performance can lag when handling anything complex than simple visualizations. The slowness could be due to the multitenant SaaS model that provides shared computing. As for the mobile app, it didn’t work in the offline mode for me. I should mention here that I had opted for the trial version. A proof-of-concept will help you check if the issue persists in the paid edition.Domo’s pay-as-you-go model is great for estimating usage but be prepared to pay more for workload spikes. According to our research, about 89% of users who reviewed the price found Domo’s consumption model expensive. Small organizations working with a lean team might find it challenging to handle billing.Here’s what’s great about subscribing to Domo. You can create as many reports and dashboards as required — there’s no limit or additional cost. Plus, Domo allows adding an unlimited number of users. Domo accepts external data models from OpenAI, Amazon Bedrock, Hugging Face, Databricks and Jupyter Workspaces.Despite a competitive market, Domo is an excellent product for organizations seeking data visualization and strong integration. Its flexible pricing model and recent AI updates make it a strong challenger to leading data platforms.

InsightSquared is a powerful sales analytics platform that helps users drive sales pipelines and access self-service data analytics through robust features and interactive data visualizations. According to many users who discussed data integration, the tool interacts seamlessly with other applications and data sources to enable predictive analytics that help forecast future trends. Most of the users who mentioned support said that they are responsive and knowledgeable. A majority of the users who reviewed the interface said that it’s user-friendly and easily navigable, though some users said that the versatility of the platform makes it complex to learn. Many users who discussed the platform’s visualization capabilities said that it provides a wide range of interactive and intuitive out-of-the-box dashboards. A majority of the users who discussed data analytics said that the platform excels in analyzing historical data to better forecast future trends, though some users said that the scope of predictive analytics should be wider to provide better insights. According to many users who mentioned functionality, the solution provides many ways to explore data-based insights through deep-dive and pivoting on key metrics, though some users said that the platform is not easily customizable. Many users who mentioned reporting said that the solution provides a plethora of out-of-the-box reports that can be customized and exported easily, though some users said that there is limited flexibility in report customization. On the flip side, a majority of the users who reviewed speed said that the platform is slow when moving between templates and can become CPU-intensive with large dashboards, though some users said that it can slice and dice data to present relevant information in seconds. Many users who mentioned pricing said that necessary customization modules add to the cost of the software, which makes adoption difficult for small businesses. Many users said that though training is needed to maximize the tool’s potential, lack of adequate documentation makes the learning curve steep. In summary, InsightSquared is a self-service revenue intelligence tool that provides a single source of truth for sales analytics and forecasting pipeline management. It boosts productivity across the organization, though its pricing can be cost-prohibitive for small businesses.