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

  • Agilence

    Agilence is the industry leader in cloud-based data analytics solutions for retail and restaurants.
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    Agilence is the leader in data analytics and reporting in the retail, restaurant, grocery, convenience, and pharmacy industries. We develop intelligent data analytics and reporting technology that enables organizations to easily connect the dots within their stores or restaurants by automatically collecting and summarizing data to identify anomalies and trends that can improve operations, measure ... read more about Agilence

    Entry Level Price
    Free version
    Free Trial
    Available
    Category Focus
    30% in Business Intelligence Software
  • 9Lenses

    9Lenses is a cloud assessment platform that enables companies to thrive in a data-driven market.
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    Survey platforms, spreadsheets and other manual methods for identifying and solving business challenges no longer meet today’s digital expectations. To compete in a data-driven marketplace, businesses must deliver secure propriety digital solutions. 9Lenses is the only cloud based platform that digitally automates the development, collection, organization, connection, and analytics of a variety ... read more about 9Lenses

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

    People, Process and Innovation is Aays Analytics
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    Integrating Analytics into your business can result in fundamental changes to how you operate and improvement in ROI. Massive Re-skilling, Capability building and Change management are the critical steps to bring the nextgen Transformation in your business. ... read more about Aays Analytics

    Entry Level Price
    $499 Per Month
    Free Trial
    30 Days
    Category Focus
    100% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Intellicus

    Intellicus is one of the world's leading Business Intelligence and Analytics platform
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    Intellicus is a BI product company, founded in 2004. At Intellicus, we have a passion to deliver a world class BI and analytics experience to all our users. Our customizable and modular solution has made us the product of choice for more than 14,000 large & small scale enterprises across the globe. Our flexible architecture and robust integration framework has won major OEM relationships with lead ... read more about Intellicus

    Entry Level Price
    Contact vendor
    Free Trial
    More than 30 days
    Category Focus
    100% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Competitors App

    Monitor all your competitors' marketing moves
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    Competitors App helps marketers monitor their competitors' marketing moves in one place, with very little time investment. Monitor all your competitors' marketing strategy in one place. Takes only 5 minutes a week to know your competitors' marketing moves. You will read the emails we send you every time a competitor is taking a significant action. Competitors App monitors all marketing channels: - ... read more about Competitors App

    Entry Level Price
    $9.90 Per Month
    Free Trial
    30 Days
    Category Focus
    100% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Sapience Vue

    We Empower Enterprises to Make Faster and Better Workforce and Resource Utilization Decisions.
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    Sapience Vue is our automated Knowledge Workforce Activity Monitoring & Analytics solution that accurately captures effort data in a contactless manner and provides actionable insights for fact-based decision making by keeping employee privacy at its core. Vue is a SaaS-based solution-built ground up with latest technology stack and top of the line security. ... read more about Sapience Vue

    Entry Level Price
    Contact vendor
    Free Trial
    N/A
    Category Focus
    25% in Business Intelligence Software
  • germain APM

    Custom Monitoring, Analytics & Automation platform to best improve UX.
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    Germain APM is a real-time application performance monitoring software designed to help application developers & administrators, data scientists, customer experience analytics, prospect analytics, and user experience analytics monitor the performance of apps, network, files, users, DB, and business. It’s an end-to-end platform that enables businesses to maintain optimal performance and high ava ... read more about germain APM

    Entry Level Price
    $4999 Per Year
    Free Trial
    7 Days
    Category Focus
    100% in Business Intelligence Software
  • ibi

    Preparing organizations for the future.
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    ibi is a data and analytics software company that embeds intelligence into everything. We help organizations get their data in order, so they can build, embed and automate intelligence in everything they do. Whether our customers use pre-built applications or build their own solutions, ibi powers their innovation and reinvention. ibis open platform and industry-specific building blocks accelerate ... read more about ibi

    Entry Level Price
    Contact vendor
    Free Trial
    14 Days
    Category Focus
    100% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Holistics

    Holistics helps you to set up end-to-end, scalable analytics stack
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    Holistics was founded in 2015 by a team of engineers and business intelligence professionals who had originally met each other in university. Together, they have more than 15 years of industry experience working at places such as IBM, Facebook, Microsoft and other successfully acquired startups. The Holistics team is on a mission to make data tools and business intelligence a widely accessible for ... read more about Holistics

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

    Ecommerce Analytics and Business Intelligence Software Save time. Sell more.
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    Glew provides ecommerce merchants, digital agencies, retailers and B2B sellers a SaaS product and BI platform for analytics, workflow and performance management. Glew delivers multichannel business intelligence and analytics for ecommerce merchants, digital agencies, retailers and B2B sellers. With 30+ integrations, Glew lets you see all your data in one place - and get meaningful insights to grow ... read more about Glew

