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

  • BrightGauge

    Your Data. Your KPIs. All in One Place
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    BrightGauge Software allows you to display all of your important business metrics in one place through the use of gauges, dashboards, and client reports. It is a business intelligence tool focused on the IT Service Provider and MSP industry. Using our SaaS platform, Service Providers can generate customizable performance reports and dashboards based on their own unique data sources. No more loggin ... read more about BrightGauge

    Entry Level Price
    $233 Per Month
    Free Trial
    30 Days
    Category Focus
    50% in Business Intelligence Software
  • VizualSurvey

    VIZUALIZE SURVEY DATA WITH EASE
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    VIZUALIZE YOUR SURVEY DATA WITH EASE Clean, transform and visualize survey data quickly in any of the top data visualization tools. Download our customizable ready-to-use Tableau, Power BI, Qlik Sense or Spotfire survey dashboard templates to get you going in under 30 minutes. How VizualSurvey Works: Use VizualSurvey to clean your survey data then connect it to one of our survey dashboard ... read more about VizualSurvey

    Entry Level Price
    $68 Per Month
    Free Trial
    14 Days
    Category Focus
    50% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Cluvio is a modern data analytics platform that lets you run SQL queries against your database, process data in R, visualize the results and create beautiful, interactive dashboards in minutes. With pricing optimized for startups and small companies, it is easy and cost effective to share insights with everyone in your company or your customers. Cluvio also supports powerful embedding that allows ... read more about Cluvio

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

    Comprehensive data science platform with visual workflow design and full automation
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    RapidMiner Studio is a visual data science workflow designer accelerating the prototyping & validation of models. Easy to use visual environment for building analytics processes: Graphical design environment makes it simple and fast to design better models. ... read more about RapidMiner Studio

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

    Empowering People with Trusted Analytics
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    Pyramid Analytics is a business intelligence (BI) and data discovery platform that helps organizations explore, analyze, and visualize their data. It is a powerful and versatile software that can be used for various tasks, including a single view of data from all sources, making it easy to explore and analyze your data. It makes it easy to collaborate on data analysis and decision-making to get ev ... read more about Pyramid Analytics

    Entry Level Price
    Contact vendor
    Free Trial
    N/A
    Category Focus
    100% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Seller Spike

    Make More Selling on Amazon
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    View your true profit and ROI. Monitor your sales and orders. Analyze your advertising spend. Track your keywords. View and compare trends. Identify new opportunities. All with pinpoint accuracy to optimize and grow your Amazon FBA or FBM business. Seller Spike is fully compatible with North America, Europe & Far East Seller Central Accounts Regions. Supported regions include the USA (.us), Canad ... read more about Seller Spike

    Entry Level Price
    $29 Per Month
    Free Trial
    14 Days
    Category Focus
    100% in Business Intelligence Software
  • SharePoint Vitals

    SharePoint analytics the easy way.
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    SharePoint Vitals gives you instant answers to the who, what, when, and where of your SharePoint farms and Office 365 tenants. It tracks and analyzes SharePoint user activity, then gives you the insights you need to optimize your environments better. ... read more about SharePoint Vitals

    Entry Level Price
    $800 Per Month
    Free Trial
    14 Days
    Category Focus
    33% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Trevor.io

    Self-service has never been so powerful
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    Trevor.io replaces data requests inside your company, empowering your whole team to get answers from your database data in just a few clicks. Trevor.io helps One.org, Wave.com, Influencer.com & other companies run over 2.5 million queries every month ... read more about Trevor.io

    Entry Level Price
    $270 Per Month
    Free Trial
    Available
    Category Focus
    100% in Business Intelligence Software
  • CoSupport AI

    CoSupport AI enhances customer support and empowers businesses with data-driven insights
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    CoSupport BI is an AI Business Analyst connected to your company's data sources, including real-time information from your CRM. This way it generates content, offers insights, and draws analytical conclusions, based on context relevant to your products and customers. ... read more about CoSupport AI

    Entry Level Price
    Contact vendor
    Free Trial
    7 Days
    Category Focus
    33% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Kato

