Support Data Visualization or Business Intelligence Software – A wide range of business intelligence (BI) tools are available, from highly technical and powerful platforms to user-friendly and lightweight dashboard builders.
Choosing the right one depends on where your business is now, where you want it to end up, who needs access to the data, your technology stack, and so on.
Choosing the right business intelligence tool is a long and varied process that requires buy-in from many stakeholders. But the first step is to gain ground and understand what the bigger players in BI have to offer.
Support Data Visualization or Business Intelligence Software
To help you choose the right solution, we’ve gathered together ten business intelligence tools and found out which types of companies are best suited for them.
Design The Business Intelligence Dashboard For The Purpose
Microsoft’s Power BI is a business intelligence tool, the main difference being that it sits within the larger Microsoft ecosystem and integrates with Excel, Azure, Access and more.
While these integrations are a plus for many, Power BI has proven difficult for some to learn—and has some unique quirks.
Power BI is perfect for large companies full of spreadsheet junkies who are already heavily invested in the Microsoft ecosystem.
It’s not the easiest Business Intelligence tool to set up and maintain, so teams with a little extra capacity may want to look elsewhere.
Once installed, it has a reputation for being more customizable than other massive business intelligence tools. One Quora user used this comparison: Tableau is like iOS, while Power BI is like Android.
The result is a good modeling function, the implementation and utilization of which again requires some expertise.
Is a business intelligence tool focused on making data available to anyone. What sets it apart from the pack is its affordable price and how easy it is to install and use, even for people with no coding experience.
Business Intelligence Tools: Etl, Data Visualization & Cloud Bi Solutions
Is intended for all companies that need an affordable but effective business intelligence tool that anyone can use.
The largest and most complex companies, such as the New York Shipping Exchange (NYSHEX), find it “very easy to implement” and claim that “users get immediate value from it.” At the same time, the most flamboyant startups, such as the student-run content curation startup, can afford it and use it to improve their product.
Looker is a powerful tool for support data modeling using its own Looker ML language with limited visualization capabilities and data input.
It was acquired by Google Cloud Platform in 2019 and moved by Google’s walled garden, which means it can be integrated with Google Data Studio in the near future, as explained in depth here.
These teams also need the patience to learn Looker’s native language, LookerML. However, Looker has a robust analytics code library called Looker Blocks that can speed up repetitive workflows once implemented.
What Is Business Intelligence Reporting?
Data Studio is data visualization tool that is easy to integrate with the entire ecosystem, from Analytics to Sheets and BigQuery. The amount of integration and the fact that it’s free makes it easy for many people to support access, but its visualizations and designs are often lacking.
Data Studio is suitable for people who have bought into the ecosystem and want to visualize data quickly.
Data Studio has support the lowest bar of entry of the business intelligence tools listed here. But it lacks deeper data functionality, relying on other support services like BigQuery to fill in the gaps.
Tableau Desktop is a standalone data visualization tool from Tableau, an old giant among other business intelligence tools. Tableau was one of the first BI tools to lower the bar for data visualization, but it’s still out of reach for the average business user thanks to its older feature set designed for large, expert data sets.
What Is Business Intelligence? Bi Defined
Tableau’s older feature set support it robust but not very agile. It is often used as a basic information tool that only a few company employees know how to use well.
The newly renamed Sisense for Cloud Data Teams is a business intelligence tool designed with SQL experts in mind. It can help your team move more efficiently if you have a deep understanding of your data and SQL.
Sisense for Cloud Data Teams is an enterprise tool for companies with sophisticated data teams. It’s useful for teams that regularly use SQL, Python, and R to understand business data.
Domo is a business intelligence tool that made waves early on when it gained unicorn status. As it grew into a giant in the BI industry support, it attracted its fair share of fans and detractors.