business intelligence tools power bi brands

The fundamental purpose of leveraging Business Intelligence tools is to understand trends and derive actionable insights from your data, allowing you to make more strategic and tactical business decisions. The popular features offered by Business Intelligence tools are Visual Analytics, Data Visualization, KPI Scorecards, and Interactive Dashboarding to name a few. They also allow users to leverage predictive analytics and automated reporting features on a self-service basis.

Microsoft offers several Business Intelligence tools to cater to your needs. In this article, you will learn about the 4 key Microsoft Business Intelligence Tools: Power BI, Power BI Embedded, Azure Analysis Services, and Azure Synapse Services in great detail.

In layman’s terms, Business Intelligence tools are application software, involved in collating and processing unstructured data from external and internal systems. The results obtained from Business Intelligence tools help increase operational efficiency, identify market trends, zero in on new revenue potentials, and identify new business opportunities.

Business Intelligence tools like Power BI are generally used for business reporting of data and simple querying of results, but they can also combine various data analysis applications like OLAP (Online Analytical Processing), Cloud and software as a service Business Intelligence, real-time Business Intelligence, and location intelligence to name a few.

Microsoft BI is a technology-driven Business Intelligence Tool developed by Microsoft that helps analyze and visualize raw data to produce actionable insights. It integrates Business Analytics, Data Visualization, and Best Practices to assist organizations in making data-driven decisions. It provides an easy-to-use interface for end-users to create their own Reports and Dashboards. You can leverage it to extract data from various Cloud and On-premise systems and build Dashboards that track the most important metrics to you and your business. Apple, Exxon Mobil, Walmart, and Toyota Motor North America are some of the prominent names that leverage Microsoft Power BI for Business Intelligence.

The Microsoft Business Intelligence Suite is a suite of tools designed to make data processing easier. The complete range of tools helps businesses direct data through IT systems, create expansive reports on the current status of various departments, and identify and isolate data. It includes SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services), SSIL (SQL Server Integration Services), and SSAS (SQL Server Analytical Services). Microsoft Business Intelligence platform functions by moving data from various disparate data sources to a centralized architecture where the rudimentary data can be reconfigured. Here are a few benefits of Microsoft Business Intelligence tools:

Elimination of Manual Tasks: Previously, Business Management relied on static presentations and spreadsheets. Microsoft Business Intelligence tools eliminate the endless amount of columns & rows and facilitate the automation of processes. Be it a dashboard with real-time data or interactive presentations, Microsoft Business Intelligence tools have got you covered.

Reduction of Business Costs: Microsoft Business Intelligence tools enable faster analysis, planning, and reporting processes for customer behavior analysis, sales planning, and real-time optimization. Since these tools bolster the efficiency of your operations, it helps you cut back on costs and make more profitable adjustments.

Key Predictions: Microsoft Business Intelligence tools allow any business user to generate actionable insights for future scenarios through the incorporation of forecast engines. This helps companies adjust current strategies to deliver the best possible results.

Easy Data Access: By providing data access to every individual within a company, Microsoft Business Intelligence tools significantly reduce the need to request reports from the IT department. A self-service BI approach as mentioned here allows enterprises to gain a competitive edge. Since every employee is equipped with the appropriate data analytics skills, it helps save the company’s resources and time while easing the burden on the IT department. This frees up more time which can be focused on more critical tasks.

A fully managed No-code Data Pipeline platform likeHevo helps you integrate data from 100+ data sources(including 40+ Free Data Sources) to Power BI in real-time in an effortless manner. Hevo with its minimal learning curve can be set up in just a few minutes allowing the users to load data without having to compromise performance. Its strong integration with umpteenth sources provides users with the flexibility to bring in data of different kinds, in a smooth fashion without having to code a single line.

Power BI is not the name of a single application, but the umbrella term for a collection of applications. The types of Microsoft BI tools are explained in detail.

Power BI Desktop: It is the most basic application. As the name suggests, it can be installed in standalone mode on a desktop. It is offered free of cost and can be connected to various data sources. It enables users to analyze data and derive insights from the data. It can connect to on-premise as well as cloud-based data sources. Power BI Desktop is not available via the web and is an independent stand-alone analysis tool. Beyond the ad-hoc analysis tool use case, it also acts as the development environment for creating reports and dashboards that can be deployed later.

Power BI Report Server is a web application that can be deployed on-premise to let the users in an organization view the reports and dashboards. The reports and dashboards that are designed through the Power BI Desktop can be deployed in the report server. It supports a level of interactivity for the reports and dashboards.

Power BI Service is the cloud-based business intelligence tool that is available based on a subscription from Microsoft. It lets the users take advantage of Power BI Analytics features without having to spend time with deployment or maintenance. It can connect the most common on-premise and cloud-based data sources. In the back end, it works based on Microsoft Azure compute clusters. This enables it to handle large data volumes and streaming data. It is offered based on different subscription plans like premium and pro depending upon the feature sets.

Power BI Mobile is Microsoft’s attempt to bring Power BI to mobile devices. In the back end, it also makes use of the Power BI Service. All the actual data processing happens in cloud servers and the mobile application serves as the front end for displaying interactive dashboards and reports.

Power BI Embedded helps users to enable Power BI features in their custom web applications. It enables developers to control the user experience while letting their customers have access to the power of analytics in a familiar environment.

Microsoft Business Intelligence tools provide a convenient solution to handle the vast amount of crucial Business Intelligence information continually by modern companies. In this section, you will get a glimpse of the 4 key Business Intelligence tools that are a part of the Microsoft Business Intelligence Suite.

Microsoft Power BI is the top Microsoft Business Intelligence tool that is a mix of SaaS, Cloud-Based, and Desktop tools. The central focus of Power BI is data mining, exploring, and reporting. Power BI is mainly used for achieving reporting tasks through APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). The elegance of Power BI comes from its near-limitless ability to mine data from diverse sources. It can extract insights from traditional databases as easily as it can extract data from newer SaaS architectures, for instance, GitHub and Zendesk.

