14 Best Business Intelligence Tools in 2024

Business intelligence tools are software applications that use analytics and data visualization to make data-driven decisions to maximize operations. These tools enable organizations to extract valuable insights from data for understanding and visualization.

Geekflare tested dozens of BI tools and finalized the list of the best business intelligence tools, considering integrations, dashboards, AI-powered features, and pricing.

• Zoho Analytics – Best for Small Businesses
• Microsoft Power BI – Best for Excel Users and Microsoft Integrations
• Sisense – Best for Embedded Analytics
• Qlik – Best for Data Discovery and Interactive Visualizations
• Dundas BI – Best for Dashboards and Reporting
• GoodData – Best for Building Analytical Applications
• Looker – Best for Data Governance and Collaboration
• IBM Cognos Analytics – Best for EnterpriseGrade Reporting and AI Insights
• Tableau – Best for Data Visualization and Storytelling
• Oracle BI – Best for Oracle Ecosystem Integration
• SAP BusinessObjects – Best for Large Enterprises Using SAP Solutions
• Domo – Best for Real-time Data and Mobile Dashboards
• RIB BI+ – Best for Construction and Real Estate Businesses
• Spotfire – Best for Data Scientists
• Show moreShow less

Zoho Analytics

Zoho Analytics can analyze data, create impressive visualizations, and discover concealed insights in a few minutes, whether the data lies in web files, flat files, databases, offline/online apps, or cloud services. Users can schedule data and sync it periodically or automatically. 

Zoho Analytics blends data from multiple sources and merges them to create comprehensive business reports that make sense. It offers charts, pivot tables, tabular components, widgets, images, and formatted texts to create dashboards and reports. It provides various interaction options, such as viewing underlying data, contextual filters, and drill-downs to execute the ad-hoc analysis. 

Zoho Analytics analyzes geographical data using map charts to measure and compare crucial metrics across countries, states, regions, counties, longitudes, latitudes, and even postal codes. It has a comprehensive library of statistical and mathematical functions to extract business metrics. Zoho Analytics’ intelligent analytical assistant, ZIA, uses machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to answer the typed questions in the form of KPI widgets and reports.

Zoho Analytics allows users to collaborate with their teams by sharing reports. Users can control the access of reports through read-only, report authoring, read-write, export, and drill-down options. They can also add contextual comments, annotate images, see comment history, publish reports, and embed them into blogs, websites, and apps for extensive consumption.

Zoho Analytics includes white labeling to create a reporting website or portal under any brand. Users get powerful HTTP-based APIs for data integration and Metadata control.

Zoho Analytics Pricing

Plan	Pricing (monthly)	Offerings
Basic	$24	2 Users, 0.5 Million Rows
Standard	$48	5 Users, 1 Million Rows
Premium	$115	15 Users, 5 Million Rows
Enterprise	$455	50 Users, 50 Million Rows
Custom	Pricing on request	Tailored plan for high scale (rows/users) or dedicated server needs

Try Zoho Analytics

Microsoft Power BI

Microsoft Power BI enables employees at different levels of an organization to make confident business decisions with updated analytics. It offers enterprise-scale self-service analytics to reduce added costs, security risks, and complexities associated with multiple solutions. It provides meaningful insights that users can share using hundreds of built-in artificial intelligence capabilities, data visualizations, excel integrations, and pre-built data connectors. 

Power BI integrates with Adobe Analytics Cloud to deliver extensive data capabilities. It provides a 360-degree audience view with tools to build, manage, and deliver a digital experience. Users get major sensitivity classification and data loss prevention features to secure data and maintain compliance.

Power BI helps create end-to-end business solutions by connecting with Office 365, Azure, Dynamics 365, and other Microsoft 365 applications. It supports building applications that can easily connect to data, run over iOS, Android, and web devices, and utilize Excel-like expressions. 

Power BI unifies data from multiple sources to build immersive, interactive dashboards and reports. It allows users to include robust workflow automation directly into apps without writing a single line of code to connect to popular services and applications.

Microsoft Power BI Pricing

Plan	Pricing (monthly)	Offerings
Free account	$0	Included in Microsoft Fabric free account, No credit card required
Power BI Pro	$10	Publish and share Power BI reports, Included in Microsoft 365 E5 and Office 365 E5, Available to buy now with a credit card
Power BI Premium Per User	$20	Includes all the features available with Power BI Pro, Access to larger model sizes, More frequent refreshes
Power BI Embedded	Pricing on request	Brand Power BI reports as your own, Automate monitoring, management, and deployment, Reduce developer overhead

Try Microsoft Power BI

Sisense

Sisense is a robust analytics software that enables users to collect data, create beautiful visualizations, and build analytic applications that can be embedded anywhere. This self-service analytics solution utilizes data irrespective of location and uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to build enterprise-grade apps at a lower TCO.

