Cóbhan Phillipson for Docurated.com writes: Business intelligence tools (BI tools) are a way for companies to monitor data and generate business insights – necessary components in making smarter, better decisions that drive results. But once you start research BI, you realize there are many types, from analytics and big data statistics to reporting tools and dashboards that offer at-a-glance information across indicators.
When choosing the right business intelligence tools for your organization, consider your company, your employees, your departments and teams – and the success factors that drive your decision-making. What isn’t working currently, and what factors would benefit from improvement?
Select tools that allow you to visualize and analyze relevant data, combining and eliminating and customizing to generate information that helps you better understand your data. The goal: to make fact-based and insightful decisions that will improve company performance.
1. Yellowfin BI
Yellowfin BI offers business intelligence tools that are so easy to use, they become universal throughout a company. Yellowfin’s analytics are available in many different flavors – dashboards, data discovery, mobile BI, storyboards, mapping, and collaborative business intelligence – that make it simple to assess, monitor and understand any bit of data related to your business.
Features:
Interactive and intuitive filtering use check boxes, radio buttons and sliders to make it easy to dial-down your data
Access your dashboards from anywhere: web page, company intranet, wiki, or mobile device
Share insights via simple scripts that can be uploaded, embedded, or sent to collaborators
Cost: Free Trial; full version starting at $3,000 a year for 5 users
2. Clear Analytics
If you’re familiar with MS Excel, you’ll love Clear Analytics. This Excel-based BI tool serves up business intelligence with spreadsheet manageability – and centralizes all your data in the process. Clear Analytics allows your organization to continue with its business-as-usual Excel reporting, but adds BI must-haves like version control, administrative and sharing capabilities, reports scheduling, governance, and auditability.
Features:
With the Logical Data Warehouse (LDW) approach, Clear Analytics eliminates the need for a data warehouse to pre-aggregate data
Little learning curve: anyone who uses MS Excel can use Clear Analytics
Easy to trace and audit data, on ensure company-wide compliance
Cost: Free Personal Edition
3. SAP Business Intelligence
For businesses that require a full, detailed picture of every company process, SAP NetWeaver BI steps in. This full-function tool is designed to cater to a diverse set of needs, satisfying the requirements of everyone in your organization – IT professionals, senior management, and end users included. The tool’s robust infrastructure hosts wide-ranging functionality in one integrated platform.
Features:
A single, integrated platform pulls together applications and reporting to provide a detailed snapshot of your organization
Visualization makes it easy to understand your data
Improve your company’s collective IQ by giving all collaborators insights into data and performance indictors
Cost: Free Trial; contact for pricing
4. Oracle Hyperion System
Oracle is one of the most well known names in business, and its Hyperion Planning system is an agile business intelligence tool. Using mobile, desktop and MS Office Interfaces, Hyperion supports and enables enterprise-wide planning, budgeting and forecasting – mission-critical processes a company needs to develop accurate financial forecasts and generate cost-effective enterprise alignment.
Features:
Deploy Hyperion independently, either in the cloud or on-site
Integrate Hyperion with other Oracle tools to create a robust and over-arching business solution
Reduce budgeting and planning by days, weeks or months, depending on the process
Cost: Contact for pricing
5. Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE)
For businesses with serious BI needs, OBIEE is an incredibly powerful business intelligence tool. The Enterprise Edition integrates many of Oracle’s most useful components, including BI Server, BI Answers, BI Interactive Dashboards, BI Delivers, BI Publisher, the MS Office Plug-in, Hyperion Interactive Reporting, Hyperion SQR Production Reporting, Hyperion Financial Reporting, and Hyperion Web Analysis. In other words, for almost any conceivable data measurement, visualization, reporting, or information manipulation, OBIEE has a solution.
Features:
Comprehensive BI tools inform and inspire better decisions across your organization
OBIEE allows for full collaboration within an organization
Interactive dashboards make reporting and data visualization simple
Cost: Contact for pricing
6. Pentaho BI
The leader in open-source business intelligence, Pentaho provides your company with the tools to make better, more accurate and faster decisions to boost profits. The tool integrates information from almost any source to create comprehensive analytics, turning big data into visualized insights. Pentaho Business Intelligence can be used on-site or in the cloud.
Features:
Embed and integrate analytics into your company’s applications
Intuitive and interactive analytics employ lasso filtering, zooming, attribute highlighting and drill-down features to provide better insights
Web-based dashboards access rich navigation features to improve data visualization
Cost: Free Trial; Contact for pricing
7. MicroStrategy
MicroStrategy Business Intelligence has one primary goal: leverage data to help organizations find timely, informed answers to any question. Powerful dashboards and data analytics transform your company’s information into easy-to-understand reports designed to improve productivity, boost cost-efficiency, optimize revenue, monitor trends, forecast new opportunities, and fortify client relationships.
