Business Intelligence (BI) is the process of analyzing large datasets through interactive visualizations. After consolidating and standardizing your organization’s data, you can use BI to extract meaningful insights and present them through dashboards and reports. To do so, you require an easy-to-use yet extensive BI tool. If you are wondering what BI tools are, look no further! This article will briefly explain the top 10 BI tools you can consider for your organization.
What are Business Intelligence (BI) Tools?
Business Intelligence (BI) tools are specialized software applications equipped to extract and ingest vast volumes of data. These tools play an important role in processing and transforming complex data into visually engaging and interactive charts, graphs, dashboards, and reports. The human mind can easily comprehend information and draw conclusions faster through visualization. Thus, BI tools help you identify market trends, enhance operational efficiency, and unveil new business avenues to boost revenue.
Top 10 BI Tools
As more organizations incorporate Business Intelligence processes in their workflows, the demand for robust BI tools has increased. Here are some of the best BI tools in the market, in no particular ranking order.
Power BI
Power BI is a comprehensive suite of software services, applications, and connectors designed to transform disparate data sources into coherent and visually immersive data. It seamlessly integrates with various data repositories, including Excel spreadsheets and hybrid data warehouses, whether on-premises or cloud-based.
One of Power BI’s standout features is its robust data visualization capabilities, allowing you to create compelling reports and real-time dashboards. This BI tool can handle huge datasets, and you can further optimize performance by setting up aggregation tables. This way, you can expedite queries, uncover trends in your dataset, and share insights with stakeholders quickly.
Power BI’s scheduled refresh feature automates dataset updates, eliminating the manual task of refreshing your data. You can focus more on analysis and decision-making, as your insights and reports will be based on the latest data in Power BI.
Tableau
Tableau is one of the most popular Business Intelligence tools known for its specialized data discovery and visualization features. The platform offers well-designed dashboards that are quite user-friendly for efficient data exploration and interpretation. You can use the Tableau Accelerators feature to get access to pre-built dashboards that can be easily customized to suit your specific needs.
One of the most useful features in Tableau is the Data Stories feature, which concisely summarizes key insights from your visualizations. You can use the advanced capabilities to incorporate automated plain language explanations into your dashboards to ensure clarity and accessibility. This feature proactively identifies relevant insights you may have overlooked, facilitating continuous improvement in quick decision-making.
An additional advantage of Tableau is its native support for predictive modeling, wherein you can directly create models within the platform. This functionality will help you understand the data distribution around trend lines in your visualizations. You can also leverage predictive functions within table calculations to gain deeper insights.
QlikSense
QlikSense, a product of Qlik, is a comprehensive data analytics platform and BI tool. Its accessibility across devices and optimized touchscreen interface contribute to its widespread popularity among many organizations.
QlikSense boasts a unique associative analytics engine and sophisticated AI capabilities that empower you to explore data dynamically. You can combine, load, visualize, and explore data of any scale. Every chart, table, and object in this BI tool is interactive and updates instantly to reflect the current context for your datasets.
You can create powerful dashboards and reports through flexible designs and formatting control options. The reports can be published and shared in popular formats, such as Microsoft Office and PDFs. A Scheduled Report Distribution feature in QlikSense allows you to set a specific time and customize recipients for delivering reports via email, shared folders, or a centralized hub.
Dundas Bi
Dundas BI, now a part of Logi Symphony, is an advanced embedded business intelligence platform. It offers you robust capabilities for data exploration and visual analytics. You can run ad-hoc queries and craft and share personalized dashboards, multi-page reports, scorecards, and small multiple views.
This BI tool’s client side is entirely built on modern web standards, including HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS. It eliminates the need for browser plug-ins or software installation and ensures consistent functionality and appearance across desktops, tablets, and mobile devices. The platform’s user interface is optimized for touch-based gestures, enabling you to analyze data, derive insights, and design dashboards from any device and location.
Dundas BI offers an extensive range of interactive data visualization options, including a diverse chart library, maps, tables, gauges, and relationship diagrams. These visualizations are meticulously crafted with styles and behaviors that adhere to best practices in data visualization.
Sisense
Sisense is a user-friendly data analytics and BI tool designed to help you manage, analyze, and visualize large datasets from various data sources. At the core of this tool is a robust analytics engine that enables you to perform intricate queries and calculations on your data to uncover actionable insights.
The intuitive interface of Sisense facilitates ad-hoc analysis and helps you create custom reports and dashboards tailored to your specific business requirements. You can find a wide range of interactive visualization options, such as charts and graphs, to present your findings effectively in visually appealing formats.
Additionally, Sisense offers the flexibility to elevate standalone dashboards into fully integrated analytics apps. You can leverage advanced features like the BloX widgets for customized layout, navigation, and seamless integration with third-party software. These platforms include Salesforce, Adwords, and Google Analytics.
