business intelligence tools power bi suppliers

Choosing the right business intelligence (BI) tool for your company can be a time-consuming process with many options that have similar features. A smart strategy for evaluating tools like business intelligence software is to have a clear understanding of why your business needs it and a solid set of criteria to help you review your choices.

Since the main function of BI is to help you analyze data for decision making, this is an important question. As you evaluate business intelligence tools, you’ll need to know details about your data. Is it structured or unstructured or both? Will your business intelligence software deploy your analytics on-premises, in the cloud, or a hybrid of the two? What pre-built connectors does it offer?

Much like with data integration, BI tools work seamlessly with software that users are already familiar with such as Microsoft Excel. Make a list of the commonly used tools that your BI software needs to connect with—don’t forget to include third-party apps, plug-ins, extensions, and connectors that your business regularly uses.

These are important factors to consider when evaluating business intelligence tools, especially if you work in a regulated industry like financial services or healthcare. Make sure your BI software includes features that: Allow IT to create a secure, governed environment.

Because business intelligence is versatile and can be used across the organization, many companies prefer a combination of self-service and enterprise BI tools that work for technical and non-technical users.

Next, take a look at how findings are presented through data visualization and data storytelling. These features typically use charts, graphs, and maps to surface insights that are hard to see on a spreadsheet. The best data visualization tools have an intuitive interface that lets users explore and present data in multiple ways, regardless of their technical skills.

For example, some BI tools let users make annotations right in the software, quickly embed reports into messaging and collaboration tools, and set permissions to distribute findings inside and outside of your organization.

Mobile features provide access to real-time data and allow you to make data-informed decisions on the fly when working remotely. Talk to your employees who work in the field or distributed locations to find out what level of mobile access they need. It could range from basic viewing of dashboards and reports to creating and editing analytics with mobile tools. You should also make sure the tool’s features are aligned to your company’s broader mobile strategy.

The goal is to find a cost-effective solution that provides business intelligence tools to your organization at the scale you need and has flexibility to grow with your organization.

As you evaluate BI tools, look for customer stories and case studies based on company size and industry. As you review customer challenges and solutions, you’ll get a better idea of whether or not this tool is effective for businesses that are similar to yours. You may also discover new ways to use business intelligence after reading the success stories of other organizations.

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.

These BI tools collect, manage and interpret mountains of structured and unstructured data. They construct models that deliver answers and insights through reports, charts, graphics and other data representation methods. BI software is the foundation of digital transformation.

BI systems incorporate or use various data sources, including spreadsheets, querying software, reporting tools, online analytical processing (OLAP), data mining, data warehouses, and data marts. They usually encompass data extraction, data cleansing, data governance and dashboards or other mechanisms that allow users to view reports and visualizations.

Increasingly, business intelligence platforms intersect with machine learning (ML) and other artificial intelligence (AI) tools, such as natural language querying. They support advanced data mining techniques.

Not surprisingly, business intelligence—which dates back to the 1970s—continues to advance. Today’s systems span clouds and tap on-premises data sources, and work alongside data mining tools. They also rely on APIs to extend analytics capabilities across business partners and supply chains. Some BI tools are also designed to pull data from edge computing deployments, and many platforms also include open-source tools and components that make them more flexible and adaptable.

Key Insight: Domo focuses is on tying together data from a variety of sources and building insights through rich reporting and visualizations. The solution delivers sophisticated tools for handling data integration—including through visual ETL—as well as dashboards and mobile BI platforms that use intelligent apps to display analytic insights.

Key Insight:  Power BI is a sophisticated but affordable platform for organizations of all sizes. It supports self-service analytics for line of business users and data scientists, incorporating AI and ML. Microsoft includes strong collaboration features along with rich reporting and data visualizations. Power BI delivers powerful automation and includes tools to align setup and operation with enterprise scorecards.

Key Insight: The vendor’s focus is “intelligence everywhere.” MicroStrategy offers tools to build powerful and attractive dashboards that pull data from more than 200 data sources. The solution works on both PCs and Macs. It can deliver services based on roles, devices and numerous other factors. MicroStrategy supports automation and embeds analytics functions directly into applications and websites.

