Best Business Intelligence (BI) Software

Do you intend to fuse business intelligence software into your growing business? Considered generally the third wing of Information Technology, the BI tools can be helpful to store and process a tremendous volume of information. Not just that, BI tools aid businesses to transform information into noteworthy insights and settling on data-driven choices progressively. To help enterprises meet these specific business needs, GoodFirms lists the best business intelligence software available in the market. The listed business intelligence tools are accompanied by platform details and verified customer reviews.

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A Complete List of Open Source & Free Business Intelligence (BI) Software tools with Latest Reviews

  • LANSA BI

    Build actionable business intelligence reports through native DB2 database integration
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    Leverage smart, user-friendly business intelligence tools to provide your stakeholders with transformative insights to grow the business and improve operational efficiency. Streamline data workflows from consolidation to transformation and visualization. Deliver a collaborative analytics solution built with engaging dashboards and AI for assisted insight generation. Build actionable business inte ... read more about LANSA BI

    Entry Level Price
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    Free Trial
    N/A
    Category Focus
    100% in Business Intelligence Software
  • datapine

    Data Visualization & Business Intelligence Tool
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    datapine helps people to turn data into actionable insights and make data-driven decisions in real-time. A user-friendly drag & drop interface empowers everyone to make sense of complex data by asking important questions and receiving answers immediately. It offers a wealth of innovative BI 4.0 features like intelligent alarms and interactive dashboard features for modern, KPI driven businesses. ... read more about datapine

    Entry Level Price
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    Free Trial
    14 Days
    Category Focus
    30% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Grow.com

    Your Business Command Center.
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    Grow is the simplest business intelligence (BI) & data visualization software for small and medium businesses that make it easy to track the right metrics, make good decisions and lead with confidence.     ... read more about Grow.com

    Entry Level Price
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    Free Trial
    30 Days
    Category Focus
    50% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Slemma

    Simple, collaborative reporting tool for businesses.
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    Slemma is a collaborative, business analytics app built specifically around the needs of small to medium-sized businesses. It is a reporting tool that enables users to create simple, easy-to-use and dynamic data reports from multiple data sets. ... read more about Slemma

    Entry Level Price
    $99 Per Month
    Free Trial
    14 Days
    Category Focus
    50% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Tableau

    Changing the way you think about data.
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    Tableau Desktop is a powerful Business intelligence (BI) software, data discovery, and exploration application that allows you to answer pressing questions in seconds. Tableau's drag-and-drop interface allows visualization of any data, exploring different views, and even efficiently combining multiple databases. Tableau is constantly being updated with new features and improvements. Some of the la ... read more about Tableau

    Entry Level Price
    $70.00 Per Month
    Free Trial
    14 Days
    Category Focus
    20% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Zoho Analytics

    Transform your business with powerful insights.
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    Zoho Analytics is powerful Business intelligence software that helps to extract actionable insights from your data to make better decisions and devise successful strategies. By using a BI tool like Zoho Analytics for your business, you can gain better business visibility. The key features of Zoho Analytics are gathering data from multiple sources, Visualizing data and discovering hidden insights, ... read more about Zoho Analytics

    Entry Level Price
    $30.00 Per Month
    Free Trial
    15 Days
    Category Focus
    20% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Power BI

    Business intelligence like never before.
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    Power BI is a business intelligence (BI) software that helps you to make better decisions by providing insights into your data. It is a powerful and versatile software that can be used for various tasks, including Data discovery and exploration, Data analysis and modeling, Report creation and sharing, Dashboard creation and sharing, and data collaboration. Power BI is constantly being updated with ... read more about Power BI

    Entry Level Price
    Free version
    Free Trial
    Available
    Category Focus
    50% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Bitrix24

    Your company. United. Free. Unlimited. Online.
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    Highly secure, turnkey intranet solution for small and medium-sized businesses designed for effective collaboration, communication, social networking, business process, and knowledge management. Allows better knowledge continuity by moving data from network silos and local drives to a well-protected centralized repository. Wikis, blogs, and forums ensure social-enabled knowledge bases for improved ... read more about Bitrix24