Convenient Reporting of Data: You can start working on building elegant reports once the right data sources have been mined and relevant insights extracted. Power BI also supports third-party custom visuals.

Transformation of Data: Once you have put aside the sources you want to import, Power BI gives you a preview window. In this preview window, you can choose columns or other classification features for better organization of data. The Query Editor allows you to change, shape, configure and restructure data in various ways.

Discovery of Data: The primary purpose of Power BI is data mining. It looks for information in as many sources as instructed. You can do this by either importing data to Power BI or leveraging Direct Query, based on the size of your desired report.

Creation of Dashboards: A key proponent of collaboration is a dashboard. It allows a user to view and interact with the report. Power BI is flexible enough to let you create a live report feed so that all memos and documents get uploaded to the dashboard.

Power BI is built on the back of Azure, Microsoft’s Cloud Computing platform and infrastructure. The Power BI service architecture is based on two clusters: the Back End cluster and the Web Front End (WFE) cluster. The WFE cluster focuses on the initial authentication and connection to the Power BI service, while the Back End cluster deals with all the subsequent user interactions.

User Identities are stored and managed by Power BI by utilizing Azure Active Directory (AAD). The data storage is managed by Azure BLOB and the storage of metadata is managed by leveraging Azure SQL Database.

Power BI Embedded is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering that enables developers to embed dashboards and reports to an application for their customers. Power BI Embedded allows you to build top-notch analytics without having to develop them yourself. With Power BI Embedded, you can reduce developer resources by automating the management, monitoring, and deployment of analytics.

The embedding is carried out through an hourly metered, capacity-based model. Coupled with a REST API, Power BI Embedded lets you develop elegant apps in any language. Here are a few features of Power BI Embedded:

Control User Experience: With hundreds of visuals to choose from, Power BI Embedded ensures you have full control over how to deliver analytics to your users. It does this through several actions like:Turning on Q&A sessions to ensure users get their answers immediately.

Faster Business Growth: Power BI Embedded helps you create differentiated offers, new revenue streams, and data products to improve customer interactions and get to market faster.

Power BI Embedded takes user security very seriously. This is evident from the following features of Power BI Embedded that ensure a secure and robust front when it comes to data security:

The total cost of Power BI Embedded depends on the number of nodes deployed and the type of node you choose for your operations. The node types differ based on RAM and the number of V-cores as follows:

Azure Analysis Services can be used to define metrics and secure your data in a trusted tabular data model. This data model provides a faster and easier way for users to perform ad hoc data analysis using tools like Excel and Power BI. Here are a few key features of Azure Analysis Services:

Azure Analysis Services offers three tiers to choose from. The pricing for the three tiers will depend on the chosen tier and instance. Within each tier, the prices will differ by QPUs, processing power, and memory size.

Integrated AI and BI: For a complete end-to-end analytics solution, you can establish integrations with Power BI, Azure Cognitive Services, and Azure Machine Learning.

It’s easy to forget that there are other MS BI solutions when Power BI provides so many distinct data processing functions. It’s part of a collection of tools, many of which can be used as SQL Server Integration Services Sources (SSIS). They help with data extraction and integration in order to provide usable, useful Business Intelligence.

Since it speeds up the transportation of data through Microsoft-based software processes, Azure is a big hit for the company. It’s a flexible architecture that allows you to build Cloud-native apps. Azure may be used in conjunction with Power BI and other apps to create more self-contained data platforms that are not limited by hardware.

It’s also quite simple to learn, which makes it an excellent foundation for new enterprises. Users with little training will find it less daunting because most people have used it at least once before. You can also construct dashboards with it, similar to Power BI. For the reasons stated, the interface isn’t always as seamless, but Excel is still capable of manipulating massive amounts of data.

It’s a good idea to get the PowerPivot add-on if you wish to utilize Microsoft Excel for self-service Business Intelligence. This is how you’ll be able to create custom dashboards. It’s here that you can share and pin reports derived from various data sources. There’s also a robust data reporting feature that allows for complex DAX calculations.

This blog talks in detail about the different Microsoft Business Intelligence tools that the software giant has to offer. For each of the tools discussed here, the features, security measures, and pricing are highlighted.

However, many of these data points exist in isolation and require the best BI tools to connect the dots together. This is what business intelligence represents: the ability to not just look at a specific detail of business operations, but tie in key information from each angle into an overall whole.

Software behemoth, Microsoft, also plays in the business intelligence tool space, and their offering is Microsoft Power BI. They even have a Microsoft Business Applications Summit that features their Power BI, and not surprisingly other Microsoft business applications. Unlike some of their competition that take a totally web-based portal approach, Power BI also offers downloadable software, so you can run your analytics either in the cloud or via a reporting server.

Zoho Analytics is the business intelligence tool from the folks that have plenty of experience with web-based business tools, namely the venerable Zoho Office. Zoho Reports is a robust solution, that can integrate data from a variety of files, including Microsoft Office documents, URL feeds, and databases, such as MySQL, along with applications, of course from Zoho, but also outside their ecosystem including data from the cloud from Box, DropBox, Google Drive and other applications (for example Salesforce, Quickbooks and Google Analytics).

We"ve only scratched the surface when it comes to BI, as there are many providers in the market. However, the caveat is always that a software platform is only as good as its programmers, and data always needs to be the best quality - too many managers presume that processes and workflows are being correctly followed when they may not be and therefore undermine analyzes. Additionally, while there are comprehensive BI tools available there are also ones that focus on particular areas, such as sales or distribution, in order to provide more detailed and focused insights:

Reports and dashboards across devices:Dynamic visuals are organized into interactive reports and dashboards, similar to other tools in our lists, and you can access them also on mobile and tablet devices (both Android and iOS).

Integration with other applications:You can integrate SAS with Microsoft Office applications such as PowerPoint, Word, SharePoint or Excel with their Office Analytics solution which enables you to view your results directly in Microsoft Office Suite.