Key Insight: The vendor delivers robust BI through a cloud analytics platform. Qlik Sense dashboards connect to hundreds of data sources and support complex and varied use cases. This includes self-service visualizations, interactive dashboards, natural language search, and powerful mobility functions. AI and machine learning support augmented and predictive analytics.

Key Insight: The platform delivers a highly scalable and flexible self-service framework for conducting enterprise grade BI. The vendor’s focus is on infusing “intelligence everywhere” through extended data discovery in the cloud and on-premises, dashboards and integration APIs. Sisense offers strong AI and ML support, and powerful data visualization capabilities.

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 Einstein Discovery in Tableau, an AI and machine learning platform for predictive and prescriptive analytics. More integrations are planned. Salesforce is working on connecting Tableau natively to the Einstein Analytics data store, which will take advantage of the performance optimizations and native Salesforce security integration. That’s planned for release later in 2021.

Tibco Spotfire is a self-service, AI-powered data visualization platform for dashboards, interactive visualization, data preparation, and workflow. The platform offers machine learning-based data preparation capability to support building complex data models. It is deployed across many verticals, including financial services, energy, manufacturing, consumer packaged goods, government, travel and logistics, healthcare, and life sciences. The latest version adds support for Python.

Power BI is a suite of business analytics tools that deliver insights throughout your dealership. Produce beautiful reports, then publish them to consume on the web and across mobile devices. Everyone can create personalized dashboards with a unique, 360-degree view of their business. Scale across the enterprise, with governance and security built-in.

Transforming your business into an insight-driven operation starts with a modern business intelligence tool, and choosing the right tool is critical for success. Not all BI tools are created equal. To make the right choice, organizations must consider how business intelligence will drive value, which users will be doing the driving, and the full spectrum of costs associated with deploying the solution.

Before getting into feature/function discussions, make sure you’re considering business intelligence tools that offer a solid foundation to support data-driven digital transformation. At the core of this foundation is intuitive data access, robust governance, and broad deployment options. An effective BI tools comparison process will help you gauge the ability of any solution to effectively democratize data and drive data literacy throughout your business.

Power BI is a suite of business analytics tools that deliver insights throughout your dealership. Produce beautiful reports, then publish them to consume on the web and across mobile devices. Everyone can create personalized dashboards with a unique, 360-degree view of their business. Scale across the enterprise, with governance and security built-in.

Transforming your business into an insight-driven operation starts with a modern business intelligence tool, and choosing the right tool is critical for success. Not all BI tools are created equal. To make the right choice, organizations must consider how business intelligence will drive value, which users will be doing the driving, and the full spectrum of costs associated with deploying the solution.

Before getting into feature/function discussions, make sure you’re considering business intelligence tools that offer a solid foundation to support data-driven digital transformation. At the core of this foundation is intuitive data access, robust governance, and broad deployment options. An effective BI tools comparison process will help you gauge the ability of any solution to effectively democratize data and drive data literacy throughout your business.

I have only ever used TIBCO Spotfire to examine the content and train our overall business on AI and computer learning to swiftly turn data into actionable insights. I appreciate its data visualization tools, which are great for progress monitoring. These help us to maintain a record of where our firm is performing and spot any developing risks, allowing us to achieve the desired goals. I particularly like the tremendous tools it offers for research of data and cooperation with users in order to inspire ideas, expedite strategic planning, and spot trends in data more quickly. I am indeed a big lover of its configurable features and versatility, and I mainly moved to that for those very same 2 purposes. Although data has immense value, our customers and workers often dislike training to use a complex business intelligence application. By incorporating insights within our technology systems and business operations, we can simply make insights more attainable and straightforward for employees, allowing people to operate in the manner they prefer and provide us with the results we require.Read reviews

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.

Solutions Review’s listing of the best business intelligence software is an annual sneak peek of the top tools included in ourInformation was gathered via online materials and reports, conversations with vendor representatives, andexaminationsof productdemonstrationsand free trials.

Description: Altair offers an open, scalable, unified, and extensible data analytics platform with integrated data transformation and predictive analytics tools. Desktop-based data preparation is available via Altair Monarch, while Knowledge Hub features team-driven data prep and a centralized data marketplace to speed collaboration and governance. Machine learning and predictive analytics are made available inside Knowledge Studio. Altair Panopticon houses the company’s streaming processing and real-time visualization capabilities.

