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Business Intelligence products are all designed to make sense of the huge quantities of data that organizations accumulate over time, by analyzing it and presenting it in a form where it can guide decision-making.
Business Intelligence products (BI) make up a large heterogeneous category of software. Not all tools in the category can be meaningfully compared to each other. There are several sub-categories of tools of which the most substantive are Full-Stack Business Intelligence Tools and Data Visualization Tools.
BI Platform Type
Supported Data Sources
Standard Reporting
Ad-Hoc Reporting
Report Output and Scheduling
Data Discovery and Visualization
Access Control and Security
Mobile Capabilities
APIs / Embedding
Full-stack or traditional products are enterprise-level tools designed to solve the specific problem of enterprise data silos. Much crucial business data is stored in a range of different data stores, many attached to business applications like ERP. These tools consolidate all data in a data warehouse which is a relational database designed for data mining instead of transactional processing.
Slices of data from the warehouse—usually summary data for a single department like sales or finance—are stored in a “data mart” for quick access. All of this structured data is normalized by using an ETL process (Extract, Transform and Load) whereby transactional data is combined into a single pool of data and then “transformed” into a more appropriate format for querying and analysis before being written in the data warehouse database.
The Full-Stack Business Intelligence TrustMap shows only those products that belong in this sub-category.
Data Visualization products have a different purpose. These products are primarily designed to help data analysts discover patterns in large quantities of data and to build compelling visual representations which allow these patterns to be easily understood.
These tools often use a technology called in-memory analytics to query data residing on a computer’s RAM rather than on a physical disk which means that the data does not have to be stored anywhere for subsequent analysis.
The Data Visualization TrustMap shows only those tools that belong in this sub-category.
Business Intelligence software is generally quite expensive. However, it’s worth remembering that it is often money very well-spent in terms of significantly improved decision-making.
One of the impediments to understanding pricing is that vendors base their pricing on a broad range of different variables from number of users to number of CPU cores.
However, as a very rough guide, advanced report authoring can cost $2,000 to $2,500 per seat, while interactive report viewing can be about half that amount. Static report viewing can be as little as $50 per seat.
TIBCO Spotfire® is a data visualization platform that aims to speed individual time to insight and spur analytics adoption across the organization. According to the vendor, Spotfire helps users quickly and easily generate insights with three new ways to support their analytical preferences: NLQ p...
SAP Crystal Reports and SAP Crystal Server are designed to help users create pixel-perfect, richly formatted, and dynamic reports from virtually any data source – delivered in dozens of export formats, in up to 24 languages. According to the vendor SAP Crystal Reports is a robust production repor...
Tableau Desktop is the rapid-fire authoring environment used to create and publish complex visualizations, reports and dashboards in multiple output formats. Using Tableau Desktop, a report author can connect to multiple data sources, explore relationships, create dashboards, modify metadata, and...
Jaspersoft is a Business Intelligence suite that brings users worldwide more timely, actionable data inside their apps and business processes, through an embeddable reporting and analytics. The vendor says Jaspersoft is a cost-effective platform, and its goal is to help users make better decision...
Tableau Server is an enterprise-class business analytics platform that can scale up to hundreds of thousands of users. It allows distributed mobile and browser-based users to interact with Tableau workbooks published to the server from Tableau Desktop. Tableau Server comprises 4 main components:...
Birst Networked BI is a BI product that promises to enable a single view of data and eliminate data silos. Additionally, decentralized teams and individual users can augment this shared analytic fabric with their own local data, without compromising data governance. This consistency comes from a ...
SAP Lumira Discovery is a data visualization software solution that helps business users take full advantage of the massive amounts of data that is available to their business by using data analysis and data visualization capabilities. The data available in all major data sources (like MS Excel, ...
Entrinsik Informer is a web-based Reporting and Business Intelligence (BI) application. It helps organizations transform real-time data into actionable information by delivering ad-hoc reporting, data analysis and interactive dashboards.
Qlik Sense is a modern platform for self-service oriented analytics, helping drive discovery and data literacy for all user types. It supports a full range of analytics use cases - including self-service visualization and exploration, guided analytics apps and dashboards, custom and embedded anal...
QlikView® is a data discovery product for creating rapidly developed, highly interactive guided analytics applications and dashboards, purpose built for business challenges. With Qlik’s Associative Data Indexing engine at its core, it allows people to explore freely, to uncover insights and data ...
Microsoft BI benefits from the ubiquity of SQL server and the set of tools built around the database, including an ETL layer, master data management, data cleansing, report and reporting. The reporting engine is SQL Server Reporting Services which does not have the visualization capabilities of ...
IBM Cognos is an established product with a large user base. It is a full-featured platform comprising Query Studio, Reporting Studio, Analysis Studio and Event Studio, and Cognos Administration along with some newer tools for Microsoft Office integration, full-text search and dashboards. Query ...
Domo's Business Cloud is a full self-service business intelligence (BI) software that promises to bring all of your business data together in one platform. According to the vendor, the Business Cloud can help organizations automate reporting, turn data into intelligence, and help executives make ...
Sisense simplifies business analytics for complex data. Powered by its unique In-Chip™ and Single Stack™ technologies—Sisense delivers unmatched performance, agility and value, eliminating much of the costly data preparation traditionally needed with business analytics tools and providing a singl...
The SAP® BusinessObjects™ Business Intelligence (BI) platform is a flexible, scalable information infrastructure that aims to help you more easily discover and share insights for better business decisions. According to the vendor, the integrated, unified infrastructure enables scalability from on...
Zoho Reports is a cloud-based reporting and business intelligence platform for small to medium-sized businesses. It allows businesses to know and track their key performance metrics. It has a pay-as-you-go pricing model. Various customization options allow businesses to tailor Zoho Reports to the...
Dundas BI is Business Intelligence (BI) and Data Visualization software that includes customizable dashboards, reporting and visual data analytics. According to the vendor, their solution is the most flexible BI platform, with seamless integration into the user’s business applications, allowing t...
Looker is business intelligence application with an analytics-oriented application server that sits on top of relational data stores. The Looker platform includes an end-user interface for exploring data, a reusable development paradigm for creating data discovery experiences, and an extensible A...
MicroStrategy Analytics is a platform for Business Intelligence (BI) and self-service analytics. It enables organizations worldwide to analyze the vast amounts of data stored across their enterprises to make better business decisions. MicroStrategy currently has 3 versions: MicroStrategy Analy...
Alteryx Analytics is a business intelligence and predictive analytics offering.
InsightSquared Tiles is a sales analytics platform that provides sales leaders with the insights they need to drive performance and close deals. According to the vendor, the comprehensive set of reports provide sales leaders with ready access to all the analysis they need to assess their progress...