SAP BusinessObjects is a business intelligence platform designed for comprehensive reporting, analysis, and data visualization. They provide Office integrations with Excel and PowerPoint where you can create live presentations and hybrid analytics that connects to their on-premises and cloud SAP systems. They’re focused on business categories such as CRM and customer experience, ERP and digital core, HR, and people engagement, digital supply chain, and many more. To be accurate, more than 170M users leverage SAP across the world, making it one of the largest software suppliers in the world. On Capterra, the company obtained a review of 4.2 stars, while in G2Crowd 3.8 stars with over 400 reviews, confirming its well-established place in the market since 1972.

Self-service, role-based dashboards:Analytics applications and data visualization are focused on self-service capabilities, similar to other tools, where you can build your own role-based dashboards and applications to assess risks, for example.

Integration with Office:By using Microsoft Excel with SAP, you can analyze larger volumes of data, and embed analytics in PowerPoint, making this solution easily integrated with Office.

Domo is a business intelligence software comprised of multiple systems that are featured in this platform, starting with connecting the data and finishing with extending data with pre-built and custom apps from the Domo Appstore. You can use Domo also for your data lakes, warehouses, and ETL tools, alongside R or Python scripts to prepare data for predictive modeling. Similar to other tools, you can connect the data across your enterprise, utilize their machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities while enabling users to explore the data on their own. With a firm 4.2 stars rating on Capterra and an even better 4.4 in G2Crowd, this BI application is also recommended by many users across the world, even though the company is one of the younger on our list – founded in 2011.

Numerous pre-built cloud connectors:Data integration works similarly to other tools, as mentioned; you can connect to more than 1000 pre-built cloud connectors, on-premise with Domo Workbench, file upload such as Excel or Google Docs, proprietary systems, and federated connectors that will enable you to query the data where it’s hosted.

Magic ETL feature:Data transformation tools will enable you to prepare your data with a drag-and-drop Magic ETL, as Domo calls it, without the need to learn SQL.

Mr. Roboto as an AI engine:Predictive analysis is powered with Mr. Roboto, Domo’s AI engine, which enables data scientists to create predictive models and utilize artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, and other AI technologies that alert and notify about changes in KPIs, for example.

Oracle Business Intelligence is a portfolio of technology and applications with a focus on providing end-to-end solutions to help businesses optimize their performance and empower them to make faster and more informed mobile-enabled decision-making. Oracle has 4.2 stars rating on Capterra and a 4.0 in G2Crowd, and they offer a wide ray of features for data management such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, integrated array of querying, reporting, mobile analytics, among others. Since its foundation in 1977 Oracle’s mission has been to provide businesses with the tools to efficiently manage their data in a comprehensive and agile way.

We continue our BI tools list with Zoho Analytics. Although the company offers many products ranging from CRM, bundles, and apps, here we focus on their BI and analytics solutions as the most relevant for our topic. With more than 500 integrations for your business apps, more than 10 000 customers worldwide, and a strong 4.3 stars rating on Capterra and 4.2 on G2Crowd, this is one of the business intelligence reporting tools worth taking into consideration.

Blending and visualizing data:Similar to other tools on our list, their most prominent features focus on blending data from multiple sources, and visualizing them through reports and dashboards via their drag-and-drop designer. But not only, as you can also feed data from their online storage service Zoho Docs.

Intelligent assistant Zia:If you’re looking for artificial intelligence-powered analytics, Zoho has created Zia, an intelligent assistant that you can ask questions in form of natural language, and you will immediately receive the answer in the form of reports and KPI widgets. Zia is based on natural language processing and machine learning technologies to help the user search for data faster.

MicroStrategy is an enterprise business analytics software and mobility platform focused on hyperintelligence, federated analytics, and cloud solutions. Their mobile dossiers enable users to build interactive books of analytics that render on iOS or Android devices, with the possibility to extend the MicroStrategy content into their apps by using Xcode or JavaScript. You can download a sample app, MicroStrategy Mobile, or the Library app where you will enable you to deploy analytics on-the-go. Both Capterra and G2Crowd reviewers rate this tool with 4.2 stars, hence, this is one of our examples of business analytics tools having strong references on the BI market.

Federated analytics:It provides a common data glossary, no matter the tools you use, built on an enterprise semantic graph that indexes all the disparate data systems and enables visualizations of the same data.

Integration with voice technology:Powered by natural language processing and machine learning, you can also integrate voice technology and chatbots such as Alexa or Google Home.

The next tool on the list is Dundas BI. With a 4.5 rating in Capterra and 4.4 in G2Crowd, this business intelligence platform aims to make the entire analytics process more simple and flexible via interactive dashboards, reports, and visual analytics. The Software was founded in 1992 as a solution for data visualizations with the name of Dundas. In 2015, after many recognitions in the visualization industry, the tool mutated to Dundas BI an end-to-end analytics platform that empowers every level of user to visualize and analyze data with features such as report generation, ad hoc queries, data discovery, among others.

GoodData is a business analytics software that provides the tools for data ingestion, storage, analytic queries, visualizations, and application integration. You can embed their analytics into your website, desktop, or mobile application or create dashboards and reports for your daily activities, without the need to obtain a Ph.D., as stated on their website. Also, one of the younger software solutions on our list, founded in 2007, GoodData received a stable 4.3 stars review on Capterra paired to a 4.0 on G2Crowd positioning them as one of the great tools to manage your business.

A modular data pipeline:They also offer a modular data pipeline for fast data integration with an on-premise or cloud warehouse, no matter if the data is structured, semi-structured or unstructured. You can also use tools such as SQL, Python, R or Ruby for flexible data processing.

QlikView is one of the BI applications offered by Qlik as part of its data analytics platform focused on rapid development and guided analytics applications and dashboards. It’s built on an Associative Engine that allows data discovery without the need to use query-based tools, eliminating the risk of data loss and inaccurate results. With a decent rating of 4.3 stars on Capterra and 4.1 on G2Crowd, users are quite satisfied with this product and its features, making it one of the top BI tools on our list.

