Embedded Business Intelligence (BI) Tools

Best Embedded Business Intelligence (BI) Tools include:

ClicData, Logi Report (formerly JReport), GoodData, Domo, ThoughtSpot, Looker, TIBCO Jaspersoft, Zoho Analytics, Sisense, and Qlik Analytics Platform.

Embedded Business Intelligence (BI) Tools TrustMap

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Embedded Business Intelligence (BI) Tools Overview

What is Embedded Business Intelligence Software?

Embedded business intelligence (BI) integrates business intelligence tools and capabilities into existing business applications, portals, and processes. Embedded BI, also known as embedded analytics, is a specialized use case for BI capabilities within the broader Business Intelligence market.

Embedded BI products are deployed by developers by integrating BI capabilities into tools that they create or administer. This allows end-users to utilize and self-serve BI features from within other business applications. End-users most frequently experience these embedded BI capabilities via dashboards, reports, and analysis interfaces that they would otherwise have to go into a separate, standalone BI tool to access.

Organizations take one of two main approaches to embedded BI. Some businesses, especially enterprises, have the resources to build these embedded analytics in house. However, external embedded BI providers have become more prevalent and cost-efficient in recent years. While some traditional BI products can be embedded, it’s not a universal capability among BI vendors. Some traditional BI products are more well-known for their embedded systems than others.

Embedded BI vs. Traditional BI

Embedded BI has become a popular approach to business intelligence for many companies, as it offers some key advantages over traditional BI. The primary difference between embedded BI and traditional BI is that embedded BI is more streamlined and accessible for the end business user. By deeply integrating with the business apps that users are already working in, embedded BI tools can deliver a much more streamlined workflow with fewer windows and programs to juggle simultaneously.

By embedding BI capabilities directly in business applications, each embedded instance is more tailored to the structure and format of the data it’s working with, making the data easier for business users to work with than if they had to import and transfer the data between standalone applications.

This improved user experience leads to higher user adoption. On one hand, embedded BI software is less frustrating and intrusive to use for end-users. It’s also more accessible and easier to self-serve, since end-users don’t have to be nearly as familiar with the broader embedded BI system as they would a traditional BI tool.

Embedded Business Intelligence Features and Capabilities:

Embedded BI products strive to deliver very similar, if not identical, capabilities as traditional standalone BI tools. The primary difference is that these features are embedded in other business applications, which can lead to some differences in what features and capabilities are offered. However, embedded BI products should still deliver most or all of these features:

Data visualization
Application-agnostic embedding
Supported data types
Customizable dashboards
Self-service analytics
Mobile capabilities
Standardized reporting
Ad hoc reporting

Embedded Business Intelligence Comparison

When comparing different embedded business intelligence products, consider these factors:

Scalability: Will each product be able to scale with your potential or expected growth over time? In particular, consider how each product handles growth in data volumes, concurrent users, and more advanced or nuanced customizations over time.
Total Cost of Ownership: There are more costs to embedded BI tools than the upfront price tag. Consider long-term licensing costs, in-house maintenance costs, as well as reduced costs around ad hoc reporting requests that data scientists and BI administrators would have to service absent an embedded BI tool.
BI tech stack: There are several processes, or steps, in utilizing BI tools, such as data importing and formatting, data analysis, and visualizations. Consider which steps are most crucial or have the most particular requirements involved for the use case at hand, and which products best serve these specific needs.

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Embedded Business Intelligence Pricing

Embedded BI software is sold based on annual subscription pricing. Pricing most commonly scales based on the number of users/seats needed and the data volume being processed and leveraged. Some vendors will also account for secondary factors like refresh rate, certain advanced features, and extended customer support and assistance. While specific numbers can vary significantly, some products range from $30/user/month to $100+/user/month. Many offer some sort of free trial, especially the cloud-based SaaS tools.

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Embedded Business Intelligence (BI) Products

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Qlik Sense

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Qlik Sense® is a self-service BI platform for data discovery and visualization. It supports a full range of analytics use cases—data governance, pixel-perfect reporting, and collaboration. Its Associative Engine indexes and connects relationships between data points for creating…