BI tools can revolutionize organizations by providing valuable insights into their data. This helps businesses make smarter decisions, improve operational efficiency, and gain a competitive edge in their industry. In this guide, I ranked and reviewed the 7 best Business Intelligence software, along with my top 4 choices, so that you can pick the best one.
The 7 best Business intelligence software are Microsoft Power BI, QlikSense, Zoho Analytics, Tableau, Oracle Analytics Cloud, Dundas BI, and Datapine.
Business Intelligence (BI) tools are software applications that help organizations collect, store, access, and analyze data to gain insights and make informed business decisions. They provide a variety of features such as data visualization, reporting, and dashboards to help users understand and analyze large amounts of data.
It is critical to examine what features are most essential to you while selecting the best BI software. Aside from the license fee, it is critical to adopt the tool that will make it easier for you to know what is happening with your data without any deep knowledge in databases and how they work.
In addition, it is recommended to keep an eye on the latest BI trends, implement business intelligence best practices, and fully understand all its components to future proof your business and continue evolving.
Let’s get started reviewing the best Business Intelligence software available.
Comparison of Best BI Software
| BI Tools | Free trial | Price | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Power BI | Yes | $9.99 | Small to large businesses |
| QlikSense | Yes | $30 | Small to large businesses |
| Zoho Analytics | Yes | $22 | Small to medium businesses |
| Tableau | Yes | $70 | Small to large businesses |
| Oracle Analytics Cloud | Yes | $16 | Small to large businesses |
| Dundas BI | Yes | Not disclosed | Small to medium businesses |
| Datapine | Yes | Not disclosed | Small to medium businesses |
What are best business intelligence software?
Here are my top recommendations for BI tools to get you started with quickly analyzing huge amounts of data.
Each of these BI solutions has advantages and downsides; selecting the proper software necessitates careful planning and testing.
1- Microsoft Power BI
Microsoft Power BI is considered one of the best business intelligence tools available in the market that allows organizations to manage, access, and analyze huge amount of data to better understand how things are working and allow for more informed business decisions.
It provides a wide range of features including data visualization, reporting, dashboards, data modeling, collaboration and smooth integration with all related Microsoft products. In addition, it provides a data modeling feature that allows users to create relationships between different data sources and perform advanced calculations.
Microsoft Power BI offers the most competitive licensing model compared to other best business intelligence software which makes it a cost-effective tool with extremely powerful capabilities.
Why I picked MS Power BI? Power BI is the perfect tool that helps managing the complete BI cycle in an affordable licensing fee. In addition, being a Microsoft product, the community provides lots of training materials and support for free.
Key Features
- Self-service analytics
- Support a wide range of data sources including Excel spreadsheets, cloud services, streaming data, and on-premises databases.
- Real time dashboards
- Reports sharing
- Frequent updates
- No setup fees
Pricing
- Power BI Pro: $9.99 user/month
- Power BI Premium: $20 user/month
- Power BI Premium: $4,995.00 capacity/month
2- QlikSense
QlikSense is considered one of the top business intelligence software that helps organizations get the most out of their stored data by effectively analyzing it and understanding how your organization is performing and what should be improved.
It provides an associative data model that helps users to connect and explorer data relationships from a wide range of data sources to make it simple to uncover insights. in addition, the drag and drop interface makes it easy for non-technical users to create and customize their own reports and dashboards without almost any technical help.
Why I picked QlikSense? QlikSense have helped many of our clients to easily create data visualization reports and share with the other colleague in real time. In addition, they have a world class supporting system that you could expect quick answers when in need.
Key Features
- Wide range of data sources
- Enterprise ready
- Empower everyone in organizations to make data-driven decisions
- ETL capability
- Model building (Data Management)
- Predictive analysis
Pricing
- Business: $30 user/month
- Enterprise: prices not disclosed
3- Zoho Analytics
Zoho Analytics is one of the best business intelligence software that can help small to medium enterprise manage their big data, perform advanced analytics and enhance data governance. With this platform, you can easily connect to a wide range of data sources to perform complex analytics.
If you are serious about governance and security features, this tool provides roles-based access control that help you ensure compliance and integrity. In addition, it provides the perfect collaborative environment to make it easy for users to share reports with their colleagues.
Why I picked Zoho Analytics? One of the best capabilities provided is the ability to integrate with other BI platforms like Power BI, Tableau, and Qlik Sense to provide a complete end-to-end solution.
Key Features
- Integration with other BI platforms
- Wide range of data sources
- Easy to use
- Real time collaboration
- Support large amount of data
Pricing
- Basic: $22/user/month
- Standard: $45/user/month
- Premium: $112/user/month
- Enterprise: $445/user/month
4- Tableau
Tableau is known for being one of the easiest to use BI platform in which with a few clicks, users can analyze data coming from multiple data sources to help them identify patterns, gain insights, and understand their data clearly. Using the drag and drop interface, you can create powerful data visualization reports and easily share them with your colleagues, partners, or clients.
Top organizations already trust Tableau for their data analytics and visualization including Verizon, Nissan, Pfizer, and Honeywell. It provides advanced capabilities to help businesses overcome big data challenges by implementing the needed best practices.
Using Tableau, your organization can make sure that this Business intelligence software always follows the latest big data trends.
Key Features
- Powerful calculations
- Interactive dashboards
- Natural language queries
- Hundreds of data sources
- Clustering data relationships
- Data analytics
- Customization and collaboration
Pricing
- Creator: $70 user/month
- Explorer: $42 user/month
- Viewer: $15/user/month
5- Oracle Analytics Cloud
We can’t cover the best business intelligence software available in the market without mentioning the mighty Oracle Analytics Cloud. This tool is customizable and easy to use which allow non-technical users to dig deep in their datasets to gain insights and make the best business decisions.
This BI software provides required capabilities to address the complete analytics and reporting process including data modeling, data preparation, collaboration, and visualization without compromising security and governance.
Our only issue with Oracle is that their licensing plans are not usually clear and somehow expensive.
Key Features
- Wide range of data sources
- Artificial intelligence in data analysis
- Real time collaboration and reporting
- Easy to learn
Pricing
- Professional: $16 user/month
- Enterprise: $80 user/month
- BYOL: custom pricing
6- Dundas BI
Dundas BI is the most flexible Business Intelligence and Analytics tool available in the market which provides advanced analytics, data visualization and governance capabilities all in one platform. In addition, it offers a wide range of reporting and visualization from basic charts to heatmaps, gauges, and geographic maps.
Collaborating with your team members, partners, or clients is super smooth due to the collaboration capabilities that allow you to easily share reports within few clicks. It is well known for supporting hundreds of data connections to allow you to perform complex analytics.
Key Features
- Wide range of data connectors and sources
- Out of the box integrations
- Lots of charts options
- Excellent customer support
- Intuitive and easy to learn
Pricing
- Prices are not disclosed
7- Datapine
Datapine is also considered one of the best business intelligence software which is known for its ability to handle large and complex datasets, while providing advanced analytics and data visualization capabilities. One of its unique capabilities is the ability to create a single query that retrieve data from different data sources for easier visualization and analytics.
During our evaluation, we have noticed that Datapine is probably one of the fastest BI tools available due to its in-chip methodology. We could load millions of data records in few seconds which was very impressive.
Key Features
- Easy integration of APIs
- Very intuitive UI, minimal learning curve even for non-technical users.
- Excellent customer service
- Easily customizable
Pricing
- Prices are not disclosed.
