Sisense Review

 

Sisense is one company gathering new momentum in the self-service business intelligence (BI) space. In September 2018, the company announced a new $80 million investment from New York-based venture capital (VC) firm Insight Venture Partners. If you are familiar with BI tools, then you'll likely

be impressed with Sisense (which is priced only by custom quote). It's an attractive product with substantial power. Still, Sisense lacks the brand recognition of other BI heavyweights such as IBM Watson Analytics and Microsoft Power BI. But with its intuitive user interface (UI) and the significant depth of its data visualization capabilities, Sisense is seriously worth consideration.

While its UI and commands are nowhere near as familiar as those of Microsoft Power BI, it is a serious threat to Tableau Desktop given its top-shelf functionalities, such as in-chip rather than in-memory processing, and natural language commands and queries you can use inside third-party apps such as 

Microsoft Skype and Slack. Seriously, you can ask a question in Skype and Sisense will answer you in Skype. That's enough to make even IBM Watson Analytics sit up and take notice. No worries yet, Watson, as not everything in Sisense supports natural language, which is part of the reason it isn't one of our Editors' Choices.

On the downside, Sisense is still a bit too clunky to be ready for prime time in a fully data-democratized organization where you want people using data in their job decisions regardless of their skill level in data science or statistics. You know, like everyone in any given organization can use Microsoft Word 

($128.00 at Amazon) without having to know how to write code or even how to spell correctly. True, being able to access Sisense's analytics simply by popping a natural language query into a third-party app goes a long way toward making the platform universally useful. However, the rest of the platform's

 UI is still necessary and it just doesn't match that level of user-friendliness needed to satisfy users who aren't data knowledgeable. Still, the company is working on this weakness and does a creditable job providing online training and learnings with a well-organized support section and a well-maintained blog.