Business Intelligence (BI) Tools
Business Intelligence (BI) Tools Overview
Top Rated Business Intelligence (BI) Products

These products won a Top Rated award for having excellent customer satisfaction ratings. The list is based purely on reviews; there is no paid placement, and analyst opinions do not influence the rankings. Read more about the Top Rated criteria.
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Business Intelligence (BI) Tools TrustMap

TrustMaps are two-dimensional charts that compare products based on trScore and research frequency by prospective buyers. Products must have 10 or more ratings to appear on this TrustMap.
Business Intelligence (BI) Products
(51-75 of 214) Sorted by Most Reviews
The list of products below is based purely on reviews (sorted from most to least). There is no paid placement and analyst opinions do not influence their rankings. Here is our Promise to Buyers to ensure information on our site is reliable, useful, and worthy of your trust.
Key Features
- Formatting capabilities (12)75%7.5
- Customizable dashboards (12)65%6.5
- Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.) (12)63%6.3
Key Features
- Pixel Perfect reports (5)71%7.1
- Customizable dashboards (5)71%7.1
- Report Formatting Templates (5)61%6.1
SAS Visual Analytics provides a complete platform for analytics visualization, enabling users to identify patterns and relationships in data that weren't initially evident. Interactive, self-service BI and reporting capabilities are combined with out-of-the-box advanced analytics…
Key Features
- Formatting capabilities (8)100%10.0
- Drill-down analysis (8)100%10.0
- Publish to PDF (8)100%10.0
Key Features
- Customizable dashboards (9)93%9.3
- Drill-down analysis (9)85%8.5
- Formatting capabilities (9)62%6.2
Clear Analytics is a business intelligence solution that enables non technical end users to perform analytics by leveraging existing knowledge of Excel coupled with a built in query builder. Some key features include: Dynamic Data Refresh, Data Share and In-Excel Collaboration.
Key Features
- Customizable dashboards (8)91%9.1
- Pixel Perfect reports (8)90%9.0
- Report Formatting Templates (8)88%8.8
Rational BI provides analytics, data science and business intelligence in an analytical platform that connects to databases, data files and cloud drives including AWS and Azure data sources, enabling users to explore and visualize data. Users can build real-time notebook-style reports…
Key Features
- Customizable dashboards (9)90%9.0
- Formatting capabilities (9)88%8.8
- Report Formatting Templates (9)87%8.7
Mode is an analytics platform designed to help data analysts and data scientists analyze, visualize, and share data, from Mode Analytics headquartered in San Francisco. The Studio support level provides individual analysts or up to 5 users with an SQL editor, as well as a Python…
Key Features
- Customizable dashboards (8)81%8.1
- Formatting capabilities (8)79%7.9
- Publish to PDF (8)72%7.2
Geckoboard enables users to create real time dashboards using data from over 80 cloud services. It integrates with other products such as: AWeber, Basecamp, Campaign Monitor and HubSpot.
Key Features
- Publish to Web (5)100%10.0
- Customizable dashboards (5)100%10.0
- Report sharing and collaboration (5)80%8.0
Jet Reports is a business intelligence software now offered by insightsoftware, inc since the company's 2019 acquisition of Jet Global Data Technologies.
Key Features
- Drill-down analysis (6)50%5.0
- Formatting capabilities (6)45%4.5
- Report Formatting Templates (6)35%3.5
XLCubed optimises Excel for data-connected reporting and analytics, and provides a governed web and mobile sharing model. It connects Excel directly to corporate data and adds a wide range of reporting, visualisation and analytical capabilities. Designed so that users can leverage…
Key Features
- Customizable dashboards (5)85%8.5
- Pixel Perfect reports (5)84%8.4
- Report Formatting Templates (5)80%8.0
Zendesk offers Explore, a business intelligence and customer analytics tool which integrates with the Zendesk suite featuring ticket analytics, custom fields, dashboards, and other features. Zendesk is migrating customers of the BIME analytics product, which is approaching end of…
Key Features
- Customizable dashboards (5)100%10.0
- Drill-down analysis (5)100%10.0
- Formatting capabilities (5)100%10.0
Key Features
- Drill-down analysis (5)80%8.0
- Report Formatting Templates (5)79%7.9
- Customizable dashboards (5)79%7.9
Learn More About Business Intelligence (BI) Tools
What is Business Intelligence (BI)?
Business Intelligence tools are designed to make sense of the huge quantities of data that organizations accumulate over time. BI tools analyze this information and present it as actionable information that can guide decision making.
Business Intelligence software (BI) makes up a large heterogeneous category of software. Not all tools in the category can be meaningfully compared to each other. There are several types of BI tools of which the most substantive are Full-Stack Business Intelligence Tools and Data Visualization Tools.
Business Intelligence Tools Features & Capabilities
- 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 Business Intelligence Tools
Full-stack or traditional products are enterprise-level BI 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. Full-stack BI 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 Discovery and Visualization Business Intelligence
Data Visualization products have a different purpose. These BI tools 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 business intelligence tools often use a technology called in-memory analytics to query data residing on a computer’s RAM rather than on a physical disk. This means that the data does not have to be stored anywhere for subsequent analysis.
Data visualization products often have lower cost of implementation and require less support. This can make them good business intelligence tools for small companies that don’t need a full-stack business intelligence solution.
The Data Visualization TrustMap shows only those tools that belong in this sub-category.
Business Intelligence and Reporting
Many BI tools also enable some forms of reporting. Modern BI’s ability to intake many different forms of data and present them in increasingly high and professional quality, some organizations are able to use their BI tool both to surface specific insights and generate regular reports. The level of automation found in BI reporting will vary highly from product to product. For general reporting needs, the ability to set-and-forget data pipelines into a BI tool and the normalization of functions like dynamic dashboards make some leading BI tools competitive automated reporting tools as well. However, specialized reporting cases that use more niche data structures may be less automatable in traditional BI tools.
Business Intelligence Software Comparison
When considering different business intelligence tools, consider the following aspects of each product offering.
- Ease of Use: Some BI tools offer high complexity and customization, but can be difficult for non-technical users. You should consider the technical ability of the staff that will be using the BI tools as well as if you need more complex features.
- Compatibility: Many BI tools are not complete, end-to-end solutions. For some organizations, purchasing BI software from multiple vendors may be necessary. If your business needs BI features that aren’t all covered in a single product, be sure to ask venders about integrations and compatibility with other software.
- Scalability: Some BI software doesn’t scale up very well as data needs increase. Consider the breadth of data generated by your organization and decide if that amount will stay the same or increase. If your data needs will increase, be sure to choose a BI solution that can handle your expected growth.
Start a Business Intelligence Software Comparison
Pricing Information
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.
More Resources
- The Buyer's Guide to Business Intelligence (BI) Software
- Business Intelligence Trends for 2020: Advice for Buyers
- Evolution of Business Intelligence: From Reporting to Augmented Analytics
- 49 Shocking Business Intelligence Statistics for 2021
Business Intelligence (BI) Tools Best Of Awards
The following Business Intelligence (BI) Tools offer award-winning customer relationships, feature sets, and value for price. Learn more about our Best Of Awards methodology here.