    Entry Level Price
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    Free Trial
    Available
    Category Focus
    4% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Sisense

    SIMPLIFYING BUSINESS ANALYTICS FOR COMPLEX DATA.
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    Sisense is a business intelligence (BI) software that helps businesses to transform their data into actionable insights. It is a powerful and versatile software that can be used for various tasks, including Connecting to multiple data sources, Cleaning and transforming data, Creating interactive dashboards and reports, Sharing insights with others, and automating tasks. Sisense is an excellent cho ... read more about Sisense

    Entry Level Price
    Free version
    Free Trial
    Available
    Category Focus
    33% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Qlik Sense

    Go from passive to active analytics
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    Qlik Sense is the most powerful and complete modern Business Intelligence (BI) solution. With its one-of-a-kind associative analytics engine, sophisticated AI, and high-performance cloud platform, you can empower everyone in your organization to make better decisions daily and take action, creating a truly data-driven enterprise. Qlik sense begins with core key Capabilities like Self-Service Visua ... read more about Qlik Sense

    Entry Level Price
    $30 Per Month
    Free Trial
    30 Days
    Category Focus
    25% in Business Intelligence Software
  • APISCRAPY

    AI driven web scraping & workflow automation
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    APISCRAPY transforms raw data into valuable intelligence, enabling businesses to prosper in a data-driven world. It enables you to make informed decisions, capitalize on opportunities, and stay ahead of the curve in today's changing business environment by providing cutting-edge technology for data extraction, analysis, and visualization. Features of APISCRAPY: AI Data Extraction: APISCRAPY ... read more about APISCRAPY

    Entry Level Price
    $5 Per Hour
    Free Trial
    Available
    Category Focus
    34% in Business Intelligence Software
  • SAP BusinessObjects

    Make better, more informed decisions with access to real-time insights
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    SAP Business Intelligence Platform is a cloud-based BI software that helps businesses analyze their data and share insights. It is a powerful and versatile software that can be used for various tasks, including Connecting to a wide variety of data sources, Visualizing data in multiple ways, Creating interactive dashboards and reports, and sharing insights with others through the web, mobile apps, ... read more about SAP BusinessObjects

    Entry Level Price
    Contact vendor
    Free Trial
    N/A
    Category Focus
    100% in Business Intelligence Software
  • BVDash is a cloud-based project management solution designed for various industry verticals. The solution offers a dashboard that can be used by project teams to access various systems and tools. Key features include issue management, cost control, project scheduling, dashboards and more. BVDash is a cloud-based project management software designed for various industry verticals. The solution offe ... read more about BVDash

    Entry Level Price
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    Free Trial
    N/A
    Category Focus
    33% in Business Intelligence Software
  • QlikView

    Faster answers. More insights. Better outcomes.
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    QlikView is a business intelligence (BI) and data visualization software that helps you explore, analyze, and visualize your data. It is a powerful and versatile software that can be used for various tasks. QlikView's associative engine allows you to explore your data naturally by finding patterns and relationships that are not visible using traditional BI tools. It can connect to live data to see ... read more about QlikView

    Entry Level Price
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    Free Trial
    N/A
    Category Focus
    50% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Board

    Sparking your business imagination
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    BOARD International is a global software vendor leading the way in Business Intelligence, Analytics and CPM unification. Founded in 1994, BOARD has enabled over 3000 companies worldwide to improve the effectiveness of their management decision-making processes, unifying BI, Business Analytics and CPM in a single integrated environment.  Board’s Intelligent Planning Platform delivers solutions ... read more about Board

    Entry Level Price
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    Free Trial
    N/A
    Category Focus
    50% in Business Intelligence Software
  • YellowFin

