Top 12 BI tools

With more and more data at our fingertips, it’s getting harder to focus on the information relevant to our problems and present it in an actionable way. That’s what business intelligence is all about.

BI tools make it simpler to corral the right data and visualize it in ways that enable us to understand what it means. But how simple that process gets, and how you can visualize the data depends on the tool: Picking the right one for your needs becomes important.

Here we round up of a dozen popular, highly regarded BI tools to help you uncover what your organization’s data can tell you about your business.

• Board
• Domo
• Dundas BI
• Microsoft Power BI
• MicroStrategy
• Oracle Analytics Cloud
• Qlik
• SAS
• Sisense
• Tableau
• Tableau CRM
• Tibco

Board

Board International combines three tools in one: BI, predictive analytics and performance management. While it aims to offer something for everyone, it predominately focuses on finance-oriented BI. It has modules for finance (planning, consolidation), HR (skills mapping, workforce planning), marketing (social media analysis, loyalty and retention monitoring), supply chain (delivery optimization, supplier management), sales (cross-selling and up-selling analysis) and IT (KPIs, service levels). The company is Swiss, but the software is available in English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, French, German and Italian. The latest version of its platform has replaced its multidimensional online analytical processing (MOLAP) approach with an in-memory calculation engine.

• Target audience: The whole enterprise but usually enters via the finance department
• Notable features: Language support
• Pricing: License fee per user varies according to role

Domo

Domo is a cloud-based platform focused on business-user-deployed dashboards and ease-of-use. It offers business intelligence tools tailored to various industries (such as financial services, health care, manufacturing and education) and roles (including CEOs, sales, BI professionals and IT workers). CIOs might start by checking out how it handles data from AWS, Jira, GitHub, or New Relic before looking at how over 500 other integrations can help the rest of the enterprise.

• Target audience: CEOs, sales and marketing, BI professionals
• Notable features: Robust mobile interface
• Pricing: On request

Dundas BI

Dundas BI from Dundas Data Visualization is used predominantly for creating dashboards and scorecards, the company’s historic strengths, but it can also perform standard and ad-hoc reporting. Analysis and visualization are performed through a web interface that can adapt to users’ skills: Power users and standard users see different features. The latest version has a new in-memory engine, a new natural language query capability, and adds point-and-click trend analysis, support for Linux, and an application development environment for customized analytic applications. Dundas BI has been tailored for 19 industries, including clean tech, mining and construction, in addition to the usual suspects such as banking and healthcare. It sells to large enterprises but specializes in embedded BI.