9 Best Sisense Alternatives & Competitors in 2024

Cem Ruso
Cem Ruso
September 9, 2024
September 9, 2024

Sisense helps you convert data into revenue by building AI-powered analytics with pro-code, low-code, and no-code capabilities.

The software is used by the likes of Philips, Verizon, Skullcandy, and many more, but the real question you must ask yourself is whether Sisense is a great BI and data visualization tool for your business or whether you need to explore Sisense alternatives.

In this article, I will discuss the major reasons why you might need a Sisense alternative and then discuss the top ones out there in the market.

Why Do You Need a Sisense Alternative?

There are three primary reasons why you might be interested in a Sisense alternative:

  1. Updating Sisense often distorts dashboards
  2. Sisense has problems handling large datasets
  3. Sisense falls short when compared to Power BI or Tableau

Let’s drill down each reason and get to know why these reasons cause problems.

Reason 1: Updating Sisense Often Distorts Dashboards

Let’s face it, creating KPI dashboards isn’t a piece of cake. You need to keep an eye on a bunch of KPIs, shortlist the most effective ones depending on what you want to track, put them together in a dashboard, and then get to analyzing them.

With Sisense, every update the software gets is a nightmare for you and your team tracking KPIs. Existing users have complained about dashboards going broke with every new software update due to new bugs or new ways of doing things.

Reason 2: Sisense Has Problems Handling Large Datasets 

Sisense isn’t good at handling large datasets. Users often face elastic cube build failures (a way to organize and analyze large amounts of data) when dealing with a considerable amount of data.

Even if the build was successful, they were inconsistent, making it difficult to reconcile data in a few seconds.

Reason 3: It Falls Short When Compared to Power BI or Tableau

A user complained about Sisense falling short when compared to other data visualization tools like Power BI and Tableau.

Here are the points of concern the user raised:

  • The data model view is very clunky, which makes it difficult to understand the relationships of the data easily.
  • Sisense is missing a basic functionality of the min and max date filter.
  • Haven’t found a way to incorporate user-inputted parameters into dashboards.
  • Formula syntax is clunky and weird.

What are the Best Sisense Alternatives and Competitors

Some of the best alternatives to Sisense are:

  • Datapad: Track all your essential business metrics with stunning dashboards.
  • Looker Studio: Powerful data visualization tool that allows you to easily connect to various data sources and create interactive reports and dashboards.
  • Tableau: Intuitive, AI-powered analytics platform that transforms trusted data into actionable insights, enabling better decision-making. 
  • GoodData: Analytics platform that empowers you to create interactive dashboards and reports without technical expertise. 
  • Mode: Comprehensive business intelligence platform designed to unify data teams and business users around data analysis.
  • Toucan: No-code, cloud-first data storytelling platform that enables businesses to create engaging, customer-facing analytics experiences.
  • Narrative BI: Generative analytics platform that automatically turns raw data into actionable insights. 
  • Polymer: Powerful AI-driven dashboard and presentation tool that automatically generates visually stunning reports from your data. 

1. Datapad

Datapad offers a powerful solution for tracking essential metrics through visually appealing dashboards. Its standout feature is its user-friendly interface, which allows you and your team to track KPIs without technical skills.

Designed specifically for agencies, Datapad simplifies the onboarding process for new clients with one-click templates and enables the sharing of performance reports via read-only links.

The AI insights tool lets anyone detect anomalies in their data and provides actionable to-do items to increase performance.

Key Feature #1. Templates

Even if you own a small business, creating reports for it is hard. You have to track a lot of different KPIs and metrics, shortlist the ones that matter, and analyze them regularly to make data-driven decisions.

If you are an agency and want to create the same reports for multiple clients, then this hassle becomes even more burdensome.

Guess what? Datapad lets you do all this with just a few clicks.

With Datapad's templating features, you can:

  • Choose from a gallery of pre-designed templates and apply them with 1-click
  • Build a custom dashboard and re-use it as a template by changing its sources
  • Share all connected data sources in the workspace with your teammates

‍Key Feature #2. Team Collaboration

Tracking KPIs isn't a one-person job when you have a lot of them; you need a team. But not all KPI dashboard tools let you bring your team on board. 

Guess what? Datapad lets you do it quickly and easily. 

Moreover, you can assign individual team members tasks to handle, goals to achieve, and metrics to measure.

With Datapad's team collaboration feature, you can:

  • Get notified whenever there’s an update for any metrics and KPIs you track
  • Communicate around your metrics and KPIs with your team members
  • Get push notifications on your phone to stay updated with all your KPIs

Key Feature #3. Automated Reports & Scorecards

Wouldn't it be great if you could check your business KPIs first thing in the morning, straight from your inbox?

With our dashboard software, you can subscribe to any dashboard and receive daily email updates.

