ClicData vs Sisense Comparison

It’s essential to compare different products when buying a new BI solution. It helps you get what you need at the best available price. For that reason, we create a series of blog posts to compare ClicData with other popular data platforms in the market. Therefore, if you are looking for the best BI software between Sisense and ClicData, or an alternative to Sisense, this comparison will help you make an informed decision.

Understanding Sisense and ClicData

Sisense is a hybrid business intelligence software that uses machine learning to offer a wide range of BI services. On the other hand, ClicData is an end-to-end cloud-based BI solution offering dashboard systems to improve business efficiency. The platform combines five core modules to allow you to build a complete BI strategy with one tool. These modules include data integration, data visualization, data management, data analytics, and data sharing.

Implementation and Maintenance

ClicData

• There are no hidden implementation and maintenance fees on ClicData because it is a 100% cloud-based platform.
• A ClicData account takes less than three minutes to create, allowing you to start creating your first dashboard and connecting your data within minutes.
• ClicData is an accessible self-service analytics platform.
• The platform serves customers from different industries, including small and extensive marketing, retail, and healthcare companies.

Sisense

• Sisense is a hybrid or on-premise hosted platform. The platform’s setup involves its team creating your cloud. Although it looks like a cloud for end-users, you will realize it’s not 100% cloud data software if you are the BI project manager.
• The platform creates cubes (ElastiCube) from connected data using its Windows-only management and server applications. It publishes the ElastiCube via a web server for consumption to an Application Server or Web Server.
• Technical data analysts must define the ElastiCube before making it available to dashboard designers or data consumers.
• Sisense is similar to OLAP-based solutions or Cube Enterprise Information Management. As a result, Sisense is usually configured and priced for large enterprises.

Data Integration and Connectivity

Data integration involves combining data from different sources to make a single unified view. Both ClicData and Sisense come with a wide range of connectors to help in data connectivity.

ClicData

ClicData provides extensive data connectivity and integrations. The platform offers native connectors to over 50 databases, including business applications marketing, HR, sales, project management, cloud-based, and on-premise databases. On-Premise databases include SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Amazon Redshift, and MongoDB. Besides, ClicData offers additional 200 sources of data with API, REST, and SOAP to pull data from any database using any type of authentication, from Basic to OAuth2 or AWS Signature.

Essentially, ClicData aims to simplify everyone’s job, including helping you connect data sources without the help of the IT team.

Sisense

Sisense provides native connectors to only a dozen databases, as opposed to more than 50 native connectors offered by ClicData. However, it allows you to connect with a lot more data sources using a JDBC driver (Java Database Connectivity).

Although it works well, it is usually more complex to install and requires technical skills, which are not always available in the marketing and sales departments. In that case, you have to download the JDBC driver, create a connection string, and configure the ElastiCube for the data sources. This process requires Java skills.

Data Warehousing

ClicData has a data warehouse, but Sisense doesn’t. You might think that because you are not an IT expert or a data analyst, you don’t need a data warehouse; all you need is a data analytics platform. However, you might forget that dashboards are what you see at the end after the software pulls data from a warehouse.

Data warehousing refers to the data management system that helps manage BI activities such as analytics. The tool helps clean, aggregate, and merge data before it is displayed on your dashboard. In the long run, any BI project and data analytics platform needs this core component to work properly.

You can integrate your data using the following options:

1. Using the native connectors found in the in-built data warehouse in your BI tool 
2. Using an external data warehouse to connect your BI tool 

ClicData

Although ClicData is an end-to-end data platform containing an in-built data warehouse, it allows you to connect with other data warehouses. Excellent examples include MongoDB, Amazon Redshift, and Snowflake.

Sisense

Although Sisense has “ElastiCube“, it is more of a database than a data warehouse. Similarly, the platform allows you to connect various data warehouses. That means, if you don’t have the choice of using Sisense analytics, you must invest in a data warehouse and understand how ElastiCube works.

Data Management

Data management involves cleaning, identifying incorrect, incomplete, or duplicate data, and transforming data from different sources.

ClicData

As an end-to-end data platform, ClicData comes with advanced data cleaning and management features. With ClicData, performing tasks such as data standardization, normalization, and incomplete data removal is more effortless.

Here is what you can do with ClicData: 

1. Retain historical data beyond what is offered by databases and source systems 
2. Join multiple data sets from multiple data sources
3. Compare previous data sets 
4. Monitor and report data changes over time
5. Clean data errors to make charts and indicators proper and uniform
6. Make upgrades or change source systems without breaking reports or dashboards
7. Design data alerts for monitoring data changes

Sisense

Similarly, Sisense has advanced data management features. It can ingest, prepare, and transform data. Other management tasks performed by Sisense include unifying values, duplicating values, and data cleansing.