Developer’s platform:Various tools and resources are provided for developers, such as the Qlik Branch Community, the Qlik Knowledge Hub, the Qlik Branch Playground (which they announced soon to be retired) and the Qlik Core documentation.

Yellowfin signals via smartphone:Benefit from the automated detection of trends and anomalies in your data thanks to the Yellowfin signals, which are based on powerful, AI-controlled algorithms and enable immediate, personalized notifications directly to your smartphone.

Big data is all around us and steadily increasing with each year. By utilizing BI and business analytics tools, you stand to reap great rewards – your data management will become more cohesive, stable, agile, and predictable with numerous features that these tools have on offer. We aimed to help you consider the best tools on the market, and we hope we have provided an extensive review of each product that will inspire you to start exploring business intelligence tools and find a perfect fit for your company or department.

To help you process and remember all the information you just received, below we provide you with a visual summary of our 14 best business intelligence tools for 2022.

We’ve researched the best business intelligence software according to user popularity and major features. Compare the top BI tools in the chart below, and read on to learn more about how these data analytics tools can improve your enterprise outcomes. For a custom set of recommendations of the best BI software for your company, try our Product Selection Tool at the top of the page.

Business intelligence (BI) software is a set of business analytics solutions used by companies to retrieve, analyze, and transform data into useful business insights, usually within easy-to-read visualization like charts, graphs, and dashboards. Examples of the best BI tools include data visualization, data warehouses, interactive dashboards, and BI reporting tools. In contrast to competitive intelligence that analyzes data from outside sources, a BI solution pulls internal data that the business produces into an analytics platform for deep insights into how different parts of the business affect one another.

As big data — the tendency for companies to collect, store, and mine their business data — has gained in prominence, so has the popularity of BI software. Companies generate, track, and compile business data at a scale never before seen. And the ability to integrate cloud software directly with proprietary systems has further driven the need to combine multiple data sources and take advantage of data preparation tools. But all this data is nothing if we can’t make sense of it and use it to improve business outcomes.

Business intelligence has traditionally taken the form of quarterly or yearly reports that report on a defined set of key performance indicators (KPIs), but today’s BI reporting software is backed by data analytics tools that work continuously and at light speed. These insights can help a company choose a course of action in a matter of minutes.

BI software interprets a sea of quantifiable customer and business actions and returns queries based on patterns in the data. BI comes in many forms and spans many different types of technology. This business intelligence tools comparison of software vendors breaks down the three major stages data must go through to provide business intelligence, and provides considerations for purchasing BI tools for different sized businesses.

Business intelligence tools and platforms come in several forms for varying business needs. Companies looking to provide data services to business users will find self service BI software will meet the needs of most of their users. Data visualization tools are helpful for teams that are dipping their toes into data analytics but may not have lots of extra development resources available. Data warehousing tools provide the underlying infrastructure that can house and cleanse data before serving it up through visualizations. And BI tools provide end-to-end dashboard tools to store, cleanse, visualize, and publish data.

Some business intelligence platforms pull data for analysis directly from the source applications via a native API connection or webhook. Other business intelligence tools require the use of a cloud data storage system to aggregate diverse data sets in a common location. Small businesses, single departments, or individual users may find that a native connection works well, but large corporations, enterprise companies, and companies that generate large data sets will need a more comprehensive business intelligence setup.

Regardless of whether businesses choose to store their data in a data warehouse, a cloud database, an on-premise server, or run queries on the source system, data analysis and the resulting insights make the field appealing to business users. Data analytics tools vary in terms of complexity, but the general method of combining large amounts of normalized data to identify patterns remains consistent across business intelligence platforms.

Perhaps one of the most exciting aspects of BI, advanced analytics features like predictive and prescriptive analytics function as a subset of data mining. The tools use existing data sets and algorithmic models to help companies make better business decisions.

Unstructured data can’t be stored in neatly categorized sets of similarly-formatted data rows or columns, which makes it impossible for traditional data mining software to analyze. However, this data is often crucial to understanding business outcomes. With so much data in unstructured form, text analytics should be a key consideration when researching the best business intelligence tools.

Natural language processing (NLP) software, also known as text analytics software, combs large sets of unstructured data to find hidden patterns. NLP is particularly interesting for businesses that work with social media. Using the right software mix of data ingestion and AI, a business can set up rules to track keywords or phrases — a business’s name, for example — to find patterns in how customers use that language. Natural language processing tools also measure customer sentiment, provide actionable insight into lifetime customer value, and learn customer trends that can inform future product lines.

For example, a supply chain’s data metrics can include location, SKU, date of purchase, salesperson, and expiration date. OLAP tools can provide the analysts with a clear picture of any combination of these metrics. That provides analysts with the power to surface insights that would otherwise be hidden within two or three-dimensional spreadsheets.

Not every business user needs full access to everything available in the dashboard. Most employees only need access to a dashboard of their most important metrics. It gives at-a-glance access to a range of predefined visualizations. While each company can define its own dashboards based on custom business needs, some possible dashboard tools provide:

Some BI solutions also offer interactive dashboard tools where business users can manipulate the data visualizations, dig for a more detailed view, and zoom out for more context.

BI applications promise to clarify data analytics tools for the most non-technical of employees, which has driven the demand for embedded BI. These features let companies build data visualizations within their cloud BI software, and dynamically serve those visualizations to internal and external customers within company apps.

Visualizations, reports, and dashboards that are embedded in a company webpage or cloud app save companies thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars they would otherwise use to build BI reporting tools and analytics dashboards from scratch to track business performance. These tools now give business users access to custom, plug-and-play visualizations, greatly speeding the time to market.