All you have to do is build a dashboard, click the subscribe button, and set your email preferences.

The best part is you can share reports with anyone, even emails outside of your organization or workspace.

Step 1: Subscribe to a dashboard
Step 2: Check your inbox

With Datapad’s report and scorecard automation, you can:

  • Subscribe to any dashboard
  • Receive daily highlights around all KPIs
  • Send reports to users in and outside of your organization
  • Customize the date range, calculation, and styling of KPIs

Pricing

Datapad has a free tier that includes 1 dashboard. If you want more, you can upgrade to the $30 Standard Plan, which includes 3 dashboards and scales with your usage. Datapad also offers a Business Plan tailored for agencies and includes dedicated customer support.

We are now offering an early bird discount to all users, so it's a great time to sign up and give Datapad a spin.

Pros and Cons

✅ Let’s you import KPIs from unlimited data sources in the free plan.

✅ Lets you subscribe to dashboards to get daily highlights.

❌ Variety of charts and graphs selection can be widened.

2. Looker Studio

Looker Studio is a powerful data visualization tool that allows you to easily connect to various data sources, create interactive reports and dashboards, and share insights with individuals, teams, or the public. 

Its user-friendly interface and wide range of visualization options make it a valuable tool for data analysis.

Features

  • Gives you early access to a range of data. Looker Studio’s built-in and partner connectors make it possible to connect to virtually any kind of data.
  • Lets you turn your data into stories of data visualization art. Comes with multiple templates to help you build a dashboard.
  • Has the ability to collaborate with your team in real time and make changes to data.
  • Lets you share reports and dashboards with individuals, teams, or the world.
  • Comes with a feature that helps you embed your reports on any of the web pages of your website.

Pricing

Looker Studio is free to get started; the only prerequisite is a Google account. 

Pros and Cons

✅ Comes with pre-built dashboard templates.

✅ Lets you collaborate with your team in real time.

❌ Doesn’t come with manual data refreshing.

3. Tableau 

Tableau is an intuitive, AI-powered analytics platform that transforms trusted data into actionable insights, enabling better decision-making. 

It supports data visualization, analytics, and storytelling, making it accessible to users across various industries. 

Features

  • Tableau has a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface that allows you to create interactive data visualizations without extensive programming knowledge.
  • Comes with built-in statistical tools and predictive analytics, so you can perform complex analyses like trend forecasting and regression analysis.
  • With Tableau, you can easily share dashboards and reports across your teams and organization. This helps you make data-driven decisions as a team or keep your clients in the loop about how each KPI is performing.
  • Connects with a range of data sources, including databases, spreadsheets, and cloud services. This helps aggregate and analyze data from multiple sources, giving you a comprehensive view of the data landscape.
  • It allows you to create highly customizable dashboards that can be tailored to specific needs and preferences. The dashboards visualize the KPIs and other critical metrics in an easy-to-understand format.

Pricing

Tableau has three paid plans to choose from:

  • Creator
  • Explorer
  • Viewer

You can contact their sales team to get the pricing depending on the plan and the number of licenses you need.

Pros and Cons

✅ Lets you analyze data in real-time.

✅ Integrates with various data sources.

❌ It’s an expensive software compared to data visualization tools.

5. GoodData

GoodData is an analytics platform that empowers you to create interactive dashboards and reports without technical expertise. 

By leveraging AI support and automation, GoodData enhances business intelligence, enabling effective decision-making and trend identification across your team.

Features

  • Lets you create charts and dashboards with drag-and-drop UI and comes with AI-powered features like forecasting, key driver analysis, and NLQ that give you faster insights, in turn helping you make faster decisions.
  • Has no-code developer tools and blueprints that help you create an analytics environment in no time by integrating analytics with CI/CD pipelines to automate development.
  • Seamlessly embed interactive charts and dashboards into your websites, apps, and workflows via React SDK, Web Components, or iFrame.
  • Lets you customize and white-label your reports and dashboards before sending them to your clients.
  • Dynamically scale your analytics and accommodate increases in data volume, end users, and business partners.

Pricing

GoodData doesn’t come with a free plan. To use it, you have to choose one of the three paid plans it offers:

  • Startup: $30 per user per month
  • Professional: $30 per user per month + 1,500 platform fee
  • Enterprise: Custom pricing

Pros and Cons

✅ Excels in predictive modeling.

✅ Lets you create tailored dashboards and reports.

❌ You might find the initial setup and configuration challenging.

6. Mode

Mode is a comprehensive business intelligence platform designed to unify data teams and business users around data analysis. It facilitates complex ad hoc analysis and self-service reporting through an integrated environment that supports SQL, R, and Python.

