Big or small, every business needs good tools to analyze data and develop the most suitable business strategy based on the information they get. Business intelligence tools are means that help companies get insights from their data and get a better understanding of what directions and trends to follow. Regardless of the scale of your business, implementing the right business intelligence tool can help you get more use of your data than ever and drive more profit. Having trouble making sense of, analyzing and organizing all the data you?re dealing with? A BI tool can collect, analyze, and convert data for you into easily comprehensible reports.
Why Does Every Business Need BI Tools?
Currently, every modern business operates in the condition of a hugely competitive environment and great pressure. For this reason, businesses of every scale have tons of metrics they monitor, organize and analyze. In many cases, data processing includes manual data entrance, painful hours of calculations and stats drafting. All of these hours cause significant financial losses. What?s more, when work is done manually, there is always a chance of error that can ruin the whole picture. Let?s now review how business intelligence tools can change this situation and what benefits they can bring to businesses.
Get Real-Time Analysis
Automating your data processing
routine can offer your business a lot of benefits. BI tools use the Big Data approach and apply it to your company data. This way, you can get real-time analysis of your process efficiency and react faster accordingly. You will not have to wait days or weeks to see stats. You will always have them at your hand with the right BI tools. Thus, you will not lose precious time and will be able to take the needed steps exactly when they need to be taken.
Save Costs and Time
If you worry that business intelligence tools are too expensive to be used by a small business, it?s time that you stop! Obviously, a small business tries to avoid any dangerous solutions, as it rarely has any extra money to make risky bets. Quite often, such businesses miss out on the opportunities BI software solutions can offer because they consider them to be expensive luxury products, fit for multi-million enterprises with a data center and a team of analysts. Yet, with the modern pace of digital technology, a top BI tool can fit the budget of most startups and does not require anything more technologically complex than a laptop or even a smartphone to be used. BI tools can help you gather information better and faster. They can be your 24/7 analytical team that does not practically need any maintenance.
Simplify Business Processes
Do you ever wonder how much time and money your company spends on business processes that could be easily automated? BI tools automate all your analytics for you so that you can spend all of those hours on first-priority tasks.
Boost Productivity
It?s only fair to say that business intelligence tools push businesses towards success. When you don?t spend long hours gathering stats from all kinds of different formats, when your real-time data is always at hand, and when you have a clear picture of what?s going on at the moment, you can react faster and better. A BI tool is a binding element that unites your business objectives and resources.
Top 10 Business Intelligence Tools
Without further ado, let us tell you about the best BI solutions currently available for small and large businesses.
1. Zoho Analytics
Zoho Analytics is popular business intelligence, reporting, and analytics software from the creators of a popular web-based solution Zoho Office. Zoho Analytics is able to integrate data from a wide range of sources and turn it into a visually appealing and easy to comprehend reports for marketing, sales and other departments. Zoho has a 15-day free trial after which you can choose a subscription plan between $22,5 and $445,5 based on your company needs and budget. Zoho can help your business track the key metrics, reveal trends, distinguish outliers, and discover secret insights.
2. Dundas
If you are looking for an advanced yet simple BI software, check out Dundas. It is a browser-based business intelligence tool with intuitive drag-and-drop functionality that has been around for twenty-five years already. Dundas transforms loads of data into visually appealing and easily comprehensible reports that can be infinitely customized. You can analyze these reports and draw the right conclusions without hiring an analytical team. Dundas is a powerful customizable tool that offers you a 45-day free trial. The company has a flexible pricing model that allows it to fit the needs of different users.
3. Sisense
Sisense is an API-first cloud technology that allows you to easily manage large amounts of complex data and visualize it. Sisense has a user-friendly interface and integrates with a wide variety of services like Salesforce and Adwords smoothly. Sisense processes data a lot faster compared to many other similar BI tools. With this solution, you can leverage all of your data quickly and grow your business faster and better as a result. What?s more, Sisense has a committed customer service that can help you in case you have any trouble figuring the service out. This BI tool has a flexible pricing model for their annual subscription plans. You can request a personalized quote at their website.