QlikView business intelligence from Qlik is a powerful tool trusted by huge corporations such as Cisco, Raymond James, and KitchenAid, and it’s easy to see why. User-friendly interfaces and flexible customization make the tool an ideal self-service BI for your team to use, and users report excellent customer support and training.

Best suited for enterprise-level businesses, Birst offers a user-friendly experience for both developers and end-users, including a complete API that allows you to integrate other tools and automate simple tasks. Birst also provides both governance and agility in its platform, allowing for centralized, controlled data while also letting you source data from multiple points across your business.

Standout feature: Birst is one of the only BI tools that offers governance and agility in one platform, giving companies the power to keep a single source of truth for data while remaining nimble.

Looker is another bi tool that’s grown in popularity in recent years. The tool offers easy and attractive reporting, but unlike many other BI tools, Looker updates dashboards regularly, providing you with the most up-to-date information in real time.

As a pioneer among business intelligence tools, MicroStrategy was one of the first BI tools to be picked up by large corporations after McDonald’s signed a $10 million contract with the company in 1992. The tool continues to deliver today, offering fast and comprehensive reporting tools and best-in-class security features.

While it is best known as one of the top business intelligence tools on the market, BOARD also offers performance management, analytics, and data discovery solutions all in one platform. Combine its all-in-one approach to business intelligence with clear data visualization tools, and it’s easy to see why BOARD is among our top picks for business intelligence solutions.

Consistently recognized as one of the best BI solutions around, Microsoft Power BI offers flexible plans for businesses of all sizes and integrates with your Microsoft office tools such as Excel. In addition to sourcing data from a variety of cloud and on-premise sources, Power BI can also collect data from IoT devices.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are computing trends that have touched nearly every corner of the technology industry because of their abilities to spot patterns and learn from existing data. BI in particular is ripe for the growth of ML products because the tools thrive in high data-density environments. AI and ML algorithms can be used on existing data to learn, predict, and better forecast for businesses.

Cloud computing — and the databases that it produces — give companies thousands of daily data points to train machine learning algorithms. Companies that use BI will find that data integration between AI tools and their cloud data warehouses is often the logical next step.

In-memory database processing utilizes RAM instead of disk or hard drive processing in order to read information. Accessing information in this manner increases the application performance exponentially. The increasing power of RAM in our cloud or on-premise computing environments coupled with the demand for more agile systems means this software has a large stake in the future of BI. Dramatic drops in memory prices are making it a more popular option than running data analysis through multidimensional databases and cubes.

More and more, BI users aren’t IT staff; they’re employees with a standard amount of technological savvy that want to harness the power of cloud BI to get a competitive advantage.

Comparing all the features these tools offer side by side can be a daunting task, but we can help you shave hours off your software search. Contact us today or fill out the form at the top of the page to start the process. We’ll send you a set of recommendations that fit your feature requirements and data needs.

Are you considering implementing a business intelligence tool? Then you’ll happy to hear you have tons of different options on the market. Business intelligence tools (BI tools) are all about helping you understand trends and deriving insights from your data so that you can make tactical and strategic business decisions. They also help you idenitfy patterns in the mountains of data your business builds up. But the question is… how do you know which business intelligence tool is best for your business? And which tools will help you achieve your online goals?

For starters, data discovery, which used to be limited to the expertise of advanced analytics specialists, is now something everyone can do using these tools. And not only that, these tools give you the insights you need to achieve things like growth, resolve issues that are urgent, collect all your data in one place, forecast future outcomes and so much more.

In this article we will explain the top 15 Business Intelligence tools in 2021 and hopefully put you on the right path towards selecting your a tool fit for your business.

Keep in mind: these business intelligence tools all vary in robustness, integration capabilities, ease-of-use (from a technical perspective) and of course, pricing.

MicroStrategy is an enterprise business intelligence tool that offers powerful (and high speed) dashboarding and data analytics, cloud solutions and hyperintelligence. With this solution, users can identify trends, recognise new opportunities, improve productivity and more. Users can also connect to one or various sources, whether the incoming data is from a spreadsheet, cloud-based or enterprise data software. It can be accessed from your desktop or via mobile. Setup, however can involve multiple parties and some rather extensive knowledge of the application in order to get started.

Sisense is a user-friendly data analytics and business intelligence tool that allows anyone within your organisation to manage large and complex datasets as well as analyse and visualise this data without your IT department getting involved. It lets you bring together data from a wide variety of sources as well including Adwords, Google Analytics and Salesforce. Not to mention, because it uses in-chip technology, data is processed quite quickly compared to other tools. Thi splatform is even recognised as a leading cloud analytics platform by various industry experts such as Gartner, G2 and Dresner.

Microsoft Power BI is a web-based business analytics tool suite which excels in data visualisation. It allows users to identify trends in real-time and has brand new connectors that allow you to up your game in campaigns. Because it’s web-based, Microsoft Power BI can be accessed from pretty much anywhere. This software also allows users to integrate their apps and deliver reports and real-time dashboards.

Data discovery app, Looker is another business intelligence tool to look out for! Now part of Google Cloud, this unique platform integrates with any SQL database or warehouse and is great for startups, midsize-businesses or enterprise-grade businesses. Some benefits of this particular tool include ease-of-use, handy visualisations, powerful collaboration features (data and reports can be shared via email or USL as well as integrated with other applications), and reliable support (tech team).

This is for all of the Excel-lovers out there…This BI tool is an intuitive Excel-based software that can be used by employees with even the most basic knowledge of Excel. What you get is a self-service Business Intelligence system that offers several BI features such as creating, automating, analysing and visualisation your company’s data. This solution also works with the aforementioned Microsoft Power BI, using Power Query and Power Pivot to clean and model different datasets.

Domo is a completely cloud-based business intelligence platform that integrates multiple data sources, including spreadsheets, databases and social media. Domo is used by both small companies and large multinationals. The platform offers micro and macro level visibility and analyses (including predictive analysis powerd with Mr. Roboto, their AI engine). From cash balances and listings of your best selling products by region to calculations of the marketing return on investment (ROI) for each channel. The only setbacks with Domo are the difficulty in downloading analyses from the cloud for personal use and the steep learning curve.