Features:
MicroStrategy runs against data stored in ERP systems (e.g. SAP and Oracle), operational databases, and data warehouses
Use MicroStrategy on your desktop or via mobile app
Save data on-site or in the cloud via Amazon Web Services
Cost: Free 30-Day Enterprise Evaluation Edition
8. SiSense
SiSense is billed as a business intelligence solution for business users – no IT help required. The process is user friendly, swapping the usual data prep headache for an end-to-end data collection and preparation solution that even tech-newbies can understand. Join your data quickly with drag-and-drop functionality, so you can quickly begin analyzing and sharing your insights via robust, visual dashboards.
Features:
SiSense offers business intelligence for non-techies, usually with no IT department help required
Ensure 100% accuracy by integrating current data from many sources
Build interactive, fully customized dashboards (again, no tech skills needed)
Cost: Free Trial; Contact for version pricing
9. BOARD All-in-One Business Intelligence
BOARD’s AIO Business Intelligence toolkit offers all the capabilities and functions necessary to build a custom solution to corporate performance management. Bonus: no programming skills required. The toolkit approach makes it easy for end-users to interact with BOARD’s powerful interface, creating a self-service solution to analytics, reporting and understanding data. BOARD labels this integrated BI-performance management solution as “management Intelligence.”
Features:
BI functions include reporting, multi-dimensional analysis, ad hoc querying and “dashBOARDing”
Corporate performance management allows for budgeting, planning, financial forecasting, profitability analysis, scorecarding and financial consolidation
BOARD is a single interface, thus eliminating the usual complications from forcibly patching together multiple BI tools
Cost: Free Demo; Contact for pricing
10. Microsoft Business Intelligence Tools
Like BOARD, Microsoft’s BI solutions are billed as tools that require little IT involvement. The premise: if your employees know how to use Microsoft Office or Microsoft SharePoint Server, then they’ll intuitively understand MS Business Intelligence. This full-service solution is quite powerful, integrating data from multiple sources to combine with current enterprise data that lives on-site or in the cloud – all while maintaining proper governance.
Features:
MS BI allows any user to drill-down, analyze and visualize data through Excel
Enable report-sharing and other collaborative features
Self-service capabilities that reduce the burden on IT
Cost: Free Trial; Contact for pricing
11. Jaspersoft
Billed as one of the business world’s most used, most flexible and most affordable BI solutions, Jaspersoft empowers your organization with tools for better analytics and decision-making. This is a self-service product, which means that it requires little IT intervention to generate powerful data insights that help your organization create actionable answers to any question.
Features:
Can be integrated into any app or mobile device – scaled architecture that makes Jaspersoft available to anyone
Available on-premise or in the cloud
Download for your device, or use as a web-scalable platform to embed anywhere
Cost: Free Trial; Contact for pricing
12. QlikView
QlikView is a user-friendly platform that straddles the gap between tech-savvy BI tools and traditional productivity apps, creating a solution that’s available to all. QlikView’s primary goal is to enable business users to leverage their data to discover new solutions and opportunities, and it does so with a clean and straightforward interface.
Features:
This self-service tool allows for data analytics, insights and existing data manipulation
Visually appealing dashboards present data in an easy-to-understand format
Customized solutions by industry (banking, consumer products, high tech, insurance, etc.)
Cost: Free Personal Version; Enterprise Edition Server starting at $35,000 per server
13. SAS Business Intelligence
SAS Business Intelligence is all about getting the right information to the right people, always at the right time and under the right circumstances. This self-service tool is easy to use and provides real-time analytics throughout your organization, allowing any collaborator or decision-maker to monitor and analyze the metrics necessary to make an informed and effective decision.
Features:
Business and enterprise IT solutions include centralized metadata, governance and scalability
Data visualization makes it easy to see and understand big data and related insights
Auto-charting eliminates the need for coding and IT support
Cost: Free trial; contact for pricing
14. BIME
The power of BIME is the ability to turn complicated data into visual insights and actionable information – results designed to power your decision-making and boost your bottom line. BIME is cloud-based, turning your company Internet connection into a lightening-fast data warehouse capable of churning out easy-to-understand visual dashboards. A self-service tool, anyone can use this BI solution.
Features:
Easily import data from relational databases, spreadsheets, flat files, OLAP engines, Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, Google BigQuery, Salesforce CRM, Google Spreadsheets and other sources
Ultra secure BI extranet and intranet is included in every package
A powerful calculation engine allows users to create analytics across – and combining – data sources
Cost: Free Trial; Enterprise solutions starting at $180 per month
15. Intelex Business Management Software
The Intelex Business Performance Management Software System is a user-friendly, effective and very powerful business tool that integrates several solutions into one robust package. Among the solution’s various functions, this software suite combines tools for document control, records management, training management, qualifications management, audits management, NCRs and CAPA, management review, permits management, license management, monitoring and measurement, communications management, and operational control.
Features:
Trusted since 1992
Easily track, manage and generate real-time reports of key metrics
Comply with common regulations and standards, including ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001
Cost: Free Trial; Contact for pricing
16. Adaptive Suite
Adaptive Suite is the only Corporate Performance Management (CPM) and Business Intelligence (BI) solutions suite to build from the “cloud up.” Adaptive Insights is intuitive enough that anyone can use it, but also extremely powerful, integrating collaboration, web and MS Office reporting, as well as other features accessible via the web or mobile app.
Features:
Flexible drill-down capabilities a