    Entry Level Price
    $2388 Per Year
    Free Trial
    Available
    Category Focus
    100% in Business Intelligence Software
  • NECTO

    Necto is the only solution that provides state of the art BI for the end users
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    Panorama’s flagship BI product, Necto, helps companies grow revenues, reduce costs and improve corporate performance by uncovering insights within their data, presenting it in in beautiful dashboards with intuitive infographics, allowing users to view, drill down, slice and dice reports, and enabling sharing and collaboration. Necto’s centrally administered architecture provides full governanc ... read more about NECTO

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

    Highly flexible developer grade embedded analytics platform
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    Logi is the only developer-grade analytics platform focused exclusively on embedding analytics in commercial and enterprise applications. With Logi Info you have complete control over the application experience so you can quickly build interactive dashboards for your application. Use a custom-branded UI to match embedded analytics to the rest of your application. Incorporate third-party visualizat ... read more about Logi Analytics

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

    Connect, share and visualize your data, instantly!
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    Datadeck puts everyone in sync with beautiful dashboards of all your data sources, making your company happier and more productive. Using Datadeck allows teams to collaborate on data analysis, create professional reports, and ultimately save time by having all your data sources in one place. Centralize your data to create powerful reports, dashboards, and keep track of your important metrics. ... read more about Datadeck

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

    Unlock the power of spatial analysis
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    From smartphones to connected cars, location data is changing the way we live and the way we run businesses. Everything happens somewhere, but visualizing data to see where things are isn’t the same as understanding why they happen there. CARTO is the world’s leading Location Intelligence platform, enabling organizations to use spatial data and analysis for more efficient delivery routes, bett ... read more about CARTO

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

    Build Smart Build Secure
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    IBM® Rational® provides a full range of offerings to ensure software and systems delivery success through practical, reliable, and extensible components. Designed with the needs of business users in mind, Rational® offerings provide flexible, time-saving technologies that are developed for immediate productivity, high-fidelity results, and cost-savings. With Rational offerings users can consist ... read more about IBM Rational

    Entry Level Price
    $63495.40 Per Year
    Free Trial
    N/A
    Category Focus
    33% in Business Intelligence Software
  • ManageEngine Analytics Plus

    We have complete and easy solutions for even your most difficult IT management problems
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    ManageEngine crafts comprehensive IT management software with a focus on making your job easier. Our 90+ products and free tools cover everything your IT needs, at prices you can afford. Analytics Plus is an on-premise business intelligence and IT analytics software that lets you create rich visualizations and interactive dashboards. Powerful cross-data analytics and data blending allows you to co ... read more about ManageEngine Analytics Plus

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

    We are passionate about customer success and technology
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    Planhat is a Customer Success Platform focused on making Customer Success simple. Planhat is beautiful and easy to use. It brings all your customer data together in one place, helping you understand user behaviour, create best practice workflows & automate time-sapping tasks. Planhat is built for everyone from the CS rep to the C-Suite. It has all the functionality & features you would expect in a ... read more about Planhat

    Entry Level Price
    $750 Per Month
    Free Trial
    N/A
    Category Focus
    50% in Business Intelligence Software
  • OCTELAS

    We connect all of your data sources to deliver the business reports you need
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    Octelas from illuminis is Business Intelligence Software. If your data isn’t joined up and you are drowning in spreadsheets, Octelas Business Reporting Software will draw your data sources together and produce reliable, intuitive digital reports updated every day. Quick, efficient Business Reports to help you track and plan for business growth through digitally tracking data to view on computer, ... read more about OCTELAS

    Entry Level Price
    $300 Per Month
    Free Trial
    N/A
    Category Focus
    100% in Business Intelligence Software
  • ProfitSword

    Business Intelligence Solutions for Smart Leaders
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    ProfitSword’s ProfitWizard tool combines the robust power of the data gathered in the ProfitSage database with Microsoft Analysis OLAP Data cubes allowing a user to create unlimited reports. ProfitSword’s award-winning SaaS solutions provide the end user with applications for consolidated, real-time reporting and data management. ProfitSword uses various available methods of gathering data fro ... read more about ProfitSword

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

    Amazon QuickSight First BI Service with Pay-per-Session Pricing and ML Insights for everyone.
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    Amazon QuickSight is a fast, cloud-powered business intelligence service that makes it easy to deliver insights to everyone in your organization. As a fully managed service, QuickSight lets you easily create and publish interactive dashboards that include ML Insights. Dashboards can then be accessed from any device, and embedded into your applications, portals, and websites. With our Pay-per-Sessi ... read more about Amazon Quicksight

    Entry Level Price
    $5 Per Month
    Free Trial
    N/A
    Category Focus
    100% in Business Intelligence Software
  • PINpoint MES