Business Intelligence Tools are very versatile and provide you with a lot of useful information regarding your business’ performance and where it’s headed. However, while great for collating / gathering data from various sources and helping you make sense of it, it does little in terms of collecting data directly from your customers. So why not take it a step further…

Be sure to check out some of our other marketing technology tool roundups, such as the best customer feedback tools, customer journey mapping tools, usability testing tools and more.

Business Intelligence (BI) is used to transform data into actionable insights that provide value to an organization and help achieve its business goals. Reports and dashboards are the go-to approaches for modern-day business intelligence tools.

At Appsilon, we are big advocates of R and R Shiny, but we also have significant experience with business intelligence tools. Besides, coding custom solutions from scratch (or coding in general) isn’t always the right solution, especially for simple tasks. The custom-built BI solutions have their place, but more on that towards the end of the article.Are you an Excel user who is curious about R Shiny? Read How to Switch from Excel to R Shiny: First Steps

All of the BI tools you’ll see in this article are top contenders in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. Because of that, all of them are considered to be go-to solutions for enterprise businesses. Here’s a list of our top BI tools:

In addition to evaluating these tools, we’ll also answer the question of whether you should develop custom dashboards from scratch, and when would be an appropriate time for that.

PowerBI is a collection of software services, apps, and connectors that work together to turn unrelated sources into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights – at least according toMicrosoft.

PowerBI is one of the most widely recognized BI tools due to its intuitive interface, various visualization options, and because it looks good by default. Even if something isn’t supported,PowerBI can easily connect to R and Python.

All of these options and plenty of other more technical details made PowerBI a tool of choice for giant corporations, such asWalmart,Apple, AndExxonMobil.

PowerBI is easy to get started with. You’ll only need a couple of crash courses to create impressive data visualizations. Don’t let this fool you though –PowerBI is tough to master, as this requires learning the whole suite of Microsoft tools.At the same time, that’s the biggest reason to use PowerBI – it includes full integration with the Microsoft ecosystem (authorization, Azure, Office 365, and so on). If you are a big fan of Microsoft’s UI, it’s safe to say you’ll find PowerBI somewhat familiar and comfortable.

As with Tableau, PowerBI isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. PowerBI is read-only, and you can’t access the source code. As a result, it is nearly impossible to maintain proper version control. This is a problem that PowerBI shares with Microsoft Excel.

Also, you can’t do too much about visuals within PowerBI. Don’t get us wrong, there is a lot you can tweak, but the amount of options doesn’t necessarily correlate with how charts end up looking. The UI can also feel overwhelming at first because there are too many icons and menus to look at, which takes focus away from the visualizations.

When it comes to pricing, things look better with PowerBI than with Tableau. PowerBI desktop isentirely free, provided you have a Windows machine. It is limited to approximately 2GB of data, but you can always upgrade to the Pro version if you need more. It will set you back $9.99 per month per user, so this shouldn’t be a deal-breaker.There are more advanced Premium versions of PowerBI which are used in enterprise situations, and those currently cost $4,995 per month per dedicated cloud compute and storage resource.

To conclude: PowerBI can be entirely free for individuals and small teams depending on the use case. The tool has its quirks, and it’s not as intuitive as Tableau, but it won’t cost you a small fortune to get started.

Sisense falls into the category of excellent but lesser-known business intelligence tools. It’s not that no one is using Sisense – quite the opposite – but it’s the lack of brand awareness that makes you think of Tableau or PowerBI first. Even so, we think Sisense gives PowerBI and Tableau a run for their money.

Most business intelligence tools fail whenever you try to integrate them within other web apps, and you are forced to use their products individually. Most of our clients want to embed dashboards within other tools keeping them fully controlled by external UI elements and with custom authorization setups. This BI limitation often results in having multiple BI tools within one organization rather than having access to a single integrated solution.

Covering all of the available business intelligence tools isn’t feasible for a single article. Instead, we wanted to cover a few of the top market leaders. Tableau, PowerBI, and Sisense have their place in modern data analytics and visualization, and it’s up to you to decide which one(s) you’ll use.

If price is your main concern, start with PowerBI. The free version comes with more than enough features for many users, but if you want something completely customizable, R Shiny and other code-based solutions are your only real options.

There’s a broad spectrum of business intelligence (BI) tools out there, from highly technical and powerful platforms to user-friendly and lightweight dashboard builders. Choosing the right one depends on where your business is today, where you want it to end up, who needs access to the data, your tech stack, and so on.

Microsoft’s Power BI is a business intelligence tool whose main differentiator is the fact that it sits within the larger Microsoft ecosystem, integrating with Excel, Azure, Access, and more. While these integrations are a plus for many, Power BI has proven to be difficult for some to learn—and it has some unique quirks.

It’s not the easiest business intelligence tool to set up and maintain, so teams with little capacity to spare may want to look elsewhere. Once set up, it has a reputation for being more malleable than other massive business intelligence tools. One user on Quora used this comparison: Tableau is like iOS, while Power BI is like Android. The result is good modeling functionality that, again, requires some expertise to set up and utilize.

If you’re fully fluent in Excel, you won’t have to work too hard to understand Power BI. As Alainia Conrad of SelectHub says, “Users with experience in [Excel] will be able to adapt to [Power BI].”

Users of Power BI tend to praise its ability to handle the flow of data as well as its modeling capabilities. In their comparison between Power BI and Tableau, user Grovbolle on Reddit says, “Power BI is very strong on the data modeling and infrastructure, a bit less on visualization.”

Power BI has a steep learning curve, and it requires expert knowledge to set up. “You need to work with an IT person to interface Power BI with existing systems,” says Shreshthi Mehta in her TrustRadius review. On G2, Xinito L. says, “This is not an application for amateurs.”

