Did you know that today nearly 75% of organizations lack the skills and technology to really take advantage of their captured data. And yes, the only solution to this problem lies in using the right tools. By right tools, we mean – business intelligence tools.
Businesses today are immersed in the data pool. Some are using this data to their advantage and coming out as winners, while others are drowning in their own data pool – without being able to direct all that data to help them come out of the data depth. In other words, with the increasing flow of data, comes great potential for businesses to succeed, scale, and grow. The only question is – how are you going to capture, utilize, and channel the data points to make revenue-generating business decisions?
If you can capture even a fraction of the available data, and then mine it for relevant information, then you are definitely ahead of the business game when compared to those who are not encashing data the way they should. This is where business intelligence tools come into the picture. These data-driven tools can help you learn more about your customers than ever before. However, finding the right business intelligence tools is equal to finding a pearl in the ocean. One wrong decision could cost you and your business a fortune both in terms of time and money. To help you make the right decision, we have gathered a list of some of the best business intelligence tools in the market.
5 Best business intelligence tools
In the following lines, we are going to cover these aspects in their entirety and learn more about them.
Domo
Domo is a cloud-based platform that focuses on business-user-deployed dashboards and is known for its easy-to-use feature. In fact, it offers business intelligence tools tailored to various industries such as financial services, health care, manufacturing & education, and roles – including CEOs, sales, BI professionals, and IT workers. This BI platform is recommended by many users across the world and is a popular choice when it comes to business intelligence tools.
In addition, Domo comprises multiple systems and features – starting with connecting the data and finishing with extending data with pre-built and custom apps from the Domo Appstore. Not just that, you can even use Domo for your data lakes, warehouses, and ETL tools, along with R or Python scripts to prepare data for predictive modeling.
As mentioned earlier, domo allows you to connect the data across your enterprise and utilize its machine learning and AI capabilities. Plus it enables users to explore the data on their own as well. Its most loved feature is its ability to generate automatic visualizations once you upload the data source. Note, that you can always refine the data, annotate for further discussions, refine the date, and also control who has access to it.
Microsoft Power BI
This business intelligence tool allows you to analyze and visualize data from local or cloud sources. And also help you publish the reports to the Power BI platform. It offers data preparation, visual-based discovery, interactive dashboards, and augmented analytics.
The free Power BI Desktop version has limited options, whereas the pro version where you have to pay monthly, makes collaborative analysis way easier. To be precise, the pro version leverages Microsoft Office 365, SharePoint, and Teams to control access to raw data and published reports.
And if you need more options, then go with the Premium tier. This version makes self-service data prep possible with pre-built connectors to corporate data that are stored in Microsoft Dynamics 365, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, or third-party sources such as Salesforce.
Zoho Analytics
Zoho Analytics is a self-service BI and analytics platform that many organizations today rely on. This business intelligence tool allows you to create insightful dashboards and visually analyze any data in no time. Its AI-powered assistant feature allows you to even ask questions and get smart answers in return – especially in terms of meaningful reports.
Also, if you opt for a shared view of your reports, you can enable commenting in real time on elements such as charts, pivot views, tabular views, tables, or dashboards. This fuels easy collaboration and communication between employees working from different locations. Thereby, ensuring smooth workflow.
Apart from various visualization options such as charts, widgets, pivot tables, and tabular view components, it offers something called the ‘geo-visualization’ feature. This feature helps you to analyze the geographical data with interactive map charts across countries, states, regions, and even latitudes and longitudes. Now, isn’t that fascinating?
Tableau
With Tableau, you can run its software on-premises, public cloud, or even choose to have it hosted by Tableau completely. This tool offers tailored versions for over a dozen industries with support for financial, HR, IT, marketing, and sales departments.
This tool is popular for its data discovery and data visualization features. It helps you analyze, visualize, and share data with ease – and most importantly without IT intervention. It uses AI techniques that help you describe what you want to see, rather than clicking and dragging to create formulaic queries. This business intelligence tool even supports multiple data sources such as MS Excel, Oracle, MS SQL, Google Analytics, and SalesForce. Not just that, it offers well-designed dashboards that are very easy to use.
Dundas BI
Dundas is an enterprise-ready Business Intelligence platform. You can use this tool to build and view interactive dashboards, reports, scorecards, the company’s historic strengths, and more. It is capable of performing even standard and ad-hoc reporting. That is, you can even deploy Dundas BI as the central data portal for the organization. Or even integrate it into an existing website as a custom BI solution. Here are some of the great features that Dundas BI offers:
- Easy access through a web browser
- Easy data integration options
- Predictive and advanced data analytics
- Customizable data visualizations
- Smart drag-and-drop tools
- Data visualization via maps
- Server application with complete product functionality
Conclusion
Business intelligence tools today have become more of a necessity than a luxury. If your organization is not using one, it’s time you do. Hope the above list helps you select the one that best aligns with your business needs.