Sisense provides embeddable analytics with white labeling and customization for integration into any product development project. It uses AI and ML to autonomously map connections between datasets, anomaly detection for a triggered response, and natural language query interfaces via chat and voice.

Sisense analyzes data from the entire data landscape of an organization to convert it into actionable app components and powerful dashboards with interactive visualizations. It combines live and cached data models for optimizing performance and management of resources. 

Sisense uses collected insights to make better business decisions and solve complex scenarios. Users can control the access of systems, data, objects, and process levels, such as audit trails and recovery.

Sisense Pricing

Contact the Sisense sales team for custom pricing.

Try Sisense

Qlik

Qlik allows users to leverage information and associated analytics to solve their challenging problems while enhancing decision-making. It offers end-to-end data integration in real time to close wider gaps between insights, data, and action. It produces accurate insights that are easy to access through cloud solutions.

Qlik moves data instantly at scale with no tasking sources to efficiently deliver data to the cloud. Users can automate the overall process right from raw data to analytics-ready. They gain scalability and agility by automation, eliminating errors and complex scripting to build trust.

Qlik Sense is a dedicated product for AI-powered insight that anyone in an organization uses to make data-driven decisions. It has a purpose-built unique engine that can index and connect data for insights. It offers enterprise users features like natural language interaction.

Qlik Sense offers dashboards to search and explore data sets quickly. It automatically shares reports in PDF, Excel, and PPT formats. 

Qlik Pricing

Contact Qlik Sense to get custom pricing.

Try Qlik

Dundas BI

Dundas BI helps businesses gain data-driven insights and end-to-end business intelligence by analyzing and visualizing data. It converts raw data into intelligent, actionable insights through reports, dashboards, visual analytics, etc. Unlike other one-dimensional BI platforms, Dundas BI offers much-needed flexibility and speed while removing roadblocks.

Dundas BI can adapt to any user type, which allows you to personalize it to a great extent. With this self-service analytics approach, developers and analysts are empowered to analyze data quickly and meaningfully. With it, running ad-hoc queries, performing visual analytics, and creating relevant content is easy and quick with minimal IT assistance. Dundas BI uses open APIs and HTML5 for better customization and to improve dashboards, interactions, labels, and scorecards to meet unique design needs.

Dundas BI helps users understand the business value of their data with advanced prediction and on-the-go data analysis represented in a personalized format. It can manage and deploy analytics solutions securely based on IT standards. Users can connect it to relational databases, file-based data, web-based data, OLAP, etc. 

Dundas BI Pricing

Contact Dundas BI to know pricing information.

Try Dundas BI

GoodData

GoodData is a cost-efficient, easily controllable, and fully customizable BI platform. It lets organizations embed analytics directly onto products/services to help them make decisions without any assistance from IT or analytics experts. eCommerce partners of a business can utilize this platform efficiently to gather essential insights instantly. 

GoodData enables companies to transform their employees’ skills so that they can make better and more reliable decisions, even in critical business moments. This BI analytics is in the cloud, which reduces IT headaches associated with installation, management, etc. Users get fast and flexible services from GoodData, whether organizations build it for themselves or use a service package.

GoodData offers no-code tools and supports collaboration with code. Its AI-powered developer tools assist with automation in deployment, testing, and repetitive tasks. It automatically scales up when there is an increase in data volume, users, or stakeholders.

GoodData Pricing

Plan	Pricing (user/month)	Offerings
Startup	$30	10 users min., 30 users max.
Professional	$30 + $1,500 platform fee	Unlimited users and data
Enterprise	Pricing on request	Enterprise level security & compliance

Try GoodData

Looker

Looker offers more options and increases deliverability through fresh and strong insights by combining the data analysis of Google Cloud. It has a real-time dashboard to get consistent analysis and easy access to genuine data that enables teams to garner accurate results and reporting. Users can integrate it with their favorite tools to increase productivity and make data-informed decisions.

Looker helps to accelerate workflows using unified answers and create custom applications to deliver unique data experiences. It has embedded analytics services from healthcare to retail and more to serve a wider range of customers. It supports different data sources and deployment methods to provide more flexibility with no compromise on security, privacy, and transparency.

Looker can seamlessly connect with Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, and 50+ SQL dialects. As a result, businesses can link to various databases, maintain multi-cloud environments, and prevent database lock-in.

Looker Pricing

Users need to request a custom quote for Looker pricing.

Try Looker

IBM Cognos Analytics

IBM Cognos Analytics drives confident decisions through automated data discovery, preparation, and visualization. Users can import data from spreadsheets and CSV files or connect to several on-premises or cloud sources such as Google BigQuery, SQL database, Redshift, Amazon, and more.