Description: Alteryx is a self-service data analytics software company that specializes in data preparation and data blending. Alteryx Analytics allows users to organize, clean, and analyze data in a repeatable workflow. Business analysts find this tool particularly useful for connecting to and cleansing data from data warehouses, cloud applications, spreadsheets and other sources. The platform features tools to run a variety of analytic jobs (predictive, statistical, spatial) inside a single interface.

Description: AnswerRocket offers a search-powered data analytics platform designed for business users. The product enables you to ask business questions in natural language, and no technical skills are needed to run reports or generate analysis. AnswerRocket features a combination of AI and machine learning, as well as advanced analytic functionality. The platform can also automate manual tasks and answer ad hoc questions quickly. AnswerRocket is mobile-friendly and includes native voice recognition.

Description:BOARD combines business intelligence, performance management, and predictive analytics into one platform. As a result, any change to data, data models, security profiles or business rules is immediately propagated to every application. The solution provides all the tools required to create and update databases, data presentations, analyses, and process models. The company also offers BOARD Cloud, a SaaS version of the platform, backed by Microsoft Azure.

Description: Domo is a cloud-based, mobile-first BI platform that helps companies drive more value from their data by helping organizations better integrate, interpret and use data to drive timely decision-making and action across the business. The Domo platform enhances existing data warehouse and BI tools, and allows users to build custom apps, automate data pipelines, and make data science accessible for anyone across the organization through automated insights that can be easily shared with internal or external stakeholders.

Description: Looker offers a BI and data analytics platform that is built on LookML, the company’s proprietary modeling language. The product’s application for web analytics touts filtering and drilling capabilities, enabling users to dig into row-level details at will. Embedded analytics in Powered by Looker utilizes modern databases and an agile modeling layer that allows users to define data and control access. Organizations can use Looker’s full RESTful API or the schedule feature to deliver reports by email or webhook.

Description:Microsoft is a major player in enterprise BI and analytics. The company’s flagship platform, Power BI, is cloud-based and delivered on the Azure Cloud. On-prem capabilities also exist for individual users or when power users are authoring complex data mashups using in-house data sources. Power BI is unique because it enables users to do data preparation, data discovery, and dashboards with the same design tool. The platform integrates with Excel and Office 365, and has a very active user community that extends the tool’s capabilities.

Description: MicroStrategy merges self-service data preparation and visual data discovery in an enterprise BI and analytics platform. MicroStrategy provides out-of-the-box gateways and native drivers that connect to any enterprise resource, including databases, mobile device management (MDM) systems, enterprise directories, cloud applications and physical access control systems. Its embedded analytics tool allows MicroStrategy to be embedded in other web pages and applications such as portals, CRM tools, chatbots and even voice assistants like Alexa.

Description: Oracle offers a broad range of BI and analytics tools that can be deployed on-prem or in the Oracle Cloud. The company provides traditional BI capabilities inside its Business Intelligence 12c solution. Oracle Data Visualization provides more advanced features, and allows users to automatically visualize data as drag-and-drop attributes, charts, and graphs. The tool also enables users to save snapshots of an analytical moment-in-time via story points.

Description: Qlik offers a broad spectrum of BI and analytics tools, which is headlined by the company’s flagship offering, Qlik Sense. The solution enables organizations to combine all their data sources into a single view. The Qlik Analytics Platform allows users to develop, extend and embed visual analytics in existing applications and portals. Embedded functionality is done within a common governance and security framework. Users can build and embed Qlik as simple mashups or integrate within applications, information services or IoT platforms.

Description: SAP offers a broad range of BI and analytics tools in both enterprise and business-user driven editions. The company’s flagship BI portfolio is delivered via on-prem (BusinessObjects Enterprise), and cloud (BusinessObjects Cloud) deployments atop the SAP HANA Cloud. SAP also offers a suite of traditional BI capabilities for dashboards and reporting. The vendor’s data discovery tools are housed in the BusinessObjects solution, while additional functionality, including self-service visualization, are available through the SAP Lumira tool set.

Description:SAS Visual Analytics is available on-prem or in the cloud. Visual Analytics allows users to visually explore data to automatically highlight key relationships, outliers, and clusters. Users can also take advantage of advanced visualizations and guided analysis through autocharting. SAS has made its name as a result of advanced analytics, as the tool can ingest data from diverse data sources and handle complex models. In addition to BI, SAS offers data management, IoT, personal data protection, and Hadoop tools.

