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Choosing a business intelligence tool is getting tougher each year, as well-established players strengthen their offerings and new tools emerge. But if you’re looking for an embedded analytics tool that focuses only on analytics within apps or websites, there are not that many choices.
But there is Sisense - an AI-driven, cloud-based self-service platform for embedding dashboards in SaaS products.
Unlike big players such as Tableau or Microsoft Power BI, this analytics platform primarily offers a data visualization functionality for SaaS apps. The problem? The Sisense model is not very transparent.
But is Sisense any better? We researched for you to find out how much Sisense really costs.
Finding out requires a bit of work because most of the calls to action on the website lead you to watch or book a demo. However, there is a pricing page, and it’s pretty amusing:
They offer something called “no-surprise” pricing, but it is in fact a surprise. You have to fill out a demo with your information and someone from Sisense will call back to give you a quote. This is one of the many ways that Sisense is similar to Looker.
To find information about their pricing, we have to do some research instead.
Sisense costs at least $10,000 per year for a self-hosted solution, while cloud pricing is at least $21,000 per year - these are prices for five users.
Another user says that their quote was $25,000 per year, which is the lowest that Sisense will go with minimum requirements and presumably, on-premise deployment.
Prices depend on the number of users and viewers, too, as you can see from these two users, at $35,000 and $60,000 per year:
Technically you can have a lower cost with more users, depending on their level of access (full user or viewer) and their levels of use.
The main factor that influences the cost of Sisense is how many users you have. Some users also claim that another criterion is the size of data in your largest table, because they have an analytics database. The bigger the data sets, the more the tool has to work for great query times and real-time analytics.
The second influencing factor is how Sisense is hosted. There is a massive difference in cost between self-hosted and cloud-hosted versions of Sisense. One Reddit user claims that the difference between the two (with the same number of users) is $50,000 vs $70,000 per year.
On that note, the price for cloud hosting is not set in stone either. Sisense uses a unit of measurement called an elasticube, which is another term for an analytics database.
If you have large databases and high concurrency (many computations happening at the same time), the costs are going to be high.
In essence, while Sisense does not mention it, you have usage-based pricing, similar to tools like ThoughtSpot. This means that you could have five users and high costs if they do a lot of complex data analysis, have many widgets, and pull dashboards frequently. On the other hand, you could have 50 users that don’t require complex dashboards for decision-making, which lowers your cloud hosting costs.
There are three aspects of Sisense: Fusion Embed, Compose SDK and Cloud. These are not plans, just three different ways you can use Sisense to build dashboards.
Fusion Embed is the basic Sisense offering for embedded analytics, which allows you to add a dashboard into your SaaS product or website. Sisense comes with a REST API and a variety of data sources and connectors, allowing you to pull data and metrics to your dashboards from just about anywhere.
Some user reviews state that the very process of embedding is similar to Power BI, which is a bit surprising, considering that Sisense is built embedded-first.
Compose SDK by Sisense is what makes the engine run. It’s a software development kit that you need to use to create just about anything in Sisense. It’s available via GitHub and NPM and it supports React, Angular, and Vue. There is plenty of documentation and code samples available on their website.
If you have a developer who is used to building and formatting data models in SQL, they are going to have to learn Compose SDK to be fully proficient in Sisense.
Last but not least, there is Sisense Cloud, their hosted offering. According to Sisense themselves, only about half of their customers deploy in the cloud, while others run their analytics on-premise.
Like many other BI tools, Sisense hides its pricing plans, with the end goal of getting on a call with the sales team so you can get all the details. As many user reviews say, the pricing is not friendly for startups, and you’re going to pay at least $10,000 per year for a minimum of 5 users, which is more suited for on-premise, internal use cases.
The second issue is having those hidden costs. While the tool should be user-friendly, the reality is that the onboarding period is going to take a few weeks or months to go through until you learn all the workflows. Oh and by the way, you’re going to get charged for the onboarding as well.
You pay for the training for your team, version upgrades, a customer success team in Sisense to help you make the most out of the tool, and more.
And like most enterprise software, Sisense does not let you try it out with a free trial. As for their ease of use, drag-and-drop builder, predictive analytics, machine learning tools… You have to find out how it works from the demo.
If you want to purchase Sisense for embedded data analytics, prepare yourself for a long conversation with their sales team. Read the fine print and prepare to shell out some big bucks.
Or not.
Need an embedded analytics app that does not hide its costs? Luzmo pricing starts at $995 per month, which gets you 100 monthly active viewers, 1 monthly active designer and unlimited dashboards. For more viewers, more designers, removed branding, and an embedded dashboard editor, you can get one of the more expensive plans - and they all have a price you can see immediately.
And the best part is that you don’t even have to talk to sales to find out if Luzmo is a great fit for you.
Experience the power of Luzmo. Talk to our product experts for a guided demo or get your hands dirty with a free 10-day trial.