It also has some quirks that’ll cost you time, as the good people of Reddit are quick to point out in r/PowerBI. Here is the top-rated post of all time in that community:

Jason Harris at Panoply explains it this way: “While [Chartio] may not have all the functionality that your data analysts are looking for, it’s well suited to business users.” On G2, one executive in financial services says, “[Chartio] has relatively fewer features than the other primary tools out there, like Tableau. I think in part, that’s what enables it to be user-friendly, so it’s a trade-off rather than a downside.”

Looker is a powerful tool for modeling data using its proprietary language, LookerML, that has limited visualization capabilities and data inputs. Google Cloud Platform acquired it in 2019, moving it into the Google walled garden, which means it may get combined with Google Data Studio in the near future,as explained in-depth here.

LookML provides a powerful modeling layer that some veterans enjoy. On Reddit,user rlaxx1 says, “The modeling layer allows you to basically turn SQL into object-oriented code.”

Google Data Studio has perhaps the lowest bar of entry for the business intelligence tools listed here. But it lacks deeper data functionality, relying on other Google services like BigQuery to fill in the gaps.

Tableau Desktop is the standalone data visualization tool from Tableau, a legacy giant among other business intelligence tools. Tableau was one of the first BI tools to lower the bar for entry into data visualization but still remains out of reach for the average business user due to its older feature set designed for large, expert data teams.

It’s very flexible in how you manipulate and use data, making it a powerful data visualization tool. One Capterra reviewer says, “The quality and variety of graphics that can be created with Tableau is vast, and that’s the best part of it.”

While Tableau has some very good legacy BI features, like visualization, it lacks some important features other business intelligence tools have innovated that have become fairly commonplace. Tristan Handy, CEO & founder of Fishtown Analytics, puts it this way: “Tableau, for all its impressive visualization capabilities, can’t really deal with production data: its drag-and-drop capabilities just don’t allow users to express the complicated business logic that is required in real-world BI.”

In particular, Domo targets the busy executive with its mobile-first philosophy and its segmentation tools by team. It’s good for large companies looking for data distribution over data analysis that can afford the sticker price and the time spent to get Domo’s system fully up and running.

Its laser focus on dashboard tools makes it a lifesaver for some, but a major pain for those looking todive deep into data. For companies with a solid data infrastructure already in place, it may be a good fit to help business users visualize data, but it’s not for those who need a tool dedicated to data.

It can also leave behind power users, as Peter Weinberg of Panoply says: “Advanced SQL users may find it tricky to learn the SQL-but-not-quite style data interface, but it’s not designed for them.”

All the business intelligence tools listed here have some form of a free trial, so it’s easy to dive in and try them out. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, but we encourage you to try out as many as you can. We guarantee one will feel much more natural to your business than the others.

Just like a handyman needs a toolbox equipped with hammers, nails, and screwdrivers, individuals pursuing careers in business intelligence (BI) must be familiar with certain software tools. Business intelligence involves the functions, strategies, and tools companies use to collect, process, and analyze data.

Business intelligence tools can identify new opportunities for businesses to improve return on investment (ROI) and competitive advantage based on insights found. These tools are used across all departments, industries, and business users, so consider exploring one to accelerate your career.

Business intelligence tools collect, process, and analyze large amounts of structured and unstructured data from both internal and external systems. Data sources might include documents, images, email, videos, journals, books, social media posts, files, and more. BI tools find this information through queries, which can present the data in user-friendly formats such as reports, dashboards, charts, and graphs.

The tools can perform functions such as data mining, data visualization, performance management, analytics, reporting, text mining, predictive analytics, and much more. As a result, employees can harness this information to make better decisions based on predictions, market trends, and key performance indicators (KPIs).

Centralized data:All of your data, in one place. Companies collect data from numerous databases, portals, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and more. To make sense of it all, you’ll need business intelligence tools to pool the data together and deliver certain types of views (issues, trends, analytics) based on your queries or what you want to know.

Make predictions:With access to so much data from the past and present, employees can make evidence-based decisions. Predictive analytics and forecasting enable users to generate insights based on a product or service’s performance history. If a business condition changes, the intelligent tools can automatically figure out the anomalies and you’ll be able to react to disruptions as they arise.

Automatic reports:Instead of inputting data manually into Excel spreadsheets or toggling between different tools, many BI tools are automated. If you need a report on a product over a specific period of time, the tool will generate that for you. If that information is significant and you want to add it to a presentation, you can create an interactive visualizations and download any charts or graphs you may need.

Reduces business costs:BI tools can do so much, from analyzing consumer behavior and sales forecasting to real-time process monitoring, that analyzing, planning, and reporting processes are way more efficient and accurate than ever before. In fact, more than 50 percent of BI tools users reported that these benefits helped them reduce costs and increase revenue [1].

Today, there are dozens of BI tools available. To determine the top five, these were the most commonly cited among ten websites that ranked the best BI tools. These five BI tools are not ranked in any particular order.

One of the most popular BI tools is Power BI, offered by leading software giant Microsoft. This tool is downloadable software, so you can choose to run analytics either on the cloud or in a reporting server. Syncing with sources such as Facebook, Oracle, and more, generate reports and dashboards in minutes with this interactive tool. It comes with built-in AI capabilities, Excel integration, and data connectors, and offers end-to-end data encryption and real-time access monitoring.

Learn Power BI with Coursera: In just two hours, you can learn the basics of Power BI Desktop with this guided project. You’ll load and transform data to create interactive reports and dashboards.

QlikSense is a BI tool that emphasizes a self-service approach, meaning that it supports a wide range of analytics use cases, from guided apps and dashboards to custom and embedded analytics. It offers a user-friendly interface optimized for touchscreens, sophisticated AI, and high-performance cloud platforms. Its associative exploration capability, Search & Conversational Analytics, allows users to ask questions and uncover actionable insights, which helps increase data literacy for those new to using BI tools.