Description:Zoho Analytics is a self-service BI and data analytics tool that lets you incorporate data from a wide range of sources, blend it together, and create cross-functional reports and dashboards. The product features a drag-and-drop designer, as well as different visualization tools to drill down to specifics. A “smart” assistant called Zia can answer questions in the form of reports and KPI widgets via AI, machine learning and natural language processing. Users can share and publish reports and smart data alerts ping you when outliers or anomalies happen.

Business intelligence (BI) software has gained considerable traction since its introduction as "decision support systems" in the 1960s. Today, there are over 100 BI software companies selling business intelligence tools.

Business intelligence software is data visualization and data analytics software that helps organizations make more well-informed decisions. Business intelligence tools connect to the business"s data warehouse, ERP systems, marketing data, social media channels, Excel data imports, or even macroeconomic information.

The business intelligence market is growing rapidly because of the proliferation of data to analyze. Over the past few decades, companies that have deployed Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and other applications are now sitting on a mountain of data that can be analyzed. In addition, the growth of the Web has increased the demand for data analysis tools that can analyze large data sets.

BI software can be divided into three broad application categories: data management tools, data discovery applications and reporting tools (including interactive dashboards and data visualization software). In the next section, we"ll explain how these analytics platforms can help your organization"s decision-making process become more data-driven.

The BI tool you"ll need depends on how your data is currently managed and how you would like to analyze it. For example, if it is currently scattered across disparate transactional databases, you might need to build a data warehouse to centralize it and invest in data management tools that offer Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) functionality to move and re-structure it.

But this isn’t the only way to implement business intelligence software within your organization. If you’re only analyzing data from a single source, ETL and data warehouses are unnecessary. Alternatively, you might require multiple warehouses, and thus, require different tools to connect data between both these servers and other analytics tools that need access to this data.

Better decision-making starts with better data. Data management tools help clean up "dirty data," organize information by providing format and structure and prepare data sources for analyses.

Helps organizations maintain clean, standardized and error-free data. Standardization is especially important for business intelligence tools that integrate data from diverse sources. Data quality management ensures that later analyses are correct and can lead to improvements within the business.

Collects data from outside sources, transforms it and then loads it into the target system (a database or a data warehouse). Because primary data is often organized using different schemas or formats, analysts can use ETL tools to normalize it for use in analytics.

The ability to sift through data and come to meaningful conclusions is one of the most powerful benefits of adopting business intelligence tools. Data discovery applications help users make sense of their data, whether it be through quick, multivariate analysis during OLAP or via advanced algorithms and statistical computations during data mining.

Extracts and interprets large volumes of text to identify patterns, relationships and sentiment. For example, the popularity of social media has made text analytics valuable to companies with a large social footprint. Understanding semantic trends is a powerful tool for organizations evaluating purchase intent or customer satisfaction among users of these channels.

Helps users create advanced interactive dashboard representations of data via simple user interfaces. The ability to visualize information in a graphical format (as opposed to words or numbers) can help users understand data in a more insightful way. In addition, new interactive tools can help teams use analytics and manipulate reports in real-time.

Allows users to design and generate custom reports. Many CRM and ERP systems include built-in BI reporting tools, but users can also purchase standalone applications, such as Crystal Reports, to create ad hoc reports based on complex queries. This is especially helpful for organizations that constantly use analytics and need to generate new reports quickly.

Business users and departmental buyers. These buyers favor small data-discovery vendors and BI tools over the big, traditional BI systems. Ease-of-use and fast deployment are more important than in-depth functionality and integration. They are usually business users rather than IT staff.

In-memory processing:OLAP systems of the past would pre-calculate every possible combination of data. These calculations would be stored in the “cube,” and users could retrieve them when they needed a certain analysis. Creating these cubes was very time-consuming—sometimes taking as long as a year—and required expertise. Today, computer processors and memory are faster, cheaper and more powerful overall. This same process can happen in-memory, rather than using a disk-based approach with cubes. Analytics software built on an in-memory architecture can retrieve data and perform calculations in real-time or on-the-fly.