    Intelligent Insights For Everyone
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    Make informed decisions quickly. Connect, model, and then explore your data with visual reports that you can collaborate, publish, and share. Kato integrates with other tools, so you can get up to speed quickly and work seamlessly with your existing solutions. Our team helps you identify your KPIs and create user-friendly dashboards so you can export, share, and publish crucial data across various ... read more about Kato

    Entry Level Price
    $10 Per Month
    Free Trial
    Available
    Category Focus
    100% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Pentaho

    Minimize Risk and Costs With Pentaho
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    Pentaho data integration and analytics at Hitachi Vantara is an open-sourced based, enterprise-class platform for big data deployments. The unified data integration and analytics platform is comprehensive, completely embeddable and delivers governed data to power any analytics in any environment.  ... read more about Pentaho

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

    The Leader in Embedded Analytics & Intelligence.
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    GoodData powers the transformation of decision-making for frontline workers within their daily business processes. It's a platform that gathers data and user decisions and transforms them into actionable insights delivered at the point of work. This empowers enterprises and software companies to integrate insights into applications so that their customers, partners, and employees can make more ... read more about GoodData

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

    Metabase is the easy, open source way for everyone in your company.
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    Metabase is bringing data tools with the elegance and simplicity of consumer products to the crufty world of enterprise business intelligence. Our Open Source analytics and business intelligence application let installs in minutes, and can connect to most commonly used databases. It lets anyone in your company quickly ask questions, and create dashboards or nightly emails without knowing SQL. ... read more about Metabase

    Entry Level Price
    Contact vendor
    Free Trial
    N/A
    Category Focus
    33% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Wolfram Mathematica

    The world's definitive system for modern technical computing
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    Widely admired for both its technical prowess and elegant ease of use, Mathematica provides a single integrated, continually expanding system that covers the breadth and depth of technical computing—and seamlessly available in the cloud through any web browser, as well as natively on all modern desktop systems. ... read more about Wolfram Mathematica

    Entry Level Price
    $1490 Per Year
    Free Trial
    15 Days
    Category Focus
    25% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Infor Birst

    Democratized analytics infused with artificial intelligence
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    Infor industry analytics deliver relevant and meaningful insights for everybody from the boardroom to the shop floor. Infor Birst® makes business intelligence and analytics easy to consume with pre-built industry and role-specific content and metrics embedded wherever business users need information. Improve decision-making with Birst. ... read more about Infor Birst

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

    Oracle Business Intelligence end-to-end Enterprise
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    The foundation of the Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus platform is a true BI server that is designed to be highly scalable, optimizing concurrency and parallelism to make the value of BI applications available to the largest possible audience. It provides centralized data access and calculation, essentially creating a large pipe through which anyone can consume any inform ... read more about Oracle Business Intelligence

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

    Affordable Analytics for All.
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    ReportPlus is a cloud-based or on-premise data visualization service that allows you to visualize the metrics that matter most to your business in one place. Monitor the most important KPI’s and know the health of your business with real-time dashboards, create rich interactive reports and access data on the go with ReportPlus apps for iOS, Windows and *Android, or on the Web. ... read more about ReportPlus

    Entry Level Price
    $99.99 Per Year
    Free Trial
    30 Days
    Category Focus
    50% in Business Intelligence Software
  • SAP Lumira

    Data Analytics and Data Visualisation Software.
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    SAP Business Objects Lumira is a system that empowers enterprises and organizations to visualize their business data on self-service, and to collect and analyze all relevant information on one platform only. As massive your data can be, SAP BusinessObjects Lumira can tell the story of your business easily, giving presentations with predefined scripts and complex spreadsheets a business sense. ... read more about SAP Lumira

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

    More than data it's faster decisions.
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    There are many reasons why customers, partners, and industry experts turn to TARGIT to help them make better, faster decisions. It’s not just our powerful decision-making platform, our proven methodology, or our dedicated employees and partners. It’s the combination of all of these that enable us to unleash the potential within organizations. It’s our mission to help companies perform better ... read more about Targit

