Pixel-perfect design and reporting for Sisense, a review of available options
Summary: Ido Darnell provides a detailed overview of various tools for creating reports in Sisense, addressing common challenges with dashboard exports. They discuss options like Native PDF export, Sisense Report Manager, Jasper Reports, and SAP Crystal Reports via ODBC, noting limitations such as lack of design control or data residency issues. The post highlights QBeeQ Report Studio as a solution for creating pixel-perfect, customizable reports within Sisense, allowing multi-dashboard integration and full layout control. A beta version for scheduled distribution is announced as forthcoming.
If you manage Sisense, you've had some version of this conversation: someone asks for a report that actually looks like a finished document, not a dashboard screenshot with the edges cut off.
There are more ways to solve this than most admins realize, and each one solves a different piece of the problem. A quick rundown:
Native PDF export - zero setup, but the layout is whatever the dashboard happens to produce. No control over page breaks, no way to add narrative text, and pivot tables cut off at the edge of the screen.
Sisense Report Manager - solid scheduling and delivery, but it's still exporting the dashboard as-is. No design layer, no multi-dashboard composition.
Jasper Reports - genuinely pixel-perfect for table and pivot widgets specifically, if you have developer resource to build and maintain JRXML templates. Doesn't touch charts or KPI widgets.
SAP Crystal Reports via ODBC - full design control, but it pulls your data out of Sisense entirely to do it, which is a real consideration if data residency matters to you.
Where this leaves most teams: something that handles scheduling, or something that handles pixel-perfect tabular data, but not both, and rarely anything that lets you design a report as its own document rather than a dashboard export.
That's the gap QBeeQ Report Studio is built for: a canvas inside Sisense where you design the report as a report - pulling from multiple dashboards if you need to, with full control over layout, brand, and every widget on the page. Report Studio Deliver, our scheduled distribution layer, is coming in beta this month.
For the full breakdown with a side-by-side comparison table, here's the complete write-up.