    Any BI can tell you what happened. Yellowfin tells you Why. Faster.
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    All BI companies can tell customers what happened. Yellowfin tell them why it happened. Yellowfin is a global Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics platform dedicated to solving real enterprise analytics challenges, and helping business people understand not only what happened, but why it happened.  ... read more about YellowFin

    Entry Level Price
    Free version
    Free Trial
    Available
    Category Focus
    50% in Business Intelligence Software
  • MicroStrategy is a business intelligence (BI) and enterprise analytics platform that helps organizations make better decisions by providing insights into their data. It is a powerful and versatile software that can be used for a variety of tasks, including Creating interactive dashboards and reports, Exploring and understanding your data, Sharing insights with others, Automating tasks, Enabling se ... read more about MicroStrategy Enterprise Analytics

    Entry Level Price
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    Free Trial
    N/A
    Category Focus
    20% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Reveal

    Simple. Fast. Predictable.
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    Reveal removes the complexity of embedding analytics into your applications. Unlike your typical vendors, Reveal was built with embed in mind first, on today's most modern architecture. Reveal delivers a seamless experience with no added requirements, a flexible architecture and no complex licensing. Reveal is a true self-service solution that gives your developers and customers a simple, beautifu ... read more about Reveal

    Entry Level Price
    $9.99 Per Month
    Free Trial
    14 Days
    Category Focus
    33% in Business Intelligence Software
  • SAS Viya

    Confident decisions at every moment.
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    SAS Viya is an AI, analytic, and data management platform that runs on modern, scalable architecture. Quickly transform raw data into operational insights that support every kind of decision your organization makes. Better decisions, maximum value, faster outcomes. That's the SAS Viya difference. SAS Viya enables users to quickly transform raw data into operational insights that support every kind ... read more about SAS Viya

    Entry Level Price
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    Free Trial
    14 Days
    Category Focus
    33% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Jaspersoft

    Embedded analytics and reporting software
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    TIBCO fuels digital business by enabling better decisions and faster, smarter actions through the TIBCO Connected Intelligence Cloud.TIBCO fuels digital business by enabling better decisions and faster, smarter actions through the TIBCO Connected Intelligence Cloud. From APIs and systems to devices and people, we interconnect everything, capture data in real time wherever it is, and augment the in ... read more about Jaspersoft

    Entry Level Price
    Free version
    Free Trial
    Available
    Category Focus
    100% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Looker

    BI & Data Visualization Software for Interactive Analytics
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    Looker is Google for your business data. More than just a modern business intelligence platform, you can turn to Looker for self-service or governed BI, build custom applications with trusted metrics, or even bring Looker modeling to your existing BI environment. Looker can be used for various benefits, including Improving decision-making with intelligent data access, Insights where you work at yo ... read more about Looker

    Entry Level Price
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    Free Trial
    Available
    Category Focus
    25% in Business Intelligence Software
  • TIBCO Spotfire

    Try TIBCO Spotfire Analytics
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    TIBCO Software Inc. unlocks the potential of real-time data for making faster, smarter decisions. Our Connected Intelligence platform seamlessly connects any application or data source; intelligently unifies data for greater access, trust, and control; and confidently predicts outcomes in real time and at scale. Learn how solutions to our customers’ most critical business challenges are made pos ... read more about TIBCO Spotfire

    Entry Level Price
    $125 Per Month
    Free Trial
    30 Days
    Category Focus
    50% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Google Data Studio

    Your data is beautiful. Use it.
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    Google Data Studio turns your data into fully customizable informative reports and dashboards that are easy to read and share. Unlock the power of your data with interactive dashboards and beautiful reports. ... read more about Google Data Studio

    Entry Level Price
    Free version
    Free Trial
    Available
    Category Focus
    25% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Clear Analytics

    Make Everyone A Power Analyst!
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    Clear Analytics is born from decades of experience in delivering cutting-edge self-service capabilities to the most demanding industries. Empowers business users to gain direct access to data whilst giving IT the ability to monitor and secure their infrastructure always. Clear Analytics aggregates data from a variety of sources, then leverages Microsoft’s Power BI features to enable you to wrang ... read more about Clear Analytics