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

    Simplifies your world, giving you more time to focus on what matters.
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    Scientrix solves this with a single, design-led digital product. Aligning company thinking, communication and execution of strategy. Connecting with the company vision in a regular and consistent way, mobilizing stakeholder ownership and unlocking deeper thinking and capability. A cloud-based product, with performance, execution and collaboration analytics. ... read more about Scientrix

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

    Embedded Reporting and Dashboards
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    Jinfonet Software is the leading provider of data visualization and reporting software for the enterprise. Its cornerstone product, JReport, is a leading Java reporting solution that delivers integrated business intelligence. ... read more about JReport

    Entry Level Price
    Contact vendor
    Free Trial
    N/A
    Category Focus
    50% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Insight software

    Revolutionizing Financial Reporting
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    Insightsoftware is on a mission to help companies turn their financial & operational data into better business outcomes that drive growth and ROI. Through their innovative, turn-key reporting and performance management solutions, insightsoftware provides users with real-time access to data-driven insights in an efficient, cost-effective and secure manner. Good things happen when you’re well-c ... read more about Insight software

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

    Interactive data visualization for any project - JS charts designed to be embedded and integrated
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    AnyChart is one of the global leaders in data visualization, offering powerful JavaScript (HTML5) based solutions that allow developers to easily embed interactive and great-looking charts and dashboards into any desktop, mobile, or web project. Whether you need to enhance your website with better reporting, embed dashboards into your on-premises and SaaS systems, or build an entirely new product, ... read more about AnyChart

    Entry Level Price
    Contact vendor
    Free Trial
    Available
    Category Focus
    50% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Piik

    Profitable Decisions - Delivered Real-time
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    Piik helps restaurants and retailers make profitable decisions by recommending data-driven actions using AI and advanced analytics. Simply connect to your QuickBooks Online account with Piik and automate your accounting close and financial/management reporting processes. ... read more about Piik

    Entry Level Price
    $149 Per Month
    Free Trial
    7 Days
    Category Focus
    50% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Seal Report

    The ultimate open database reporting tool.
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    A complete framework for producing and publishing an everyday report from any database. ... read more about Seal Report

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

    End to end data science for better decision making.
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    KNIME Analytics Platform is the open source software for creating data science applications and services. Intuitive, open, and continuously integrating new developments, KNIME makes understanding data and designing data science workflows and reusable components accessible to everyone. ... read more about KNIME Analytics Platform

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

    An open source technology platform
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    An open source technology platform used to create data visualizations and reports that can be embedded into rich client and web applications.BIRT is a top-level software project within the Eclipse Foundation, an independent not-for-profit consortium of software industry vendors and an open source community. ... read more about BIRT

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

    Modern business intelligence and advanced analysis.
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    Knowage offers FULL ANALYTICAL CAPABILITIES, with a special focus on big data analytics and comprehensive support to rich and multi-source data analysis. Knowage provides different modules, each one focused on a specific domain but mutually combinable (Big Data, Smart Intelligence, Enterprise Reporting, Location Intelligence, Performance Management, Predictive Analysis). It is available in two ve ... read more about KNOWAGE

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

    The Business Intelligence Suite.
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    ReportServer is the modern and versatile business intelligence (OSBI) platform for your company. Pixel-perfect reporting, ad-hoc analyses, Excel and Word reporting or multidimensional OLAP analytics: ReportServer comes with a great selection of powerful tools. ... read more about ReportServer

    Entry Level Price
    Free version
    Free Trial
    Available
    Category Focus
    100% 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.

