What are business intelligence tools?
Business Intelligence (BI) tools are a diverse set of software applications, platforms, and solutions designed to extract, transform, and present data to support data analysis, trend identification, and strategic decision-making within an organization.
Capabilities of BI tools:
Data integration: BI tools can connect to and consolidate data from multiple different sources, such as databases, spreadsheets, and cloud-based applications.
Data transformation: since data can come in many different formats, this aspect of BI tools is crucial for improving the compatibility and usability of the data. Users can transform data by cleaning, structuring, and aggregating it.
Data visualization: the bread-and-butter of business intelligence is its ability to represent large and often complex datasets visually to deliver insights and make trends and patterns more evident.
Reporting: the final presentation of data in a BI tool is in the form of a report or dashboard that can be delivered to key stakeholders automatically.
1. Power BI
Power BI is a powerful BI tool that offers both a desktop application (which is free) and a cloud-based platform for sharing reports and dashboards. Power BI is a full-featured tool with the ability to transform and visualize your data, along with some impressive predictive modeling and AI-based features that make this tool a true leader in the BI market.
Power BI is particularly ideal for beginners who are familiar with Microsoft products, providing a seamless transition into the world of BI.
Power BI has two pricing options: a Pro subscription paid per user or a Premium plan per user or per capacity if you require access to advanced enterprise-scale features.
2. Tableau
Tableau is another leading BI tool with a strong emphasis on usability, particularly for non-technical users. Tableau can integrate with dozens of applications easily through the use of their pre-built data connectors, along with advanced data discovery and visualization capabilities.
However, a unique aspect of Tabelau is their Tableau Public offering, which is freely available to anyone, from complete beginners to seasoned experts, to learn more about Tableau and improve their analytical and BI skills.
Tableau has a subscription-based pricing structure split into three levels, making it an affordable option even for small teams.
3. Looker
Looker Studio is a free tool (with the option to upgrade to the Looker Studio Pro plan) for creating customized, interactive reports and dashboards that integrate with various data sources.
With a focus on simplicity and speed, Looker Studio allows even complete beginners to harness the power of Google’s ecosystem to create data visualizations and reports, making data accessible and understandable.
4. Domo
Domo is an entirely cloud-based BI platform offering easy-to-use data visualization and reporting capabilities. Domo is also particularly great for beginners thanks to its user-friendly and intuitive interface, pre-built connectors, and the simplest ETL solution out of all BI tools.
Domo offers a limited free version to learn more about the tool and try it out. After that, they offer three pricing tiers depending on your requirements. Domo has based its pricing structure on credits rather than users. You can have an unlimited number of users but will need to purchase more credits if your usage causes them to run out.
5. Zoho
Zoho Analytics is a user-friendly BI tool that is highly affordable, making it especially attractive for small businesses and beginners. However, Zoho Analytics does not compromise on functionality to keep costs low. You can expect many of the same impressive data preparation and visualization features as the other BI tools on this list.
Zoho Analytics offers four pricing tiers depending on the number of users you have and the volume of data you want to import into the platform. If your organization has large volumes of data or many users, Zoho Analytics can provide a more tailored plan to you with the option for dedicated servers.
6. Sisense
Sisense is known for its powerful and incredibly fast data analysis capabilities due to its unique data architecture that combines data preparation, data modeling, and data visualization into a single, unified platform. However, the power and sophistication of the platform should not deter beginners, as Sisense has taken great care in designing a no-code user experience with an excellent drag-and-drop dashboard builder.
Sisense offers self-hosted and cloud-based pricing options tailored to your needs.
I hope this article helps you understand these six BI tools, offering insights into their functionalities and significance. I aimed to keep it short and crisp. Thank you.