Knowledge is power, and business analytics (BA) give you the knowledge to do what you need for your business to thrive. But there are so many different types of business software out there. How can you choose just one?
Today we’re breaking down the pros and cons of two of the best business analytics tools on the market: Dundas vs Sisense. Hopefully by the time you’re finished reading you’ll feel both knowledgeable and empowered enough to make the right choice for your business.
Compare Dundas and Sisense Against Your Needs
Here’s the breakdown between these two BA applications:
Features Comparison
Dundas BI is a strong solution that supports functionality for users to drill down, filter, sort, change level, re-visualize, zoom-in/out and expand/collapse. The solution also offers several customizable features and dashboards, making it user-friendly.
Compare Business Analytics Software Leaders
Sisense BI is a robust platform that provides interactive BI reports with customizable dashboards. The solution offers a customizable interface to meet the user’s requirements.
Analytics
Sample dashboard from Dundas BI
From real-time reporting in the present to future forecasting functionality, analytics is the cornerstone of business analytics software.
Dundas BI allows users to compare data from multiple sources. This BA solution facilitates forecasting through comprehensive built-in formulae. It can be connected to social media sources such as Facebook and Twitter. Dundas can be easily configured via an open database connectivity connection or by creating a custom connection via the open API.
A built-in connector allows users to connect with Google Analytics data and quickly start analyzing it. Dundas helps users handle single specific business queries and points to specific issues with data. This solution also allows users to analyze statistical data for profit gains in real time.
Sisense BI is a powerful tool that facilitates visualization of multiple sets of data sources on a single dashboard. This solution allows users to drill down to the most granular raw data across all data sources. It is also integrated with the statistical language of the platform to execute predictive statistical functions.
Sisense allows users to calculate correlation, variance, rank and others to perform advanced statistical analysis on complex data sets. The solution also allows users to dissect data sets from multiple disparate sources with minimal data preparation. The solution connects natively to a variety of web analytics platforms like Google Analytics.
Both platforms pack a punch in the analytics arena, but Sisense offers more robust analytics features.
Big Data Integration
The amount of data your organization can process can mean the difference between success and mediocrity. Big data integration encapsulates a BI system’s ability to process, analyze and visualize large data sets. It takes traditional data, machine-generated data, social media, web data, and data from the Internet of Things (IoT), and combines it to provide the most complete and up-to-date view of your business. It drives insights you need to boost performance and allows analysis that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.
With Dundas BI, you can connect to a variety of data sources including RDBMS, OLAP, Flat files, Big Data, Web services and more. Capabilities to extract, transform and load (ETL) are built directly into Dundas BI via a data cube layer. Simply add transform nodes to a data cube and connect them together to perform data cleansing or join tables sourced from different databases. With data cubes, even non-technical users can easily discover and analyze data.
Dundas BI is an open platform that can be fully customized and programmed to embed it into existing systems, or consolidate data from any source you have available. At the same time, its APIs are extensible, and you can always add the functionality you need to use the platform with almost every web application. Dundas provides big data integration using Hadoop, Hive, Hbase, Cassandra and MapReduce.
Sisense lets you combine data from multiple sources with unrivaled ease. Using our built-in connectors you can join all of your present and future data and quickly transform it into information and insights.This BI solution offers APIs and additional developer tools that let users interact with the Sisense platform. These tools give you more options and flexibility for managing, enhancing and customizing the functionality and user experience of the Sisense platform.
Users can connect and analyze data from multiple sources, then reveal the insights you’ve been missing…in just a matter of minutes. With smart suggestions and an intuitive visual interface, Sisense makes it easy for any user to combine data and discover hidden insights in one place…without the usual scripting, coding, and IT hand-holding. Sisense BI’s ElastiCube provides native connectivity to Hadoop and Hive. The solution is compatible with Cassandra in Azure deployment option.
Dundas wins this round as it offers more options and platforms for big data integration.
OLAP
Sample dashboard from Sisense
Online analytical processing can perform multidimensional analysis of data sets, allowing BI applications to perform complex calculations, trend analysis and data modeling.
Dundas BI/BA strongly supports drill-down capabilities to access details directly from its interactive dashboards. The BI capabilities of this solution enable users to identify different patterns and performance variations from the data set analyzed. Dundas BI/BA is enabled with date mapping features to support date-based operations in an OLAP cube. The solution helps users gain insights to drive accurate decision-making.
Sisense Pulse enables multiple business users to perform ad-hoc data analysis on a centralized data repository. The solution does not achieve this by pre-calculating query results, but rather by utilizing state-of-the-art technology called ElastiCube — a sophisticated columnar database which was specifically designed for BI solutions. The solution offers interactive, web-based dashboards with advanced capabilities, enabling users to drill down along with a variety of visualization tools. However, the solution does not support issue indicators features and does not work on OLAP modeling.
Although Sisense has a powerful analytics tool of its own, because it doesn’t have OLAP functionality, Dundas takes this category.
Mobile
Mobile BI capabilities include mobile apps, mobile alerts and mobile access to dashboards.
Dundas BI offers a full immersive experience on both desktop and mobile. The entire platform is built with mobile-first in mind using HTML5, and does not require any special apps or downloads. You can create, view and share your Dashboards, Reports and Scorecards on desktop and mobile seamlessly, or even do data analysis on mobile devices.
Dundas’ mobile BI application provides an easy-to-use and touch-based HTML5 interface for viewing real-time data and visualizations on any mobile device. Users can create powerful dashboards, multi-page reports or ad-hoc reports on the go. The mobile BI application is loaded with full security and governance features for all types of mobile devices.
Sisense has two ways to get data insights on your mobile device:
1. An entirely browser-based Business Intelligence experience, with no local footprint and no installation required. All you need is an internet connection and any type of mobile device, including all types of laptops, tablets and smartphones. Simply browse to your dashboard and jump straight into the insights.
2. A complete Sisense BI Mobile App that you can download from the Apple or Android app store. Using the mobile app, you can explore your dashboards with simple gestures optimized to let you dive deep into your data or apply filters to view the data you want. These dashboards are built with a ‘mobile first’ design providing an enhanced mobile user experience.
Dundas has the advantage in this category with powerful security assurances and a robust variety of mobile features.
Deployment
Deployment refers to whether a software solution is cloud-based (accessed via the internet) or on-premise, installed and hosted on the site of the consumer’s own facility.
Dundas BI/BA can be deployed both on-premise or via a cloud-based/SaaS model, based on users’ requirements. However, the solution does not support hybrid installation of its product.
Sisense Pulse can be deployed as an on-premise solution, hosted as a SaaS offering or configured under a hybrid model. Sisense partnered with Azure to give users a cloud-based BI solution.
Sisense offers all three available deployment options to give their users freedom and control.
Who Won?
These are both great BA solutions with a range of powerful business analytics features and functionality. Only you can choose the best BI platform for your business — but we can help.
Do you use either of these BA platforms? How have they performed for you? Which BA tools should we compare next? Tell us your thoughts in the comments!