Comparison of Business Intelligence (BI) Software: Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, Looker, Qlik Sense and Zoho Analytics

FeatureMicrosoft Power BITableauLookerQlik SenseZoho Analytics
Company BackgroundDeveloped by Microsoft, offering a suite of business productivity tools, including Office 365, Azure, Dynamics 365, and Power Platform.Developed by Tableau Software, acquired by Salesforce, known for its data visualization and analytics software solutions.Developed by Looker Data Sciences, acquired by Google Cloud, providing a cloud-native BI and analytics platform.Developed by Qlik, known for its data discovery and visualization software, offering a range of analytics solutions.Developed by Zoho Corporation, offering a suite of cloud-based business software solutions, including Zoho Analytics for BI and analytics.
Target AudienceBusinesses of all sizes, particularly Microsoft usersBusinesses of all sizesMid-sized and large enterprisesBusinesses of all sizesSmall and medium businesses
PricingFreemium, paid plans start at $9.99/month per userPaid plans start at $10/month per userCustom quote, typically high costPaid plans start at €30/month per userFreemium, paid plans start at $29/month
Ease of UseUser-friendly for Microsoft users, learning curve for othersModerately complex learning curve for beginnersComplex requires technical expertiseUser-friendly, intuitive interfaceUser-friendly, drag-and-drop interface
FeaturesData visualization, self-service analytics, mobile access, strong integration with Microsoft productsPowerful data visualization, advanced analytics, and storytelling featuresData exploration, data modeling, embedded analytics, governed self-serviceAssociative engine, in-memory analytics, real-time data explorationBasic to advanced reporting, dashboards, self-service analytics, mobile access
StrengthsAffordable, strong Microsoft integration, user-friendly for existing usersRenowned for powerful visualization and storytelling, flexible deployment optionsScalable, secure, governed self-service analytics, advanced capabilitiesUser-friendly, in-memory analytics, real-time data explorationAffordable, good for basic reporting and self-service analytics
WeaknessesLimited data source connectivity compared to some optionsIt can be complex for beginners, with higher cost for advanced featuresHigh cost, complex, requires significant technical expertiseLimited customization compared to some optionsFeatures not as comprehensive as enterprise-grade BI tools
Best forBusinesses using Microsoft products seeking an affordable and user-friendly optionBusinesses prioritizing data visualization and storytelling with diverse data sourcesLarge enterprises requiring advanced analytics, data governance, and scalabilityBusinesses seeking a user-friendly and in-memory analytics platformSmall and medium businesses needing basic reporting and self-service analytics
Deployment OptionsOffers cloud-based deployment through Microsoft Azure, with desktop and mobile apps for accessing reports and dashboards, as well as on-premises deployment options for businesses requiring data sovereignty and control.Offers cloud-based deployment through Tableau Server or Tableau Online, with desktop and mobile apps for accessing dashboards and reports and on-premises deployment options for businesses with specific requirements.It offers cloud-based deployment through the Google Cloud Platform, with web-based access to reports and dashboards and on-premises deployment options for businesses with data privacy and compliance needs.Offers cloud-based deployment through Qlik Cloud Services or Qlik Sense Enterprise, with web and mobile apps for accessing analytics and on-premises deployment options for businesses with specific requirements.Offers cloud-based deployment through Zoho Cloud, with web-based access to reports and dashboards and on-premises deployment options for businesses requiring data control and compliance.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Business Intelligence Platform?

A business intelligence platform is a software application broadly used by businesses to assemble, sort, and analyze actionable data and convert them into meaningful insights to make intelligent business decisions.

Who is the best-rated business intelligence software on GoodFirms?

We have listed 345+ best business intelligence tools on our platform based on reviews & ratings. Here are the top business intelligence tools, including:

Who are the free business intelligence (bi) tools on GoodFirms?

The free business intelligence (BI) tools on GoodFirms, based on verified client reviews and ratings, include:

Who are the open source BI tools on GoodFirms?

The open-source BI tools on GoodFirms, based on verified client reviews and ratings, include:

Who are the cloud-based BI tools on GoodFirms?

The cloud-based BI tools on GoodFirms, based on verified client reviews and ratings, include:

Who is the best dashboard business intelligence software on GoodFirms?

The best dashboard business intelligence software on GoodFirms, based on verified client reviews and ratings, includes:

Who are the best bi tools for data visualization on GoodFirms?

The best BI tools for data visualization on GoodFirms, based on verified client reviews and ratings, include:

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