What do you like best about the product?

Sigma is awesome at making data accessible and editable for non-technical users, requiring minimal tech background to use effectively. If the data is modeled optimally for Sigma, this creates a great user experience, for fast performance as well as ease of editing for those non-technical users. As with any tool though, technical users can focus more on driving business value than spending too much time improving query durations.

Their writeback feature is very helpful. It's something that other BI tools should take note of, in my experience, no one does writeback better than Sigma. We can have a functional application like experience, where users can input values, tweak assumptions and scenario plan, without ever leaving the report.

Ai functionality is very cool and intuitive. While Ask Sigma has room for improvement, I do appreciate where this is headed. Things like Explain this Chart is a wow factor, and is actually useful.

Their support chat is great. We used it heavily at the beginning of our implementation.

What do you dislike about the product?

Sigma takes a very literal approach to data handling, in contrast to Power BI's more abstract methodology. This fundamental difference has significant implications for performance and cost management.
Cost and Performance Considerations

Cloud Warehouse Costs:

Sigma's literal data handling approach can lead to substantially higher cloud warehouse costs if not managed carefully. The platform requires more compute resources to execute operations compared to alternatives.

Data Preparation Requirements:

Success with Sigma depends heavily on proper data optimization and preparation. Organizations that invest in optimizing their data structure for Sigma's architecture can achieve good results. However, performing joins and on-the-fly data combinations creates a poor user experience for report consumers.

Visualization Limitations
Sigma struggles with complex visualizations, a problem that's becoming more pronounced with the introduction of input tables and linked input tables. These features drive extensive downstream calculations, but Sigma's handling of dependent visualizations remains inefficient.

Performance Issues:
Downstream visuals that utilize input table results suffer from slow interaction speeds. The platform needs to improve how it materializes results to address this fundamental performance bottleneck.

Materialization Problems
Sigma's materialization feature remains in beta status despite being available for an extended period. Even when functional, materializations are slow to execute—a significant issue given that data operations should be nearly instantaneous when occurring within the same data warehouse environment.

Technical Solutions Needed:
Sigma should implement more efficient use of temporary or transient tables for complex calculations. Downstream elements should access stored calculation results without triggering full refreshes, which currently cause compilation delays and poor user experience.

Performance per type of fact table

Strengths: Sigma excels with regular fact tables, particularly transaction data that requires simple aggregations like column sums.

Weaknesses: The platform struggles significantly with snapshot data like account balances. Visualizing balance-type data at scale requires extensive backend data preparation to achieve acceptable performance and user experience.

Bottom Line
While Sigma can be effective with proper data architecture and preparation, its literal approach to data handling creates performance challenges that require careful management to avoid cost overruns and user experience issues. We made the decision that the pros for accessible data outweighed the cons. Because if end users couldn't understand how to access and interact with the data, they wouldn't use it at all.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Sigma gives us the ability to easily give our customers simple access to their data in a way that they can understand. It also is good at the deployment of reports to our customers without complex pipelines to literally bring each report to each individual customer.

What do you like best about the product?

I like how customizable the reports are to be able to filter in and view the specific data that I need, based on the various reports I consistently use on a daily basis, I can easily find what I'm looking for. I like how easy collaboration is as well when I can view what reports are endorsed, the date of things last being access/updated, and more.

What do you dislike about the product?

I don't love how complicated it can be to customize and create visuals of the the data - bar charts, graphs, font, colors, etc. I feel like it also is a little slow and downloading reports / waiting for the data to load can take a long time. I also wish some of the filters were more dynamic in the sense that I don't have to select a drop down everytime.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Understanding how my clients are using the SaaS platform - I can see everything from what their invoiced amount was, things like utilization, users, and see the data on a line by line basis to help my customer make informed decisions moving forward.

What do you like best about the product?

It is very tedious to run reports and get KPIs for an entire department. Sigma makes it easy to do, and in turn my direct reports and I save time and energy.

What do you dislike about the product?

Often times there are discrepancies and numbers that aren’t pulling accurately.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Pulling KPIs can be tedious and time consuming. Sigma takes care of that.

What do you like best about the product?

Sigma is intuitive, easy to use, and boasts frequent updates that constantly improve its effectiveness.