Dundas BI is a browser-based BI tool that’s been around for 25 years. Like Tableau, Dundas BI features a drag and drop function that allows users to analyze data on their own, without involving their IT team. The tool is known for its simplicity and flexibility through interactive dashboards, reports, and visual analytics. Since its inception as a data visualization tool in 1992, it has evolved into an end-to-end analytics platform that is able to compete with the new BI tools available today.

Sisense is a user-friendly BI tool that focuses on being simplified and streamlined. With this tool, you can export data from sources like Google Analytics, Salesforce, and more. Its in-chip technology allows for faster data processing compared to other tools. Key features include the ability to embed white label analytics, meaning a company can fully customize the services to its needs. Like others, it has a drag-and-drop feature. Sisense allows you to share reports and dashboards with your team members as well as externally.

Other popular BI tools include: Zoho Analytics, Oracle BI, SAS Visual Analytics, Domo, Datapine, Yellowfin BI, Looker, SAP Business Objects, Clear Analytics, Board, MicroStrategy, IBM Cognos Analytics, Tibco Spotfire, BIRT, Intercom, Google Data Studio, and HubSpot.

You can get familiar with one or more BI tools by learning independently or on the job. Many top companies use them, so you can benefit from listing the most common ones in the skills section of your resume if it makes sense for the role and industry in which you’re applying. Hiring managers may specifically keep an eye out for applicants who have experience with specific BI tools, especially if it is referenced in the job description.

Dive into Business Intelligence Concepts, Tools, and Applications to learn how to work with large data sets using MicroStrategy’s Online Analytical Processing and Visualization capabilities to create visualizations and dashboards. These skills can be used to support strategic decision-making across any business sector.

BI tools make it simpler to corral the right data and visualize it in ways that enable us to understand what it means. But how simple that process gets, and how you can visualize the data depends on the tool: Picking the right one for your needs becomes important.

Board International combines three tools in one: BI, predictive analytics and performance management. While it aims to offer something for everyone, it predominately focuses on finance-oriented BI. It has modules for finance (planning, consolidation), HR (skills mapping, workforce planning), marketing (social media analysis, loyalty and retention monitoring), supply chain (delivery optimization, supplier management), sales (cross-selling and up-selling analysis) and IT (KPIs, service levels). The company is Swiss, but the software is available in English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, French, German and Italian. The latest version of its platform has replaced its multidimensional online analytical processing (MOLAP) approach with an in-memory calculation engine.

Domo is a cloud-based platform focused on business-user-deployed dashboards and ease-of-use. It offers business intelligence tools tailored to various industries (such as financial services, health care, manufacturing and education) and roles (including CEOs, sales, BI professionals and IT workers). CIOs might start by checking out how it handles data from AWS, Jira, GitHub, or New Relic before looking at how over 500 other integrations can help the rest of the enterprise.

Dundas BI from Dundas Data Visualization is used predominantly for creating dashboards and scorecards, the company’s historic strengths, but it can also perform standard and ad-hoc reporting. Analysis and visualization are performed through a web interface that can adapt to users’ skills: Power users and standard users see different features. The latest version has a new in-memory engine, a new natural language query capability, and adds point-and-click trend analysis, support for Linux, and an application development environment for customized analytic applications. Dundas BI has been tailored for 19 industries, including clean tech, mining and construction, in addition to the usual suspects such as banking and healthcare. It sells to large enterprises but specializes in embedded BI.

With the Power BI Desktop app for Windows, users can analyze and visualize data from local or cloud sources, publishing their reports to the Power BI platform. It offers data preparation, visual-based discovery, interactive dashboards, and augmented analytics. The free Power BI Desktop version suits isolated users; the Pro version makes collaborative analysis easier, for a monthly fee, leveraging Microsoft Office365, SharePoint and Teams to control access to raw data and published reports. For enterprises that want to go all-in, the Premium tier makes self-service data prep possible with prebuilt connectors to corporate data held in Microsoft Dynamics 365, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, or third-party sources such as Salesforce.

MicroStrategy targets the enterprise BI market in a broad range of industries with cloud, on-premises and hybrid deployment options. It features a drag-and-drop interface to help users create customized data visualizations and build personalized, real-time dashboards. MicroStrategy touts federated analytics that allow customers to leverage existing investments in data sources such as Tableau, Qlik and Power BI, and blend the data to build reports and insights. It also features enterprise semantics graph, which indexes data assets to enrich data silos with location intelligence and real-time telemetry. MicroStrategy offers a free, 30-day full platform trial.

Oracle has spent the past several years bulking out its Oracle Analytics Cloud offering, launched in 2014 as an outgrowth of its flagship Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition suite. In 2020, it added a Cloud HCM offering to provide self-service workforce analytics to HR executives, analysts and line-of-business leaders. Oracle has focused on making its cloud offering intuitive and user-friendly, with powerful reporting and machine learning features. Key features include data preparation, data connectors, visualizations, predictive analytics, a native mobile app, and support for embedded analytics.

Sisense’s BI software stack covers everything from the database through ETL and analytics to visualization — and it claims its In-Chip database engine is faster even than in-memory databases. It is best known for embedded BI uses. The latest version adds new machine learning capabilities. Sisense is available on premises or in the cloud. There are solutions for finance, marketing, sales, HR and IT, as well as customer service and operations and logistics departments. Sisense also makes it possible to offer the analytics tools to users outside the enterprise by embedding them in web applications. Sisense acquired Periscope Data in September 2019 and is in the process of integrating advanced analytics capabilities gained through the acquisition.

Formerly known as Einstein Analytics, Salesforce rebranded the offering as Tableau CRM in October 2020. Tableau CRM integrates Einstein Analytics’ advanced analytics capabilities — including predictive and prescriptive analytics — into Tableau’s full range of offerings. The goal is to extend self-service access to data to users across the business. Users can build predictive models for their data. There are industry-specific templates, and tailored tools for sales, service, marketing, and IT departments. The first fruit of the newly integrated offering is