    Entry Level Price
    $11 Per Month
    Free Trial
    30 Days
    Category Focus
    100% in Business Intelligence Software
  • iDashboards

    Get more eyes on your KPIs.
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    iDashboards provides easy-to-use, visually-appealing and cost-effective dashboard software for clients in a wide variety of industries—including higher education, healthcare, logistics, finance, manufacturing and more. With customizable and flexible dashboard solutions that easily integrate with key data sources, iDashboards clients can quickly and effectively view and analyze their critical per ... read more about iDashboards

    Entry Level Price
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    Free Trial
    30 Days
    Category Focus
    25% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Helical Insight

    A business intelligence framework.
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    Helical Insight software is the world’s first open source developer friendly business intelligence framework which helps you to make sense out of your data and make well-informed decisions. ... read more about Helical Insight

    Entry Level Price
    Contact vendor
    Free Trial
    30 Days
    Category Focus
    50% in Business Intelligence Software
  • WORKMAP

    Accelerate Success At Work
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    WORKMAP helps you get relevant to Customers, Partners & Employees. And it gets Customers, Partners and Prospects to find you relevant. ... read more about WORKMAP

    Entry Level Price
    Free version
    Free Trial
    Available
    Category Focus
    100% in Business Intelligence Software
  • AccountsIQ

    Award winning cloud accounting software.
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    AccountsIQ is a modern cloud-based accounting software that can be leveraged to operate your end-to-end financial processes efficiently. The automation facility enabled by this reliable accounts payable and receivable software eliminates manual finance management. The premium church accounting feature is best for managing all the monthly finance and the general ledger. Consolidating your daily acc ... read more about AccountsIQ

    Entry Level Price
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    Free Trial
    N/A
    Category Focus
    20% in Business Intelligence Software

Buyer’s Guide

Introduction to Buyer’s Guide for Business Intelligence Software

The digital revolution has fuelled enormous opportunities for businesses to grow at an unprecedented rate.  The organizations that are marching on this growth path have become data-driven and are investing heavily in technologies to enhance their performances. They are harnessing data technology like business intelligence software to help them in engaging customers, optimizing operations, reducing business costs, improving product quality, and making better decisions. Not just large enterprises, but small and mid-size companies are showing the same anticipation for the data-intelligence software to solve their complex issues.

With AI, cloud computing, and big data, data intelligence software has become more powerful and accurate.  The organizations are now bracing up to take advantage of these new features and make them a part of their culture.  However, before they get their hands on new features, they must get familiarized with the business intelligence software selection and the need for advanced BI tools.

This buyer guide is intended to help business owners, executives, managers, data analysts, data scientists, and other data technology enthusiasts on the important aspects of BI software and parameters to consider while buying the software.  It envelops everything that business owners need to know about BI tools.

What Is Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence is a technology-driven approach for analyzing business data and presenting actionable insights to help business executives, managers, and stakeholders to make informed business decisions. The BI technology includes tools, strategies, and processes to refine raw business data into meaningful data and present them in a most comprehensive format.

Why Is Business Intelligence Critical?

A business that consists of various departments like Accounting, HR, Sales, Marketing, etc., produces a large amount of data while performing daily activities. But these data are disorganized (stored at various places and in various formats) and unstructured and may not be of use until it is consolidated and streamlined. This is where business intelligence can be helpful.  Business intelligence uses technologies like data warehouses, data discovery tools, dashboards, ad hoc reporting, etc., to consolidate and derive valuable information from the data reciting across various business processes.     

In the data-driven world, data technology like business intelligence is very crucial in identifying new business opportunities and taking competitive market advantage. It gives organizations the power to access, analyze, understand, collaborate, and act on information.  With better insights about the working, trends, and analytics of the business process, organizations can identify risk elements that set them back and allow them to focus on the area for improvements. But to collect more in-depth and business specifics analytics, the enterprises have to resource end-to-end business intelligence software.