IBM Cognos Analytics saves the time spent on data cleaning by incorporating AI-assisted preparation. Users can also join data, including calculated fields, create tables, create interactive dashboards quickly, drag-and-drop data to build auto-generated visualizations, carry deep detailing, and share them through Slack or email.

IBM Cognos Analytics has an AI assistant to answer questions and predict trends with time-series modeling. It updates the stakeholders automatically while crafting and sharing personalized, dynamic, and multi-page reports presented in the stakeholder’s preferred format.

IBM Cognos Analytics helps to gain deep insights even with no background in data science necessarily. Users can validate the information and identify new things with pinpoint patterns and accurate forecasting. It helps users stay in the loop with their mobile application to access data while directly getting real-time alerts.

IBM Cognos Analytics Pricing

Plan	Pricing (user/month)	Offerings
Standard	$10.6	AI Assistant, Mobile app, View saved report output, Receive email reports, View/interact with active reports
Premium	$42.4	Create and edit reports, Run reports in HTML, CSV, Excel and more, Schedule reports and jobs, Save report output in Cognos, Exploration

Try IBM Cognos Analytics

Tableau

Tableau minimizes the regular tasks of a business and enhances its data-driven decision-making process. Its visual analytics solution can solve complex problems with ease. Users can drive better business outcomes with its data governance, data storytelling, collaboration, and visual analytics.

Tableau bridges the gap between engagement and interaction using drag-and-drop functionality. It enables users to explore more data over time with an AI-driven model. It lets users manage all the data with security, maintenance, compliance, governance, and support. 

Tableau Cloud enables users to make insight-driven, smarter decisions with its cloud-based solution. Tableau Desktop gives everything needed to view, analyze, and access data. Users can explore hidden data with its drag-and-drop feature and speed up decision-making.

Tableau Prep Builder comes with a modern approach to preparing data and making it easier to clean and use for analysis. 

Tableau Pricing

Contact Tableau sales to know pricing information.

Try Tableau

Oracle BI

Oracle Business Intelligence offers an end-to-end and integrated business performance system to build a better company. It includes BI tools like reporting, alerting, data integration, analysis, data management, queries, desktop integration, and more. It helps to manage financial performance, data warehousing, and business intelligence applications. 

Oracle BI has a scalable business intelligence server that shows old and current data so that users can compare them to make data-driven decisions. It allows data calculation and access centrally, which is crucial for all team members to easily access data in any form. This BI server comes with features including ad hoc queries, OLAP analysis, dashboards, data mining, production reporting, and interaction reports.

Oracle BI platform supports integrated analysis, information delivery, and access options. Different teams can access different data on the same architecture, enabling an amazing user experience. Its real-time decision server combines predictive analytics and rules to give solutions for decision-making.

Oracle BI Pricing

Contact the Oracle BI sales team for pricing information.

Try Oracle BI

SAP BusinessObjects

SAP BusinessObjects’ BI suite allows users to access real-time insights and make informed decisions. It provides a centralized place to report, share, and visualize data. Since it is an on-premise BI layer, it can transform data into valuable insights for anytime, anywhere access.

With SAP’s flexible architecture, users can access multiple interfaces and tools in a single place to get real-time, personalized, and simplified data. It enables users to identify trends and problems using BI reporting and ad hoc queries. They can access its self-service and intuitive tools to combine historical and present data to analyze trends and make decisions.

Users can create role-based and interactive dashboards for their teams. By integrating Microsoft 365 tools, users can enhance their data analysis capabilities by filtering and manipulating data. It also supports connection with SAP HANA and SAP Business Warehouse to access real-time analytics.

SAP offers a complete roadmap that helps explore present options to make innovations and decide on new product functions. It helps users view their risks, identify opportunities, and enhance productivity.

SAP BusinessObjects Pricing

Request a custom quote from the SAP BusinessObjects team.

Try SAP BusinessObjects

Domo

Domo is a BI software that offers dashboard, reporting, and AI-generated insights so businesses can make the right move based on their current situation. Its drag-and-drop interface makes complex datasets consumable through data visualization. It has a collection of 150+ types of charts, including Trellis charts, data science charts, and period-over-period charts.

Domo has 7000+ custom maps, along with the facility to upload user-created maps. Users can filter and sort data on this platform without changing the views of other users. Its Beast Modes allow users to calculate new metrics from different datasets. Domo supports exporting raw data and visuals into CSV, Excel, PDF, and PPT formats.

Domo enables businesses to create branded data stories for data analysis guides without any coding. It lets users include variables in the interactive dashboard to customize it according to any business scenario. Users can apply page and chart filters and get alerts via email, web, and mobile devices. Scheduled reports, augmented analysis, a branded toolkit for embedded analytics, and bi-directional filter parameters are other key features of this software.