Domo
Domo is a well-known Software-as-a-Service BI solution. It offers a comprehensive platform for consolidating all business data in a centralized location. The platform can help you transform large chunks of raw data into interactive visualizations, facilitating pattern recognition and trend interpretation.
With this BI tool, you can get access to real-time reports and insights across various aspects of your business operations. Domo streamlines workflows through built-in automation and triggers, giving you more time for operational processes. The data dashboards help you securely share all the insights with different teams, replacing the traditional static spreadsheets.
Domo harnesses the power of data science by offering predictive analytics capabilities. You can leverage machine learning algorithms to forecast how changes in your data can impact your business outcomes.
datapine
datapine is a comprehensive all-in-one BI tool that can streamline data analytic processes even for users lacking technical expertise. Developed with user-friendliness in mind, datapine’s intuitive interface leverages drag-and-drop functionality to help you integrate data from diverse sources and analyze it swiftly.
This BI reporting tool empowers you to visualize relevant Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) on a single screen, facilitating efficient data storytelling. You can dynamically filter data based on specific criteria during presentations, enhancing audience engagement and comprehension.
datapine provides various security measures for keeping your data safe. It includes having password protection on live URLs and customized viewing rights on dashboards. While disseminating data through dashboards, you can customize the recipient's access to certain data portions. Through this authorization, you can bolster data privacy and security measures.
Looker
Now a part of Google Cloud, Looker is a robust data discovery and BI tool. The platform provides services beyond traditional BI capabilities, seamlessly integrating with any SQL database or warehouse. It includes ease of use, intuitive visualization, strong collaboration features, and reliable technical support.
Looker facilitates real-time exploration and sharing of insights thanks to its enterprise-grade BI, data applications, and embedded analytical capabilities. At the core of Looker functionalities lies LookerML, a powerful SQL-based modeling language. You can use LookerML to centrally define and manage business rules in a version-controlled data model. This streamlines query generation and ensures data consistency.
A notable integration within Looker is the Looker Studio, a free tool to visualize data seamlessly. You can connect the models made in Looker with Looker Studio to create reports that combine governed and ad-hoc data.
Yellowfin BI
With over 20 years of experience in the Business Intelligence landscape, Yellowfin BI delivers comprehensive solutions to make your data more accessible and visually appealing. The tool leverages automation and provides several collaborations to enhance your data storytelling journey.
In this BI tool, you will find more than 50 chart types available, including trellis charts, GIS maps, and infographics. Additionally, you can build custom visualizations using popular JavaScript charting libraries, such as D3, Highcharts, and three.js.
Yellowfin also provides you with features to build impactful dashboards specific to your needs. The popular self-service BI features include the advanced Report Builder, Quick Charts, and Guided Natural Language Query (NLQ). These functionalities can cater to a wide range of business requirements, and even the non-technical staff in your organization can easily use the platform.
Zoho Analytics
As a self-service BI tool, Zoho Analytics provides you with powerful solutions for creating reports and analyzing data. There are several easy-to-use connectors that allow you to make connections with a wide range of sources, including files, business apps, custom apps, on-premise and cloud databases. Once you obtain the data, you can use its editor feature to personalize your reports and dashboards.
Zoho Analytics offers smart AI assistance for generating automated insights, predicting future trends, and conducting cognitive and what-if analysis. You can leverage a diverse range of visualization options, including charts, widgets, pivot tables, and tabular views, to effectively visualize your data.
This BI tool also has a unique commenting section where different team members can seamlessly collaborate while working on shared projects. You can add comments, annotate images, engage in discussions, and revisit the comment history anytime. This feature also boosts transparency, enabling faster and better decision-making.
How to Boost the Performance of your BI Tools?
Business Intelligence tools provide expansive features and collaboration options. Although the tools allow you to import data from various sources, the number of connectors they provide may not be enough. You may also find that your BI tool does not have the desired source connector to a third-party software or CRM tool from where you want to bring the data.
Sometimes, it may happen that you have datasets stored locally or spread across multiple locations. In such cases, it is difficult to conduct data consolidation and load it to your BI tool for better analysis. To mitigate such issues, it is best to consider data integration and replication platforms like Airbyte.
Airbyte offers you an extensive library of 350+ connectors to various cloud data warehouses and database storage systems. If you do not find a desired connector, you can build a custom one in under 30 minutes through their Connector Development Kit (CDK). With this platform, you can extract data from several different sources and load them into the destination in just two simple steps.
Once your data pipeline is established to a data warehouse, you can conduct transformations and perform queries to standardize your datasets. Finally, when your data is ready for analysis, you can integrate the data warehouse with your BI tool and create visualizations with relevant and accurate data.
Wrapping Up
BI tools play a vital role in data analysis and decision-making processes. Visualizing the data gives you a clear idea about areas that need attention and improvement. Before selecting a BI tool, it is good practice to establish a robust data pipeline. With Airbyte, you can extract and consolidate all your data without writing a single line of code. Once your data is updated and ready for further analysis, you can use your BI tool’s connector to move your data from the cloud data warehouse.