Switching from Tableau to Sigma

Summary

In the ever-evolving landscape of business intelligence (BI) tools, organizations are constantly seeking platforms that align with their long-term data strategy. As a marketing agency, we recently made the strategic decision to migrate from Tableau to Sigma, and the results have been transformative. In this article, we delve into the reasons behind our transition, highlighting Sigma’s unique features and advantages.

Tableau Challenge

Tableau has been regarded as a powerful data visualization tool, enabling users to create various visual representations of complex datasets. In our marketing agency, it was the main tool for analysts and marketers to gather insights from for all of our client's marketing campaigns. However, as our team grew and dataset became more complicated, we encountered several challenges:

• Speed: Tableau’s reliance on data extracts became a everyday problem when creating copies of data ourside our data warehouse, Snowflake, was often taking not just minutes - but hours. Even making small changes in a dashboard required refreshing extracts and saving new versions, which became so frustrating that analysts didn't want to make any changes more than once a day.


• User Experience: While Tableau excels in visualization capabilities, it can be quite overwhelming for non-technical users. With Tableau, marketers didn't have access to make their own visulations or subtables, which is pretty crucial to gain insights while maintaining campaigns.


• Data Governance: As our team grew and the client's campaigns were diversified, the logic behind KPIs in our dashboard was becoming too complex. This not only made it diffcult to collaborate between analyts and marketers, but also made it extremely hard to find errors in reported numbers.

Sigma's advantage

• Speed and Ease of Use: Unlike Tableau, Sigma maintains a live connection to our Snowflake data warehouse, ensuring real-time data accuracy. Its cloud-native architecture was a game-changer for us, eliminating the need for extract refresh schedules. With Sigma, we were able to directly connect to live data models, ensuring real-time insights without compromising governance. Sigma's spreadsheet interface made it easier for our analysts and marketers to investigate and the focus on the numbers that matter to them.


• Customization for Marketers: Sigma’s “Explore” feature empowers our marketers to customize dashboards instead of relying heavily on analysts dashboard updates. Whether it’s tweaking metrics, adjusting visualizations, or drilling down to specific data points, marketers can tailor their dashboards to their unique needs as "explorer". This flexibility enhanced decision-making and agility, and also freed up analysts time to work on more analytical tasks rather than dashboard updates.


• Removing Layers Between Snowflake and BI: Sigma bridges the gap between our Snowflake data warehouse and BI reporting. By eliminating unnecessary layers, we streamline data access and reduced complexity. Our data engineering teams enjoy the seamless integration, allowing them to focus on more complex data solutions rather than repetitive data fix. This also prevents the logic to be miswritten or get lost as each column in Sigma is a calculated field with simpler excel-like functions rather than lenghy SQL code.

Conclusion

In summary, our transition from Tableau to Sigma has been a resounding success. We’ve gained speed, ease of use, and customization capabilities while maintaining robust data governance. Sigma’s cloud-native approach aligns perfectly with our vision for data-driven growth marketing. As we continue to explore its features, we are confident that Sigma will empower our team to make smarter, faster decisions. Our journey from Tableau to Sigma reflects the changing landscape of BI tools, where Sigma’s speed, ease of use, and customization options have revolutionized data analytics process. Like us, any marketing agencies or departments should be able to embrace Sigma’s cloud-native solutions and make data-driven success in business. 🚀📊