The 5 Best Business Intelligence Tools

Business intelligence tools intensify data collection, analysis, monitoring, and prediction of future business scenarios, creating a clear perspective of all the data managed by companies. Organizations and businesses need solid support when making decisions that are sustainable and profitable. By using cutting-edge and professional business intelligence tools, any challenge can be promptly addressed.

Let's see what BI tools are, what main advantages a company can gain by using them, and which ones are currently the best on the market.

What is Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence, or BI, leverages software and services to turn data into actionable information that can facilitate strategic business decisions in a data-oriented manner. BI and data visualization tools allow access to vast amounts of data and analyze them, presenting analytical results in reports, summaries, dashboards, charts, and maps to provide stakeholders with detailed insights on the company's status.

The term business intelligence often also refers to a range of tools that provide quick and easy access to in-depth information about a company's current status based on available data.

These platforms include key features like data visualization, visual analytics, interactive dashboards, and KPI scorecards. Moreover, they enable users to utilize automated reporting and predictive analytics in a single solution, making the analysis process efficient and accessible.

But what are the advantages of these BI applications, and what do they offer compared to traditional data management means?

Advantages of BI Tools

1. They gather all relevant data: Whether a small business or a large enterprise, data collection likely happens from various portals, ERP, CRM, flat files, databases, APIs, and more. A high level of data intelligence is needed to manage all these sources and develop a better understanding of the collected information. That's why using these platforms will help centralize disparate sources and provide a single point of view on all business processes.
2. Self-service approach: Every person in the company will be able to explore the data independently, reducing the need to request reports and support from the IT department. This approach gives organizations a competitive edge: every employee will have the right data analysis skills, ultimately saving the company time and resources while relieving the IT department.
3. They reduce manual tasks: While traditional business management methods encourage the use of spreadsheets and static presentations, modern tools eliminate infinite rows and columns and facilitate process automation, leaving endless PowerPoint presentations in the past and adopting a much more intuitive approach to data analysis.
4. They reduce business costs: From sales planning to customer behavior analysis, from real-time process monitoring to offer optimization, BI platforms enable much faster planning, analysis, and reporting processes. In fact, according to a survey conducted by BI Survey, over 50% of business intelligence users reported these as the most important benefits that helped them reduce costs and increase revenue.
5. They provide a competitive advantage: Companies that manage to use the vast amounts of data they produce to their advantage can stand out from the competition in a big way. BI tools offer the knowledge and capabilities needed to efficiently manage business data to promote productivity and growth. Being able to make informed strategic decisions is an invaluable advantage that organizations across all sectors gain by working with the right BI software.

The 5 Best BI Tools

Now that we have seen the main advantages of business intelligence tools, let's see which ones, according to our team, are the best in the market today:

DATAPINE

Datapine is a BI software that allows connecting data from various sources and analyzing them with advanced features (including predictive analytics and artificial intelligence). It allows creating one or more business dashboards, generating standard or customized reports, or setting intelligent alerts to receive notifications on anomalies and targets. The software offers functionalities for both advanced users like data analysts and average business users. The SQL mode allows analysts to create their queries while on the other hand, the intuitive drag-and-drop interface ensures a visually intuitive way to insert values and create charts and dashboards very simply.

Key features of Datapine:

Easy-to-use predictive analytics: advanced analytics features, including predictive analysis based on a forecast engine, where you simply select the KPI, determine the number of data points you want to predict, specify the previous data points for calculation, and finally define the model type.

Interactive dashboard features: Ability to delve deeper into each part of the dashboards with advanced features like drill-down, chart zooming, widget linking, and hierarchical filters, ensuring a detailed data discovery process.

Multiple reporting options: Ability to create standard or customized reports sharing them via password-protected live URL, enabling viewer access, or sending a report by email that can be automated at set intervals.

Intelligent insights and notifications based on AI: with AI technologies, machine learning, and pattern recognition, the user gets alerted if any business anomaly occurs or there are other updates, including growths, trends, what-if scenarios, etc.

ORACLE BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

Oracle Business Intelligence aims to provide end-to-end solutions to help companies optimize their performance and enable quicker, more informed decisions. It offers a wide range of data management features such as: machine learning, artificial intelligence, a suite of integrated query, reporting, and mobile analytics, and much more. Since its founding in 1977, Oracle's mission has been to provide companies with the tools to efficiently manage their data comprehensively and agilely.