Domo Pricing

Contact Domo sales for pricing information.

Try Domo

RIB BI+

RIB BI+ is a perfect solution for data analysts, C-suite executives, and operational teams in the construction industry. It offers centralized access to all their data and a user-friendly interface to generate professional construction dashboards with interactive visuals. These boost strategic decision-making and project efficiency while keeping costs in control.

RIB BI+ uses neural networks, pattern recognition, and ML technologies to self-learn and find data patterns, anomalies, and seasonality. It can alert users based on predefined parameters. Its dashboard is customizable to meet organizational needs and allows users to add interactive filters to answer any questions during the analysis.

RIB BI+ has a robust integration capability to connect all data sources for fetching data in a central location. It offers an overview of existing reports, while users can also create standard or custom reports. RIB BI+ allows users to set up automatic weekly or monthly report generation. Admins have the option to manage the roles of employees, such as who can view or edit the data.

RIB BI+ Pricing

Contact the RIB BI+ sales team to get the pricing information. 

Try RIB BI+

Spotfire

Spotfire empowers data scientists with a point-and-click, no-code platform that can analyze data at rest and in transit together. This visual analytics platform also comes with data science and streaming capabilities. It allows users to collect structured and unstructured data from varying sources in one place.

Spotfire also conducts tasks like data wrangling, data transformation, and data cleaning to help with visual data exploration. Its single-pane-of-glass dashboard helps with quick data discovery. Spotfire enables businesses to democratize and operationalize machine learning across their organization using reliable, governed data science models.

Spotfire lets users apply learning algorithms to live stream data in real-time. Live streaming can be embedded in applications or surfaced in operational dashboards. It also provides guided and interactive advanced analytics where interactive discovery is possible through an immersive visual experience.

Spotfire Pricing

Contact Spotfire to get pricing information.

Try Spotfire

What is a BI Tool?

BI tools are software that collects past and current data to process and analyze it to understand future trends. It generates actionable insights, creates interactive reports, and simplifies business decision-making. These platforms offer other features, including data visualization, KPI scorecards, visual analytics, and interactive dashboards. 

How does BI Help Businesses Understand Data?

The human brain is wired in such a way that it catches visual triggers quickly to get fully immersed in something. When someone looks at an image or graphic, it becomes much easier for them to understand things instead of scrolling through unending texts or spreadsheets. BI tools are built keeping this aspect of the human brain in mind. It makes data easy to grasp by creating valuable insights out of them. 

BI tools help businesses understand data by transforming it into visually appealing formats like charts, graphs, heat maps, images, videos, and infographics. However, the functioning of BI tools goes beyond visualization. It collects, stores, cleans, and analyzes data to identify hidden patterns, trends, and anomalies. 

How Does a BI Tool Work?

BI tools work in the following steps:

• Accessing and viewing data
• Interacting with them
• Analyzing and discovering meaningful information beneficial for business
• Sharing that information with the team for further implementation
• Promoting and governing insightful data to make better business decisions, along with future planning

Benefits of BI tools

The benefits of BI tools are outlined below.

• Brings together every relevant data from multiple endpoints such as portals, CRMs, ERPs, databases, flat files, APIs, etc.
• Help businesses to create self-service analytics without any IT support. It’s because these tools make everything clear and concise so that users can easily understand. Next, they can effortlessly generate reports that make sense and perform queries as well.
• Predictive analysis can be achieved with these tools to shape future decisions based on trends. If conditions change at a later phase or an anomaly occurs, you can receive intelligent alerts that help you react instantly.
• Due to automation with BI tools, you can save time using a drag-and-drop editor from their interactive dashboard.
• It saves business expenditure and time that otherwise is wasted on inaccurate planning.

What is the Difference between BI and Data Analytics Tools? 

The difference between BI tools and data analytics tools is that BI tools present historical and current data to help with decision-making. In contrast, data analytics tools perform predictive analysis for immediate insights and future trends. BI tools display past and present data in a consumable format so users can understand them and make informed choices. Data analytics tools deploy advanced techniques to explore possibilities and guide strategic directions.

Can I Use Excel as a Business Intelligence Tool? 

Yes, you can use Excel as a basic BI tool, as it offers primary business intelligence features like data visualization and data analysis. To get the advanced BI functionalities, you need to get Microsoft 365 Enterprise plans with dedicated BI tools like Power BI.

Final Words

Data has a huge role in shaping business operations and outcomes. Organizations can utilize the available data in various ways to make better decisions. This is why business intelligence tools can help with better planning and execution using insightful data. From this comparative discussion, companies should be able to find the BI tool that is suitable for them.

Explore more on Data Visualization