The Ecomm Analyst

Sisense keeps coming up in searches for e-commerce analytics, and most of the time it should not. It is an embedded analytics platform aimed at software companies putting dashboards inside their own products, and at large organizations with compliance requirements. If you run a Shopify store doing $1M to $20M, you are not the customer they built it for.

Sisense’s own plans page lists two options, an Enterprise plan and a Self-Serve plan, with no figures attached to either. The Enterprise route is a conversation with sales. That is normal for this category, but it means budgeting is guesswork until you have been through a sales cycle, and the third-party numbers floating around for Sisense range from five figures to seven, which tells you how little any of them are worth.

Here is what I would look at instead, depending on what you actually need. Every price below comes from the vendor’s own pricing page, checked this week.

1. Metabase

If you have data in a warehouse and someone on the team who can write SQL, Metabase is the closest thing to a straight swap. The open source edition is free to self-host under AGPL and gives you the query builder, unlimited dashboards, and twenty plus database connectors.

Metabase Cloud starts at $100 a month with five users included and $6 per additional user per month. Pro is $575 a month with ten users included and $12 per user after that, and unlocks row and column level permissions, SSO, and white labeling. Enterprise is custom and the page states it starts at $20,000 a year. Annual billing saves 10 percent, and both paid Cloud tiers come with a 14-day free trial.

The catch is that everyone who logs in counts as a billable user, viewers included, so a big read-only audience gets expensive faster than the headline suggests.

2. Microsoft Power BI

Power BI makes sense if your business already runs on Microsoft 365. Power BI Desktop is a free download for building reports locally, but you cannot share anything without a paid license. Microsoft raised Pro to $14 per user per month and Premium Per User to $24 per user per month effective April 2025, and those are the current list prices.

The modeling is genuinely powerful and the ecosystem is deep. The downside for a DTC operator is that connecting Meta, TikTok, and Klaviyo data means either paid third-party connectors or building the pipeline yourself, and you will spend more time on plumbing than on answering questions about the business.

3. ThoughtMetric

Different category, and worth naming because most operators looking at Sisense do not actually want a BI platform. They want to know which channels are producing customers. ThoughtMetric, which sponsors this blog, connects ad platforms and Shopify order data directly and reports new customer versus returning customer revenue by channel without you building the joins yourself.

Pricing starts at $99 a month, based on pageviews, with all features included at every tier and a 14-day free trial. Annual billing works out around $83 a month. It will not replace a warehouse and it is not a general purpose BI tool, so if you need arbitrary SQL across arbitrary tables, look at Metabase instead.

4. Looker Studio

The base product is free, which is why so many small teams end up here. It connects natively to GA4, BigQuery, Google Ads, and Sheets, and for a Google-centric stack it is hard to argue with the price.

There is a paid Pro tier that adds organizational ownership of reports, team workspaces, and support. Google publishes the current Pro rate on its own pricing page and I would check there rather than trusting a roundup, because the third-party figures for this one are all over the place. The real cost is usually not the subscription anyway. It is the connectors you need for non-Google data, which typically run separately and add up fast.

The other thing to know is that free-tier reports are owned by the individual who built them. When that person leaves, the reports can go with them.

5. Polar Analytics

Polar is built specifically for Shopify brands rather than adapted for them, which shows in how quickly you get to a usable dashboard. Connectors for the ad platforms and Klaviyo are there out of the box, and the metric definitions are e-commerce ones rather than generic BI primitives.

Pricing is not listed on the website and requires a demo, so you will not be able to compare it against anything else on this list without talking to their team first. Whether that is acceptable depends on how much patience you have for sales cycles.

How I would choose

Ask what you are trying to do before you shortlist anything. If you need to explore data freely and you have warehouse infrastructure, Metabase. If you are embedded in Microsoft, Power BI. If the actual question is which ads are working, an attribution tool answers that faster and cheaper than any BI platform will.

The mistake I see repeatedly is buying enterprise BI to answer a marketing measurement question, then spending six months building the data model that would have arrived pre-built with a purpose-specific tool. Sisense is a serious product. It is just answering a different question than the one most Shopify operators are asking.

If you are working through the wider enterprise BI category, I went through the same exercise for a closely related tool here: Tableau alternatives for e-commerce reporting.