However, according to Gartner, through 2015, 85% of Fortune 500 organizations will be unable to exploit big data for competitive advantage. The right BI tools can help harness the power of so much data.

Business users to outnumber IT staff: This is a major trend playing out in the market. More business users—rather than traditional IT staff—are evaluating and purchasing software. So usability is becoming more important than functionality during software evaluations. As a result, small data discovery vendors that develop really good interactive visualization tools are gaining market share. Meanwhile, traditional BI vendors are parroting new market entrants by promoting ease of use.

Business Intelligence tools are tools that gather all the business intelligence data together into easy-to-understand reports and summaries. They can be found in dashboards, charts, visualizations, maps, and more. These insightful, valuable tools can be found in a significant offering of software solutions available on the market today. The software tools will break down all of the historical performance data of your business and create logical, user-friendly reports, analyses, and summaries to better facilitate decision-making to course-correct problem performance or to better invest in successful profitable business trends. These software solutions can deliver all of this information instantly through easy, user-directed selections available through dashboard choices or visualization. The ability to gather all of this critical user data instantly and create informational reports to enable the best possible business decisions creates improved business processes throughout your entire organization.

Finally, the last tool to consider is employing a business intelligence analyst team. This team would be directly accountable for getting all of the information accessed by the business intelligence tools to the appropriate departments, highlighting the areas for improvement and celebrating the areas of success so that the organization can maintain the highest levels of profitability. This business intelligence team will also maintain that the data being gathered for the reports are accurate and correct and ensure that the tool is performing appropriately.

IT Central Station (soon to be Peerspot) reviewers want to know how little training is required for a BI tool to get non-IT end users going. They want BI to be easy to implement. Users want tools to enable easy report building and administration as well.

The desire for BI tools to be easy to use flows from a trend in the technology over the least few years. BI has gone from being complex discipline reserved for highly-skilled people to being something the general knowledge worker can use every day. It’s not an either/or scenario. An organization might have some BI workloads that are reserved for data scientists, with others available to everyone. Regardless of where BI is deployed, however, continued support of end users and technical training for the support team are critical for success.

In addition to security, performance, scalability and stability, users emphasize the importance of BI’s ability to integrate with other systems. BI is not a standalone technology. It works in concert with database management and business applications. For example, BI must integrate with OLTP databases with minimal footprint. BI also needs to integrate easily with graphical tools and reporting software. A business intelligence toolset ought to integrate with visualization tools - with ability to produce visually appealing, value added dashboards, charts, and standard reports. Mobility also counts, with workers wanting to be able to do analytics on mobile form factors such as tablets.

Given that the “B” in BI stands for business, the business use case is considered highly relevant in choosing the right business intelligence toolset. BI should meet business needs. The total cost of ownership (TCO) should be well thought-out. And, any initiative to undertake BI should have clear executive management approval and a business plan for success. A thorough business needs analysis is essential.

According to IT Central Station members, the best BI tools support multiple file output options and publication options. For instance, can the tool produce interactive files (e.g. Xcelsius output) that are shared externally via .pdf, Excel, etc.? A business analytics solution should easily access multiple types of data sources, with data blending capabilities.

The most successful business intelligence software company is GrapeCity Inc. for its product Wyn Enterprise. It offers powerful analytic capabilities for tech-savvy and non-technical professionals alike. The platform is also easy to use and can even provide you with real-time dashboards and alerts.

In light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, a study suggests businesses must quickly adapt or leverage their BI tools and strategies via data analytics, AI systems, and agile risk management to help make informed decisions amid the serious impact of the global health crisis. Likewise, another study predicts that BI strategies and platforms will become more customized starting in 2021 to ensure that the advantages of these business tools are maximized.

Now, its Wyn Enterprise product is making waves in the industry. This provides professionals with tools to create complex dashboards and reports without knowing how to code. You can even source different types of data from different locations and integrate them for analysis. If you are interested in its features, you can check out the product yourself when you sign up for a free trial.

What’s more, is that it has other features that round out its offering. These include the modules for operational planning, animations, visual data explorer, and many more. Of course, core Wyn Enterprise features include data analytics, modeling, reporting tools, and specialized portals for users.

Wyn Enterprise offers an easy-to-use platform that is computationally powerful. This gives your teams across departments a better chance of creating highly-visual and accurate reports needed to make data-driven de