Features

  • Comes with drag-and-drop exploration that lets anyone dive into the dashboard’s underlying data.
  • With Mode, you can build multi-faceted, multi-axis visuals and present them side-by-de with advanced analysis.
  • Lets you white-label reports and dashboards by importing your company’s colors and fonts.
  • Build and maintain trusted, curated datasets to power every team's explorations in record time.
  • Build dashboards powered by notebooks to provide instant access to advanced analytics.

Pricing

Mode offers a free plan, Studio, to test the platform. However, if you want premium features, Mode offers two paid plans: Pro and Enterprise. You can contact Mode’s sales team to get the pricing.

Pros and Cons

✅ Mode excels at facilitating team collaboration.

✅ Supports various programming languages like SQL, Python, R, etc., and integrates with multiple data sources.

❌ The platform is primarily designed for desktop users.

7. Toucan 

Toucan is a no-code, cloud-first data storytelling platform that enables businesses to create engaging, customer-facing analytics experiences. It seamlessly connects to various cloud data warehouses, offers guided frameworks for creating perfect stories, and provides exceptional support to optimize team efficiency.

Features

  • Comes with a built-in storytelling framework and guided design that helps you build reports in no time; it’s a no-code way to build reports.
  • You can easily embed Toucan in your software or workflow using web components and iFrames.
  • Lets you collaborate with your team with a built-in collaborative environment to annotate, share, and live chat with your peers.
  • Work seamlessly with live data coming from Snowflake, MongoDB, AWS, etc., and any other Cloud data provider thanks to Toucan's integrated, no-code cloud provider modules.
  • Comes with enterprise-grade security, best-in-class data centers, powerful role permissions, and row-level security.

Pricing

Toucan doesn’t disclose its pricing on the website. However, you can book a free demo and ask their custom support team for the software's pricing.

Pros and Cons

✅ Seamlessly connects with consumer data from a variety of sources like Snowflake, AWS, RedShift, and more.

✅ Toucan's intuitive interface allows you and your team to quickly create and manage dashboards.

❌ It's difficult to automatically send PDF reports to your user base if you choose token-based authentication.

8. Narrative BI

Narrative BI is a generative analytics platform that automatically turns raw data into actionable insights. 

It offers AI-powered features like anomaly detection, automated reporting, and natural language generation to help growth teams make data-driven decisions. 

Features

  • The AI data analyst lets you chat with your data. It integrates seamlessly with CSV/XLSX, GA4, Google Ads, Google Search Console, and more.
  • You can create reports on key metrics, send them automatically via email or Slack, and share them with your whole team.
  • Lets you connect your data sources to the software and receive an automated feed of natural language narrative that highlights trends, patterns, and key metrics.
  • Lets you set up automated monitoring to receive real-time updates on your key metrics.
  • Stay updated with weekly AI-powered insights on your marketing performance, delivered in a language you understand.

Pricing

Narrative BI doesn’t have a free plan; instead, it has a 7-day free trial with every plan it offers:

  • Pro: $30 per month per data source
  • Growth: $40 per month per data source
  • Enterprise: Custom pricing

Pros and Cons

✅ Offers unlimited seats for all plans.

✅ Great set of integrations with the latest and popular data sources.

❌ Lacks the feature of while-labeling reports.

9. Polymer

Polymer is a powerful AI-driven dashboard and presentation tool that automatically generates visually stunning reports from your data. 

With no technical skills required, Polymer connects to multiple data sources, creates customizable dashboards, and transforms them into always up-to-date slide decks in just one click.

Features

  • Comes with a dashboard maker that lets you combine data from multiple sources into a dynamic, always-updated dashboard.
  • Has a built-in AI (Polymer AI) that suggests beautiful visualizations so you can understand your data with ease, within a few simple clicks.
  • Create beautiful charts and graphs that blend seamlessly into your own apps and services with Polymer Embedded Analytics.
  • With PolyAI, ask your data plain English questions and get clear answers in seconds.

Pricing

Polymer offers three paid plans to choose from:

  • Starter: $50 per month
  • Pro: $100 per month
  • Teams: $250 per month

Pros and Cons

✅ Comes with advanced AI features.

✅ Sleek, modern, and easy-to-use interface.

❌ You get unlimited seats and API access only with its Enterprise plan.

Wrapping Up

All the tools mentioned above are great alternatives to Sisense and take care of the drawbacks it poses.

Analyzing and visualizing data is critical for any business’s survival because, without it, you can’t make the right decisions.

Unfortunately, Sisense’s updates can distort your dashboard, the tool isn’t meant for large datasets, and falls short when compared to other BI tools. That’s why exploring alternatives is a smart choice.

But how do you find out which Sisense alternative is right for you? 

Well, there’s no better way than signing up for free trials and judging products for yourself.

If you or your team don’t have the time to try every product on our list, sign up for Datapad, import your KPIs, and create stunning dashboards for you and your team.