What Is Business Intelligence Software?

Business Intelligence Software is a tool that converts the raw business data (structured and unstructured) into valuable data insights for business owners or stakeholders to make an informed decision. The business intelligence tool extracts current and historical data related to business from various sources. They slice and dice these data to get a full 360-degree view of the business and generate the reports to analyze the business performance or any other metrics.

BI software is generally used by:

  • Managers and executives
  • Data Analysts
  • Front line worker
  • IT developers
  • Information workers
  • Suppliers, customers, and regulators

Business intelligence Software benefits are immense, and organizations can enhance their business efficiency by incorporating them into their infrastructure.

What Is the Difference Between Business Intelligence and Business Analytics?

Business Intelligence: Business intelligence is focused on descriptive analytics. It uses historical and present data to determine what has happened and what is happening.

Business Analytics: Business Analytics is a superset of Business Intelligence, and is focused on predictive analytics. It uses predictive models and machine learning algorithms to determine what will happen.

Why Does Business Intelligence Software Matter for Your Company?

  • Better decision: In a data-driven world, businesses can reap more benefits with BI software.  It helps to dig deeper into the business process and derive valuable insights from it. They can use these insights for making crucial business decisions.
  • Compare data with competitors:  Organizations, big or small,  can use a BI tool for conducting customer surveys and collecting data about how customers feel about the competitor’s product or what are their expectations from the product.  These insights can be used in the future to get a competitive advantage.   
  • Track performance:  BI software with a detailed report on business activities can help the organization track its business performance.  
  • Executive Scorecards and Dashboards: The top business intelligence tools provide business executives with detailed scorecards and dashboards to track business performance and capture essential business events. 
  • OLAP analysis: The best bi tools with OLAP help businesses to perform data analysis efficiently. It is due to OLAP structure and nature the business analyst can derive quick information from the database. OLAP helps in fast query execution, which means the data are available in a short time for making a rapid decision.
  • Ad hoc reporting: Ad-Hoc reporting is the process of creating reports on the fly.  The best business intelligence companies provide this feature in their tool, and it allows businesses to fetch reports on any particular activity and speed up the decision-making process. Unlike a structured report, ad hoc reporting does not require experts and thus reduces the IT workload.
  • Operational reporting: Operational reporting is a rapidly developing area of business intelligence.  Operational reporting software can either be used as a stand-alone or can be used in combination with BI solutions.  The operational reporting allows businesses to view data of their daily activities in real-time and in multiple ways.
  • Forecasting market trends: Data mining is an integral part of top business intelligence software, and it allows industries to predict the market trend. 
  • Customer relationship: With detailed insights about business activities, the business owner can study customer behavior and purchasing habits. Based on those insights, users can design their customer retention strategy and build better customer relationships.
  • Identify the bottlenecks: The best business intelligence companies could help in identifying the bottlenecks in the business process.  The BI dashboard displays intuitive reports about the business in detail, which makes it easy for business executives to study the obstacles in the system.  He can also determine how frequent and how long the problem persists within the business process.

What Are the Key Categories of Business Intelligence Software?

There are varieties of tools that fall under the BI software category.  

