Sense requires Kibana, which is another app to download and run. The original version of Sense, which I still use, was a simple Chrome extension.

Sense is JSON aware (and autocomplete is nice) but it still expects you to write the Elasticsearch DSL.

Mirage provides an alternative interface (GUI based) to compose the Elasticsearch queries that it transpiles on the fly to the Elasticsearch JSON syntax (and you're free to work with the latter as well).