We feature the best Business Intelligence (BI) tools, to make it easier to sort through data to provide insights and statistics for stakeholders.
The best business intelligence tools provide a simple and easy way to mine data to provide actionable insights more clearly to stakeholders. This is especially important when the modern business can now collect data on every aspect of a business, from sales and marketing, to workflows and productivity, to hiring and HR, to overall performance and profitability. However, many of these data points exist in isolation and require the best BI tools to connect the dots together. This is what business intelligence represents: the ability to not just look at a specific detail of business operations, but tie in key information from each angle into an overall whole. This can then allow for real insights and predictions for improving business performance, not least through Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). A number of software packages also come with their own analytics, but these can also usually be exported into a business intelligence platform. Even more importantly, the best BI software will be driven by visualizations you can share with stakeholders, to help communicate sometimes complex statistics as easy to understand charts and diagrams. Here then are the best business intelligence tools for business. Software behemoth, Microsoft, also plays in the business intelligence tool space, and their offering is Microsoft Power BI. They even have a Microsoft Business Applications Summit that features their Power BI, and not surprisingly other Microsoft business applications. Unlike some of their competition that take a totally web-based portal approach, Power BI also offers downloadable software, so you can run your analytics either in the cloud or via a reporting server. There is a generous sixty day trial of the software, which promises to “Connect hundreds of data sources,” including Microsoft applications, and other sources such as Facebook, Sybase and Oracle which can then prep data for subsequent data analysis on the fly, allowing reports to be created in just a matter of minutes. Pricing begins at the Power BI Desktop tier for a single user, which is fully functional, and free. The next tier up is Power BI Pro and supports collaboration between users, and real time data analysis, and includes a 60 day trial. Tableau Desktop endeavors to do more than make charts, but rather to show “live visual analytics.” A slick interface with drag and drop buttons allows the user to quickly be able to spot trends in the data.
