Top 11 Software For Business Intelligence

Data is the new oil for every industry. Every year, massive volumes of data get produced that challenges businesses of all sizes. Every organization is data-driven and relies on data to make sustainable and profitable decisions. That is where BI analysts come in to play a significant role in transforming data into actionable insight. This article will give us a clear idea of the various Business Intelligence software development tools. Also, we will discuss why to use business intelligence software.

What is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence is a set of technology-driven techniques that fuses data mining, business analytics, data visualization, data tools, etc., to enable business executives to make accurate and smarter data-driven decisions. While performing all these processes, organizations use various software and tools. For business intelligence processes, organizations collect data from IT departments & external entities and prepare a comprehensive view. Then through these collected data, BI analysts eliminate inefficiencies, drive change, understand market demand, and quickly adapt to market or supply changes. There can be closed-source or open-source software for business intelligence. Depending on the organization’s requirement and budget, they compare business intelligence software and decide which one to use.

[Source: https://ezdatamunch.com/difference-business-intelligence-analytics/]

What is Business Intelligence Software?

Business Intelligence Software meaning – They are a set of software tools that helps in gathering, analyzing, processing, and visualizing large volumes of old, current, and future data. The data can be of any form (structured, semi-structured, or unstructured). According to some predictions, by 2025, users will generate nearly 463 exabytes of data each day. The BI tools help generate actionable business insights from these granular data of different types. Other BI tools help in creating interactive reports to simplify the decision-making processes. Organizations like Google, Microsoft, SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, Zoho, IBM, etc., are into Business Intelligence software development. They develop either paid or open-source BI applications to help organizations extract data for intelligence business. Let us now understand why to use business intelligence software. 

Why to use business intelligence software?

There are a lot of features of BI tools that make data-driven decisions easier. Some of the typical features of BI tools are:

·        The BI tools help in predicting business-related decisions with much accuracy.

·        Some BI tools help in bringing together all relevant data.

·        BI tools also reduce unnecessary manual tasks.

·        A better data-driven decision benefits the organization by reducing unnecessary business costs.

·        Another prominent feature of BI tools is some of them help in visualizing the analyzed data so that executives and managers can make prompt decisions.

These are the reasons why to use business intelligence software.

Top 11 BI Software

The business intelligence tools ingest a broad spectrum of data having different types from different sources. BI analysts work in close tandem with many of these BI tools to provide various data-driven acuities. But there are specific purposes and features of BI tools mentioned below.

1.      Datapine: It is a popular and interactive BI tool that benefits modern business intelligence programs. It helps the organization’s BI team to connect with data from different sources and dissect them meaningfully with diverse attributes driven by AI and predictive analytics. It caters to a powerful dashboard for generating standard & customized reports leveraging intelligent cautions signals to notify in case of any peculiarities.

Attributes and features to compare this business intelligence software:

·        Make predictive analysis easy

·        Provides stunning drag and drop interface

·        Multiple report-generating options

·        Smart insight and interactive dashboard

2.      Oracle Netsuite: It is an easy-to-work cloud-based business intelligence tool that renders real-time visibility to data. It also allows businesses to fetch financial and operational performances across various departments. It can help the BI team streamline communication among different data segments by discovering trends and delivering meaningful insights for better business decisions.

Attributes and features to compare this business intelligence software:

·        It provides a dashboard that enables the BI team to integrate business execution metrics.

·        Through Netsuite, the BI team can merge data with visual analytics for rendering meaningful insights.

·        It permits BI analysts to supply data-driven facts to executives and decision-makers without depending on IT entirely

3.      SAS Business Intelligence: It is another BI tool that offers various features and technology-driven operations. Professionals like data scientists, data engineers, text analysts, econometricians, forecasting analysts, and BI analysts prefer to use this tool.

Features to compare this business intelligence software:

·        It supports machine learning in conjunction with BI operations.

·        It supports text & location analytics that allows gaining insights from text data such as social media or geographical context.