Key features of Oracle:

Oracle BI Server: the tool offers a full BI server providing centralized data access for anyone within the company. It hosts all data-supported business processes like dashboards, ad hoc queries, OLAP analytics, data mining, and more.

Oracle BI Answers: It is the built-in reporting tool allowing users to create and modify reports, allowing end-users to explore and interact with information and perform drill-downs to source data.

Oracle BI Dashboard: the tool offers customized dashboards providing interactive access to information, tailored to the roles and identity of those viewing them.

Custom notifications: allows activity monitoring and can notify users through dashboards, emails, or even notifications on mobile devices.

Oracle BI Publisher: This feature offers the ability to generate scalable reports to provide complex information to stakeholders securely and in the correct format.

Real-time decision server: combining rules with predictive analytics, this function allows implementing intelligence in real-time in any business process. The tool provides real-time advice and insights.

DOMO

Domo is a business intelligence software composed of multiple systems. Cloud-based, it is redefining the BI market and transforming how business is managed. It gives users direct, real-time access to all business information they care about, all in one place. Domo solves pain points commonly felt by CEOs, managers, and IT professionals for whom traditional BI reporting is often too cumbersome, complex, and slow.

Key features of Domo:

Magic ETL functionality: data transformation tools allow you to prepare data with a drag-and-drop Magic ETL, as Domo calls it, without needing to know SQL.

Automatically suggested visualizations: data visualization allows switching from raw data to diagrams, charts, maps, and other visual types automatically suggested by Domo after uploading the data source.

Mr. Roboto as AI engine: predictive analytics is powered by Mr. Roboto, Domo's AI engine, allowing data scientists to create predictive models and use AI, machine learning, natural language processing, and other AI technologies that alert and notify of KPI changes, for example.

Domo Appstore: their open cloud platform is an ecosystem of prebuilt apps, connector APIs, and dashboards designed to meet specific business needs, also giving the ability to create customized ones and share them on Domo Appstore.

PENTAHO

Pentaho is a Hitachi Vantara end-to-end data integration and analytics platform offering a range of business intelligence features like OLAP services, reporting, dashboards, data mining, and integration, ETL, and more. With all these functionalities, some presented as open source plugins, the software aims to help businesses manage large data quantities to positively impact strategic decisions and business outcomes. It can be used cloud-based or on-premise through two different formats: a community edition with basic features and a more comprehensive enterprise edition obtained via an annual subscription.

Key features of Pentaho:

Cloud data integration: a complex ETL engine allowing execution of data integration processes and transformations in and out of big data environments.

Data mining: using a set of machine learning algorithms, efficient data mining tasks can be performed using, among others, clustering, decision trees, and neural networks.

Pentaho Report Designer: queries data from multiple sources including SQL, MXD, flat files and more, and generates scheduled or on-demand reports in various formats like XLS, PDF, TXT, and HTML.

Pentaho Dashboard Designer: a drag-and-drop interface to quickly generate dashboards and scorecards with multiple data visualization options.

Advanced analytics: Pentaho also offers a range of advanced analytics capabilities like predictive analytics technologies to generate accurate forecasts and extract valuable insights, as well as options for creating advanced charts to communicate complex data simply.

SAS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

SAS Business Intelligence is a BI tool offering numerous products and technologies for data scientists, text analysts, data engineers, predictive analysts, economists, etc. Founded in the 1970s, it is one of the most well-established software with a long-standing tradition in the market, building and expanding its products every year.

Key features of SAS

Visual data exploration supported by machine learning: SAS's data exploration offers automated analytics supported by machine learning compiled in interactive visualizations answering business questions like: "Where do my customers come from?"

Text analysis: enables gaining insights from text data such as those extracted from social media.

Reports and dashboards on all devices: dynamic visuals are organized into interactive reports and dashboards, also accessible on mobile devices and tablets (both Android and iOS).

Integration with other applications: it is integrable with Microsoft Office applications like PowerPoint, Word, SharePoint, or Excel, and their Office Analytics solution allows viewing results directly within the Microsoft Office Suite.

We have analyzed the main tools on the market, but often companies need customized products with specific features created for their business. Our team of experts develops ad hoc cloud platforms aimed at moving and storing this data and can train staff to use Business Intelligence tools. Contact us for a consultation and scale your business through data analysis.