  • Dashboards: Dashboard is an integral component of BI software and is widely used to display important business metrics, track KPIs, and critical data points relevant to an organization. Dashboards enable organizations to make complex data easily understandable and approachable for non-technical users. It is restricted to one –page. Dashboards are elaborate and mostly focused on more narrow aspects of an organization. It can be updated in real-time.
  • Visualizations: Data visualization software enables users to put data in visual form and communicate information efficiently.
  • Reports: Reports are static documents that include data in text and table form, and sometimes it may involve graphs and charts.  It features data that is already cleaned and sorted. Unlike dashboards, the reports are sprawled to multiple pages.
  • Data mining: Data mining is the process of sorting and analyzing a large set of data that helps companies to solve problems and mitigate risks.
  • ETL: The process of ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) plays a significant role in data integration strategies.  It also helps in migrating data between various sources, destinations, and analyzing tools; therefore, it is very important from the point of business intelligence.
  • OLAP: OLAP stands for Online Analytical Processing.  It is software that performs multidimensional analysis at high speeds on large volumes of data.
  • Data warehouse: A data warehouse is an analytical database that sits on top of transactional databases for analytic purposes.  The data warehouse selects, organizes, and gathers data for efficient comparison and analysis.
  • Business activities monitoring: Business activity monitoring (BAM) software allows managers and executives to monitor business processes in real-time. The BAM system compiles all the business-related information in one place so that the data can be consulted anytime, anywhere.

What Are the Benefits of Business Intelligence Software?

There are numerous benefits of a business intelligence system, but it largely depends on how organizations want to use it.

  • Faster, relevant, and accurate reporting: BI software pulls in data from various sources into a data warehouse, and then analyzes the data based on user queries, reports, and dashboards. The BI software facilitates real-time reporting and populates accurate data on various business events.
  • Visual analytics: BI tools present data in visual forms that are comprehensive and understandable.
  • Data-driven business decisions:  Business intelligence tools enable users to gather data from various sources and clean up data for better visualization. With quality business data in hand, it becomes easier for the business owner to make a smart decision.
  • Understand customer expectations: The top business intelligence software can help understand customer expectations and deliver better service.  The business owner can anticipate customer needs by analyzing the purchasing pattern and customer behavior.
  • Identifying marketing trends:  With the help of quality data, businesses can establish a new strategy that complements the market trend. For instance, the marketing team and sales team can build their future strategy based on the reports populated by the BI tool.
  • Streamline Operations: By having exact information or data, the organization can identify the error within the business operations and can take steps that can streamline the processes.
  • Reduce financial loss: Business often incurs financial loss due to wrong decisions, but with BI software, the business owner can have better insight into the data, which allows them to make the right decision and take calculated risks.
  • Increased organizational efficiency: The BI tools collect data from all relevant sources, which helps the organization to unlock the treasure in the business data.  It also saves time for business owners and managers on accumulating data with the traditional method.
  • Real-time updates: Some BI software provides a customized alerts option.  The users can set automated alerts to send emails to management or departments related to it. 

While the above-mentioned benefits of the business intelligence system may convince organizations to buy business intelligence tools, there are a few things to consider before boarding it. Follow the below section for the same.

Things to Consider Before Buying a Business Intelligence Software

  • Evaluate Software Need: Evaluate the software capacity before finalizing the BI software. The user must see whether the software fulfills the business requirement and find out whether the software can help to solve the problem.   
  • Support multiple data sources:  The top business intelligence software should support multiple data sources; since the modern business operates on a wide scale, the data may be scattered on multiple platforms and databases. It should be able to fetch data from anywhere and in any format.
  • BI Software Costs: Analyze the BI software costs from all angles like setup cost, technical support, and training, hiring experts, hidden charges, and software upgrades.
  • Integration: While performing business intelligence tools comparison, the business owner must verify the integration capabilities of the business intelligence tools.
  • Usability: Some business intelligence software requires an instruction or training program for its successful transition into companies’ infrastructure.  If the software does not gel well with the current working system or requires additional training, then it needs to get configured.
  • Support Collaboration Tools: The BI software must support collaboration features like the ability to share insights, share reports, comments, and collect feedback.
  • Customization: Customization is an important factor for BI software, and it should allow business owners to configure the software as per their needs. The best BI vendors generally provide customization options to their software users.
  • Role-based access: The BI software could be valuable assets for decision-makers, and there are many people in the organization that may need access to the BI software.  The BI software should have features to control the software access.
  • Real-time BI: Most of the business executives and stakeholders are keen on real-time information. Real-time BI software enables users to stay abreast of the competitor’s activities and market trends.
  • Responsive and user-friendly interface: If the user interface is complex, the money invested after BI software could be a complete waste.  The user interface of the BI software should be easy to comprehend and must support all devices. 
  • Deployment options:  The BI software should allow users to choose the deployment option. The users with dedicated IT teams may prefer on-premise software deployment, but with rising cloud technology trends, the user can switch to cloud infrastructure.   
  • Scalability: The BI software should be scalable, and it should easily adjust itself to the growing needs of the business.  It is always recommended that when a business executive or manager is scrutinizing the business intelligence software list, they should always consider scalability.
  • Technical support: Not all business intelligence software requires technical support, but if the BI software deployment is done for a large enterprise, then it may need technical support. Technical glitch is quite common in large enterprises dealing with a huge amount of data, so the best bi companies must deliver robust technical support.
  • Powerful reporting capabilities: The goal of BI software is to produce sensible reports that give a clear understanding of business activities.  The BI software lacking in powerful reporting features may fail to communicate the business insights to decision-makers. 