    THE MES SOLUTION that helps you reach your productivity and quality goals
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    PINpoint is an industry leading Manufacturing Execution System that both 'controls' and 'monitors' manufacturing operations for unprecedented error-proofing. PINpoint is used daily Worldwide in many languages to help customers optimize their manufacturing operations. Customers include Caterpillar, Navistar, Perkins, GM, Ford, Chrysler, Hyundai, Nissan, Toyota, JCI, AWTEC, Magna, Automodular, Arvin ... read more about PINpoint MES

    Entry Level Price
    $39000 Per Year
    Free Trial
    N/A
    Category Focus
    50% in Business Intelligence Software
  • OWOX BI

    OWOX BI merges all your marketing, CRM, and ad cost data, automates your reporting
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    We specialize in implementing Google Analytics 360 for e-commerce businesses and developing unique online services based on Google BigQuery. Our expertise in Google Cloud Platform, Google Analytics 360 and Google Tag Manager is recognized by Google. OWOX BI merges all your marketing, CRM, and ad cost data, automates your reporting, and helps you achieve your goals 22% faster than the market averag ... read more about OWOX BI

    Entry Level Price
    $42 Per Month
    Free Trial
    Available
    Category Focus
    100% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Xtraction

    BEAUTIFUL REPORTING OF IT DATA IN REAL TIME. FOR NEARLY EVERY IT TOOL YOU USE.
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    Xtraction consolidates data from multiple sources and tools and presents it in one place. Pre-built data connectors mean no coding, no BI gurus, and definitely no spreadsheets. View your data in context and make smarter, faster decisions with ease. You wrestle separate IT systems and cross-reference data manually—all for one report. It takes time and resources for sure. But there's a better way ... read more about Xtraction

    Entry Level Price
    Contact vendor
    Free Trial
    Available
    Category Focus
    100% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Pharmafusion360

    Valuable insights into your pharma all on a single platform.
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    Pharmafusion is based on an award-winning, multi-dimensional enterprise data warehouse and is designed explicitly for pharma. Its unique blending of pharma business acumen, data management, and business analytics will quickly provide your organization new and valuable insight. Pharmafusion provides valuable data insights that allow you to take action. When Pharmafusion merges diverse, distinct, an ... read more about Pharmafusion360

    Entry Level Price
    Contact vendor
    Free Trial
    Available
    Category Focus
    100% in Business Intelligence Software
  • MoData

    Go beyond dashboards. Action-ready guidance to overcome your sales roadblocks, powered by AI.
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    MoData accelerates your revenue growth by automatically combining the data from your pipeline tools, analyzing their impact, and then providing insights based on the complete picture of your sales process. MoData is a fully automated sales BI platform designed for high-growth teams looking to scale. Intuitively visualized, it provides 360-degree insight on the past, present, and future of your sal ... read more about MoData

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

    Forecasting is time consuming. Predict instead.
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    Futrli is the all in one forecasting & reporting tool for business owners and accountants. Futrli platform’s financial prediction software does the work of a team of analysts every day, so you can make the best decisions with no effort. They’re powerful alone — but even better when used together. A time-saving, live, and customisable view of your business’s performance and cash flow next m ... read more about FUTRLI

    Entry Level Price
    $37.12 Per Month
    Free Trial
    7 Days
    Category Focus
    100% in Business Intelligence Software
  • DBHawk

    DBHawk is a web-based Database Management and self-service data analytics platform
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    DBHawk supports a wide array of SQL and NoSQL databases, including AWS Athena, Amazon Redshift, Cassandra, Greenplum, MongoDB, MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, SAP Hana, and Teradata. DBHawk integrates with SAML, LDAP, SSO, and OKTA. DBHawk’s comprehensive object access control policy, data masking support and data auditing features allow logging all database activities, making it ideal for ... read more about DBHawk

    Entry Level Price
    $30 Per Month
    Free Trial
    N/A
    Category Focus
    100% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Spotlight Reporting

    Shedding light on performance
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    Designed to enable strategic and meaningful conversations with your clients, and stakeholders, the Spotlight suite of tools are the preferred choice of the Big 4 and ideal for accounting firms, business owners, CFOs, franchises, and not-for-profits seeking to deliver clarity and insights. Integrated reporting and forecasting that allows you to create insights to inform better business outcomes. Fo ... read more about Spotlight Reporting

    Entry Level Price
    $25 Per Month
    Free Trial
    7 Days
    Category Focus
    100% in Business Intelligence Software
  • Viur Data

    nalytics for modern data-driven organizations. Viur brings data, systems and people together
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    Viur offers an easy and quick way to connect to databases, services and files, explore data, create metrics and KPIs and share them with the team. All this in a SaaS cloud solution that can access data even behind a company firewall. It doesnt require advanced technical expertise, or knowledge in programming languages, to connect to the data sources and create insights. Companies that need a busin ... read more about Viur Data

    Entry Level Price
    $35.99 Per Month
    Free Trial
    14 Days
    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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