As you can see, the difference between ClicData and Sisense is not the power of data management features but their complexity.

Data Analytics

Data analytics is the process of analyzing data to make an informed conclusion. It involves the use of specialized systems and software.

ClicData

ClicData offers an insights module to help you understand your data better. As a result, you can identify abnormalities, groupings, and patterns in your data. It helps business analysts integrate Machine Learning algorithms into their data flows for product segmentation, text analysis, regression analysis, and time series regression. It also allows the direct use of different languages against the Data Warehouse, including Python and R, to create custom Artificial Intelligence algorithms.

Sisense

Sisense provides strong analytics features to help you build advanced models. However, it is less of a self-service platform since it requires advanced technical skills from an IT expert.

Sisense data must be put into the ElastiCube format. The format requires following a temporary series of steps when processing data into a different database format before. For instance, one step involves creating categories/dimensions and metrics/values. It requires a data IT expert to create ElastiCube’s connectors and schemas, build, and set schedules from Sisense’s “back end.”

Note that building a cube is always a must when using Sisense. You cannot analyze and visualize without it. Building the cube requires the use of a Windows application (ElastiCube Manager) and expert cube designers (data analytics experienced in dimensional and measure design) to put the “catalogs” into the ElastiCube Server. An ElastiCube Server is an on-premise server, or a server hosted somewhere. This step prevents the user from being blocked when accessing the data.

Dashboard Editors and Visualization

Visualization involves representing data using graphs, charts, tables, etc. It helps end-users understand the information.

ClicData

ClicData offers a simple yet powerful dashboard editor with more than 70 visualizations. This includes charts, tables, maps, indicators, images, etc.

You can create a dashboard using the drag-and-drop dashboard designer within a few minutes using ClicData.

Due to their interactive nature, the dashboards help you to filter, zoom in, or drill down when sharpening performance analysis. Even better, it allows you to create your own dashboard or use a pre-built one.

Sisense

With the Sisense visualization tool, you can create dashboards using more than 20 different widgets and a drag-and-drop interface. It also has a drill-down feature and custom colors.

Data Sharing and Collaboration

ClicData

ClicData allows the user to embed their dashboard on the web. It helps them display their dashboards on their website or Web applications. Besides, they can securely share their dashboards using ClicData Livelinks.

There are three types of permission to choose from on ClicData:

1. Private: Only the dashboard owner and the people on the security list can access the link.
2. Public: Anyone with the link can access your dashboard information.
3. Password: Anyone can access the link using a passcode.

The best part is that ClicData allows you to share as many links as you want.

Sisense

With Sisense, you can embed dashboards everywhere, including your website and app. The methods used when Embedding dashboards on Sisense include iFrame Embedding, Embed SDK, and Sisense. JS. Finally, it allows you to schedule a report to be sent daily or monthly via email.

White Labeling

White labeling allows another business to be rebranded under another company’s brand. It helps agencies and consultants display their dashboards, including names and logos, without owning or maintaining the platforms. White labeling services are available on both ClicData and Sisense.

ClicData

White label features on ClicData allow you to:

• Replace ClicData’s name with your brand’s name and logo    
• Integrate ClicData into your website or applications like ERP and CRM 

ClicData charges 49 USD per month for white-label services. 

Sisense

With Sisense, you can display your company’s branding by customizing the Sisense UI. After rebranding the software, you can display your name and logo and customize the emails sent by the system.

Pricing

There is a distinctive difference between the implementation and maintenance of these two data platforms. ClicData is a cloud-based platform, while Sisense is an IT-driven platform. It means that the software itself consumes 20% of the total ownership. The rest of the cost (80%) goes to the implementation and maintenance of the software, including hardware forms, integrators, IT staff, other software licenses, monitoring, and backups. 

ClicData

ClicData data features a price page with different plans depending on your needs. These include:

• Personal: 75 USD per month
• Team: 245 USD per month
• Business: 485 USD per month
• Enterprise: Custom quote

Sisense

Unfortunately, Sisense stopped displaying its price plan on its web page. That means you must contact them for a price quote depending on your needs. Although there’s no official confirmation to the public, a recent evaluator estimated five users could be charged a starting price of $21,000/year.

Conclusion

Even though Sisense is a powerful tool, it requires more advanced IT skills. On the other hand, ClicData is both a complete and powerful tool that saves you time. However, both platforms offer a free trial where you can make your comparison. 

If you have any questions or you feel there’s an aspect of ClicData and Sisense we need to cover, kindly book a demo with us; our experts are always ready to answer your questions.