These factors can help business executives to select the top business intelligence tools; however, they can also shortlist the tool by comparing the features, deployment options, costs, and other factors.

Time-Saving Features of Business Intelligence Software

  • Ad-Hoc reports
  • Advanced security
  • Executive dashboard
  • Mobile access
  • Ranking report (Pivot tables)
  • Built-in ETL
  • White labeling
  • Intelligent alerts
  • Multi-tenant security
  • Geospatial mapping
  • What-if analysis
  • Seamless data and application importing
  • Collaboration tools
  • Predictive models

Emerging Trends in Business Intelligence Software

  • Voice-activated assistants:  Voice-enabled business intelligence makes it easier to collect insights, reports, and dashboards.  It has created a curiosity among BI experts about transcribing voice assistant data into an intelligent report. It can reinvent the data-analysis process by eliminating the traditional approach and reducing the time to generate business insights.    
  • Data discovery:  With data discovery, it is easy to find specific patterns and trends in a data-sets. With the advanced data visualization tools interlaced with features like heatmaps, geographical maps, and pivot tables, the data discovery becomes even more informative.  There is an evolving trend in data discovery referred to as “smart discovery” or “Augmented intelligence.”  It facilitates the AI capabilities to find the trend and relation in data, which helps to speed up the decision-making process. 
  • AI and NLP: It is fascinating that computers/ voice assistants have started decoding human language and responding to queries with high accuracy.  It is because of AI and NLP.  NLP is one of the most intriguing aspects of artificial intelligence, and it has a wide scope in Business Intelligence.  The NLP technology enables even a non-techie executive to analyze data without any support from any IT experts.
  • Data governance: Data governance defines the process of maintaining regulatory compliances and policies for managing data assets across the organization. In the coming years, data governance would become the top priority for all types of organizations. The data governance will ensure that data is acquired from the approved sources, processed for the defined purpose, shared among authorized personnel, and discarded as per the norm.   
  • Collaborative business intelligence: Collaborative BI is about bringing subject matter experts and stakeholders together to make better decisions.  By merging BI software with collaboration tools, including web 2.0 and social media, the business team can share their view or responses online. By documenting those communications, it would be easier for an organization to make a faster decision. In the future, the collaborative business intelligence tool will envelop more users and communication platforms.
  • Self-service BI interfaces: Self-service BI interface is rapidly getting its hold in business intelligence solutions. Today, the best business intelligence companies have introduced the self-service version, and in the future, there will be more efforts to make BI software completely self-reliant.    
  • Predictive analytics: Most of the BI software uses historical and real-time data to identify trends and answer questions related to what has happened and does not tell why something happened. With predictive analytics, BI tools can predict future outcomes. Generally, the BI tools do not always provide predictive analytics functionality, but in the coming days, they would be capable of predicting well in advance.
  • Better, faster, and cheaper: The amalgamation of cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and big data with the top business intelligence tools is going to become better, faster, and cheaper.  By implementing cloud computing, users can reduce infrastructure costs as well as improve data storage efficiency. On the other hand, artificial intelligence and the neural network will ensure the data fetching process, and data visualization process gets quicker and easier.