·        SAS Business Intelligence can easily integrate with MS Office suite or Office Analytics.

4.      BIRT: It is open-source software for business intelligence. It allows creating data visualizations, reports, and dashboards; also enables embedding them into various applications. It comes with different components and features like:

·        It has a built-in visual report designer & a charting engine.

·        It also provides a runtime component to generate designs.

·        BIRT has good community support and a developer center.

5.      Zoho Analytics: It is a self-serve data analytics and business intelligence platform that helps the BI team generate insightful charts and visual analysis on different types of data in a small time interval. Some of its features to compare this business intelligence software with others are:

·        It has an AI-powered assistant that helps the BI team find hidden insights & cater to intelligent answers with meaningful reports.

·        It has hundreds of readymade connectors for cloud drives, business apps, and databases.

·        It supports augmented analytics by employing ML and NLP.

6.      Helical Insight: It is another open-source software for business intelligence. It delivers data visualization, exporting data, multi-tenancy, role management, and scheduling emails. Some of its features to compare this business intelligence software with others are:

·        This BI framework allows users to include any additional functionality required for efficient data-driven insight.

·        It has an instant BI feature that allows BI analysts to type questions.

·        This browser-based tool supports data analysis, data connections, and auto emails.

7.      Microstrategy: It is a business analytics software used by enterprises to quickly deliver consumer-grade BI analytics on any device across any platform. It also provides federated analytics and hyper-intelligence data with cloud-based solutions. Some of its features to compare this business intelligence software with others are:

·        It can generate all existing reports and visualizations in real-time.

·        This BI tool leverages machine learning and natural language processing, allowing integration with voice technologies and chatbots.

·        It allows scalable, flexible, and secure cloud-based solutions handling large datasets.

8.      Dundas BI: It is an end-to-end business intelligence tool whose main aim is to simplify the entire analytics process. It provides flexibility in creating visual data analytics, dashboards, and reports by transforming raw data into actionable insights. It helps business executives to make critical decisions faster through end-to-end BI features. Some of its features to compare this business intelligence software with others are:

·        It provides seamless integration.

·        BI analysts can use it to perform cross-analysis to explore data and uncover hidden prospects.

·        It can render customizable data views.

·        It supports an immersive mobile experience.

9.      Pentaho: This business analytics and data warehousing tool enables BI analysts to uncover data by discovering, accessing, and merging different types & sizes of data. It embeds analytics at every workflow at minimum support. Some of its features to compare this business intelligence software with others are:

·        This enterprise tool helps in accelerating data pipelining.

·        It allows Big Data integration without prior coding.

·        It allows visualizing data with customized dashboards.

·        Its Community Dashboard Editor helps in developing and deploying analysis faster.

10.   GoodData: This composable BI analytics tool provides built-in functionalities for data ingestion, analytic queries, data storage, data visualizations, and integrating apps & APIs. BI analysts can embed all the extracted analytics into desktop applications, websites, mobile apps, etc. Some of its features to compare this business intelligence software with others are:

·        It provides a modular data pipeline.

·        It provides developers with a framework to integrate existing data using JavaScript libraries or iFrames.

·        IT has four different data centers in the USA, EU, and Canada to provide seamless service and 24×7 uptime.

11.   Knime: It is another open-source software for business intelligence. This BI tool provides thousands of modules and hundreds of built-in readily executable examples. Its easy & intuitive environment helps BI analysts & data scientists analyze data for granular insights. Some of its features to compare this business intelligence software with others are:

·        It supports enterprise-grade data analytics features and techniques.

·        It allows accessing, merging, and transforming all forms of data.

Conclusion

We hope this article has given you a clear idea of different closed and open-source software for business intelligence. Various companies and vendors are into business intelligence software development with the zeal to create the best BI tool. Understanding the features of BI tools is very important before implementing them. Companies should compare business intelligence software to comprehend which one aligns with the business needs.