What do you dislike about the product?

I actually have very few complaints about Sigma - for the most part it really gets the job done.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I am a data analyst, and Sigma is a fantastic cloud-based business intelligence (BI) and analytics platform. I handle both internal and external requests, and I am consistently impressed with how many easy-to-use but powerful features Sigma offers. I primarily use it to generate dashboards and reports, validate data, and collaborate on projects with my team.

What do you like best about the product?

Three things stand out that set Sigma far above competitors:

1) Input tables. Yes others have writeback functionality but it's just so EASY with sigma to set up data entry, make changes, track changes, that we've had employees who have had whole careers around maintaining spreadsheets *prefer* to enter it into Sigma

2) We can query the AI engine right in the dashboard. Yes it sounds scary, but once you have it working, letting the users ask the dashboard what the data means? it's a game changer! Our BI team can focus on new things rather than explaining what the data means. And it produces queries that we can review to build in alerts, highlights and more information to really have the dashboards tell the stories going forwards.

3) Customer support - The initial set up felt like we were really taken care of. We were able to test out the features and get advanced things up and running right from the day of integration. We've replaced all of our 250 reports from DOMO in to 8-10 reports in Sigma and the users feel like they got an upgrade.

Bonus points: Having Cortex with all the LLM models built in to snowflake, makes the sigma integration with snowflake just the ideal setup.

What do you dislike about the product?

The folder / user management style is a little rough still.

It doesn't have all of the visualizations we've come to expect from a Tableau. or DOMO.

It isn't intuitive on your first pass. You need to have someone guide you through the thought process to building dashboards. Once you get it, it's easy, but the learning curve on the first 3 dashboards is steep.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We are a nursing university. Sigma allows us to analyze which students are at risk, and make calls in real time to have AI analyze what mitigation efforts would be best. It let's us rebuild everything we had in DOMO, but not double load the data.

It let's me track our costs and usage in Snowflake, and keep those under control (about $20,000 a year less, and we added in AI)

What do you like best about the product?

Being able to customize reports from our TMS to be sent out at various times to specific individuals based on needs.

What do you dislike about the product?

I don't know of any downsides! I enjoy the software.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It is solving many time consuming reports.

What do you like best about the product?

I find Sigma incredibly user-friendly, making setup and access straightforward, which enhances my productivity. I appreciate how easy it is to read data and access various filters, especially for weekly stats through the coach's dashboard. I also enjoy the seamless integration with Excel, enabling easy downloads.

What do you dislike about the product?

I find it a bit slow sometimes. It usually takes about five or ten minutes to load, which can be inconvenient when I'm working.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I use Sigma to pull team scores and evaluate problem areas quickly, benefiting from its user-friendly interface, easy access to data, and seamless Excel integration.

What do you like best about the product?

Sigma is great for our FP&A team to get access to data that's in places like big query which would previously have required folks to write sql.

It's easy to use, and required little to no training to get started since it has so many similarities to other programs like excel.

What do you dislike about the product?

We still struggle to eliminate manual processes with Sigma when presenting to execs. They are not going to hop into a sigma dashboard, so we end up either having to painstakingly create all presentation materials within sigma and then screenshot them into a presentation, or paste data organized for a chart from sigma into a spreadsheet which leaves room for error.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

To pivot raw bookings and ARR data, create simple charts that we look at on a monthly basis, and investigate one-off anomalies.

What do you like best about the product?

I like how Sigma feels familiar and easy to use, especially for anyone comfortable with spreadsheets. It connects well with cloud data warehouses, so getting started is pretty smooth, though some advanced features can take a bit to get used to. The support team is helpful, and it’s something I find myself using regularly.

What do you dislike about the product?

While it’s user-friendly compared to SQL, non-technical users can still find some features or formulas tricky at first.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I can explore and analyze up-to-date data without needing to write SQL or wait for reports, which saves time and helps me make faster, more informed decisions.

What do you like best about the product?

The feature i most like is the report presentation. The graphs and charts are very good. The advanced analytics also awesome. The software helps me a lot

What do you dislike about the product?

Nothing from my end. It's very helpful for me.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

All my analytics problems solved. I can now analyse my analytics report in one software