In a few years, several related advanced technologies would allow users to truly discover the benefits of a business intelligence system.

How to Implement BI Software Successfully?

Step 1) Identify Requirements: The best BI software vendors today have the flexibility to customize their offerings to the users. But, still,  prospective buyers should figure out the existing business requirements and match their requirements with the business intelligence tools list.   

Step 2) Make Raw Data Available: Make sure all the raw data are available, and define the strategy on how to import raw data into the BI software.

Step 3) Shortlist BI Vendors: Once the organization has completed all the basic BI software implementation processes, they can shortlist the business intelligence tools and hire the best BI solution provider. The software buyer should compare the business intelligence software list on parameters like customer support, secure integration, database support, training programs, etc.

Step 4) Implement software and team member's training: The next step is to implement top business intelligence tools into the business infrastructure and see whether the team members require any training for it.

Step 5) Monitor the software performance:  The business executives or managers should monitor the performance of the software. They need to see whether the software behaves as expected and if not, then does it allow them to make some changes to measure particular performance metrics.

What Is the Average Cost of Business Intelligence Software?

The business intelligence software list is very broad and versatile in its offerings. The price may vary based on the software capabilities and features. The price of the software could be as low as $3/month or may raise to $1000/month or even more. 

Business Intelligence Tools For Start-ups or Beginners:  The startups or budding entrepreneurs working with minimum risks and budget can opt for low-cost software. Few options for such business intelligence solutions are Lumenore which comes with a starting price of $2.49/month, BusinessQ with a starting price of €2.0/month. Both tools offer a free trial.

Business Intelligence Tools for Mid-Size and Large Enterprises: For organizations that want to churn out in-depth information from the most unstructured data source, then mid-size and large enterprise business intelligence tools are highly recommended.  Mid-range tools like Zoho Analytics with a starting price of $23/month and Redash with $49/month are good alternatives. Both the business intelligence solution providers offer a free trial, and users can upgrade their plans as they grow with their business and data volumes.  Some best BI tools that fall in the same category include DataHero, flex.bi, and DyntellBi.  In case the business owners are more inclined towards advanced features like inspecting customers' behavior or discovering data patterns with a machine learning algorithm, a tool like Kubit with a basic price of $999/month is a perfect solution. The price range may exceed $7999/month as per the user’s requirements  The other premium range business intelligence solution providers include Trevor.io with a starting price of $270/month, whose price may exceed depending on the types of database (Snowflake, Redshift, MySQL) and data rows to export. The tool also provides a free trial version. The best BI tools that offer similar services include SharePoint Vitals, Planhat, and illuminis. The business intelligence tools list can go endless, and it all boils down to business priorities.

There are business owners that see plenty of opportunity in business intelligence tools and put their efforts into developing new features through free and open source business intelligence software. Here is the list of some best free and open source business intelligence software that can further enhance the organization's efficiency with its exceptional features.

Why Refer to Goodfirms' List of Best Business Intelligence Software?

GoodFirms is a prominent review and rating platform for IT solutions. It has been listing various software products from different sectors to help consumers choose the right software for their organization and fine-tune the business processes.  With more than 60000 services and software companies listed on the platform, it makes it easy for consumers to compare software on various parameters and select the software that fits into their budget and requirements.

Conclusion

The companies realizing the role of data in accelerating business growth are actively adopting data intelligence technology and software in their infrastructure.  It helps them to tackle complex problems by making smart decisions. Since there are tons of business intelligence software available in the market, it is challenging to pick the best Business Intelligence Software. GoodFirms is here to help you with this task. Do not miss to check the list of best business intelligence software to empower your business with the most insightful data.

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