4. SAP Analytics Cloud
SAP Analytics Cloud is a modern BI tool that lets businesses make well-informed decisions across different departments, from marketing and sales to finance. With this tool, you can track your company?s KPI in real time. As well, you can get automatic insights thanks to the incorporated machine learning technology that can highlight the most important information for you to take action immediately. What?s more, SAP Analytics Cloud can grow together with your business, as it supports all the decision-making levels. This BI tool offers a 30-day free trial. Its typical subscription price is $25 per month per user.
5.Microsoft Power BI
Microsoft Power BI is a free and powerful business intelligence tool from a world-leading software giant Microsoft. This BI tool allows you to get data and insights in minutes with your smartphone, tablet or laptop. Microsoft Power BI transforms data into visuals, lets you explore and analyze any data easily, as well as share it with your colleagues. This tool also allows users to share dashboards and reports, and collaborate on them. Built-in governance and security allow users to scale the service across practically any organizations. You can start using the service for free and switch to a Power BI Pro for $9.99 per month per one user.
6. Cluvio
Cluvio is a popular cloud analytics platform, created for the needs of startups and data-driven teams. With the help of SQL and R, this tool analyzes your data and turns it into pretty interactive dashboards within minutes. Cluvio dashboards are easy to understand. You can add time-based and custom filters, write SQL, get charts, and share dashboards with the team. This BI tool also gives you automatic recommendations and alerts to facilitate your work. Cluvio has a free trial you can start with. The cheapest subscription for this service costs ?99 per month.
7. Looker
Looker is a data-discovery BI tool that helps companies of different scales find the best business solutions thanks to real-time data access. It can analyze practically any size of data. Its analytics can integrate with different SQL databases and different data warehouses. With Looker, you need to define your metrics once and further let Looker write the right SQL. Consequently, it will be able to answer any data explorers’ questions. This tool allows you to create easy to comprehend visual reports and share reliable and trustworthy information with the whole company. You can request a demo to see this tool in action. This BI tool has a flexible pricing model for their annual subscription plans. You can request a personalized quote at their website.
8. Yellowfin BI
Yellowfin BI is an end-to-end business intelligence tool and a smart analytics platform that unites visualization with cooperation and machine learning. This BI tool lets you analyze your data, discover insights, connect and transform the data you have, as well as understand how and why your data changes. With Yellowfin BI, you receive automated signals about critical changes in information that matter to you. You will not be overwhelmed with excessive data, so you will not have to waste a lot of time to get that insight anymore. You can try Yellowfin during a 30-day free trial and later switch to a full version for $50 per user per month.
9. MicroStrategy
MicroStrategy is a powerful business intelligence tool that offers high-speed data analytics and dashboarding to its clients. With this BI tool, you can monitor current trends, discover new opportunities for your business, improve the productivity of different company departments and more. MicroStrategy lets its users import incoming data from a wide range of sources. What?s more, this tool lets you access your reports from desktop and mobile devices as well. This data-driven intelligence software can help you transform your business into a data-driven company. Web and mobile versions of this BI tool come at $600 per named user. There are many product bundles and pricing options to choose from.
10. Tableau Desktop
Tableau Desktop is an end-to-end solution that can help you understand your business data better. With this tool, you can get top-notch analytical services all in one place, without the need to connect any other services and bear any additional costs. Tableau Desktop has a lot to offer to its users, starting from free training and up to a dedicated account manager. This BI tool is easy to master thanks to its sleek drag-and-drop functionality. You will be able to see the trends in your data shortly after you start using the tool. Tableau is not the cheapest tool out there. Subscription for it costs $70 per month, billed annually.
Final Thoughts
A business intelligence tool is rather a reasonable investment that pays off in the long run than a risky luxury. With the currently available BI solutions, businesses of all scales can get the most benefits while keeping within the limits of their budget. The choice of business intelligence tools is huge nowadays, so we recommend you to check out several different solutions to figure out what works best for your company needs. No matter what tool you have in mind, make sure to take some time to master it to be able to get the most of what it has to offer.
