Geckoboard vs Sisense

Geckoboard is a London-based company that makes live KPI dashboards designed to be shown on office TV screens, shared in Slack or sent as snapshots. Its focus is visibility rather than analysis: a support or sales team should be able to glance at a screen and know how today is going.

Dashboards are built with a simple drag-and-drop editor that connects to around 80 data sources, including Zendesk, HubSpot, Salesforce, Intercom, Google Analytics, Google Sheets, Excel and SQL databases, plus a Datasets API for custom data. Widgets show numbers, goals, leaderboards, and line and bar charts with status colors, and a dedicated TV mode handles rotation, layout and readability at a distance. Scheduled Slack and email sharing pushes the same metrics to remote staff. Pricing is a monthly subscription by number of dashboards and features, starting with an Essentials plan for two dashboards; there is a 14-day trial but no free plan.

Geckoboard fits customer support, sales and operations teams that want shared, always-on metrics with minimal setup. It is not a BI tool: there is little room for ad hoc exploration, joins or deep drill-downs, and the cost per dashboard is high compared with free options. Databox connects more sources and adds goal tracking for agencies, Klipfolio is more flexible but harder to build in, and Looker Studio or Grafana are free if you can handle the setup yourself.

Sisense is a business intelligence and embedded analytics platform founded in Tel Aviv in 2004 and now headquartered in New York. It merged with Periscope Data in 2019 and is led by CEO Ariel Katz, who previously helped build Power BI at Microsoft. Its core job today is embedded analytics: letting software companies ship dashboards, reports and AI-driven insights inside their own products, white-labeled for their customers.

Sisense connects to cloud warehouses and databases either live or through its ElastiCube data engine, then builds dashboards with drag-and-drop widgets. Developers embed them with iframes or the Compose SDK, a code-first toolkit for React, Angular and Vue. Sisense Intelligence adds natural-language queries, auto-generated narratives and an assistant end users can talk to. Packaging has two tracks: a Self-serve plan you can start for free, and Enterprise with multi-tenancy, column-level security, SSO and on-prem or dedicated cloud hosting.

Sisense fits SaaS companies that sell analytics as a feature and need tight control over tenants and branding. It is a weaker fit for internal-only reporting, where Power BI or Tableau offer more analysts, training and lower per-seat costs, and for tight budgets, where Metabase's open-source embedding or Looker Studio's free tier go further.

Buying tip: Sisense does not publish prices, and third-party reports put cloud contracts in the five figures per year. Get the tenant count, user model and AI usage limits written into the quote, and ask how AI features are billed.