Business Intelligence Software for small businesses
Table of Contents
Business Intelligence Software are a must-have for small businesses today.
There are relevant trends on Business Intelligence Software such as:
- Using machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to handle high data volume
- Present your data with compelling stories
In fact, with an increase in the amount of generated data, it becomes challenging for data operators to generate key insights from it. Augmented analytics helps identify hidden patterns in large data volume through natural language processing (NLP), ML, and AI technology. Augmented analytics is a favoured driver for the purchase of analytics and BI software, as well as data science and ML platforms today.
The interactive analytical storytelling enhances story credibility and enables managers to obtain further insights from static, predefined analyses that might be harder to obtain. The “so what” analysis is the new way to present data instead of just showing dashboards.
What is Business Intelligence Software, and which are its benefits?
Business Intelligence Software allows companies to access, analyse, and share information to improve the decision-making process by gathering performance metrics. They help organizations to collect and analyse data from various sources, both internal and external, run queries, and then present it within interactive dashboards and other forms of data visualization to generate insights for a better decision-making process. BI software can analyse various types of data, such as customer data, finance data, production data, human resource data, and contact data.
Leadership tends to be the end-user of a BI tool, and they generally don’t have an IT background. Therefore, the interface of BI software should consist of simple terminologies and intuitive features, such as a drag-and-drop mechanism, drill-down options, and self-service data preparation which will help professionals easily understand and use the software.
Business Intelligence Software have many advantages:
- Make accurate and fast decisions: BI tools provide real-time information from one centralized source and allows management to make fact-based and real-time decisions to maintain a competitive advantage.
- Give better visualization of data: BI tools allow users to convert complex data into easily understandable data visuals, such as charts, graphs, infographics, and animations.
- Give alerts and notifications of your KPIs: BI tools constantly monitor all your critical key performance indicator (KPI) metrics using a specific measure and will alert users when they meet the target.
- Give the same single source of data to each stakeholder: When you share the dashboards to stakeholders, everyone gets the same, up-to-date version of the data.
Typical features of Business Intelligence Software are:
- Dashboard: Offers graphs and charts to track statistics and metrics on a single page.
- Self-service data preparation: Provides end-users the ability to access, combine, transform, and store data.
- Visual analytics: Allows users to play with data visualization elements such as charts and graphs to identify trends easily.
- Collaboration tools: Users can share media files, communicate, and work together.
- Security/user administration: Ensures secure access to reports using role-based permissions and logs of report access.
- Extract, transform, and load: Extracts data from operational databases, transforms it into a normalized or aggregated format, and loads transformed data into a data warehouse.
- Advanced analytics: Performs predictive modelling, data mining, machine learning capabilities.
When purchasing Business Intelligence Software, some consideration must be done, following the most important aspects to take in account:
- Integration capabilities with multiple data sources
- Friendly self-service options
- Rating of BI Software
- Total cost of BI Software
Most products in the market are priced on a “per user, per month” basis and are in the range, on their starting price, of $10 – $74+.
A short list of the 7 best Business Intelligence Software in our opinion
We have selected for you the best tools for small businesses, but if you do not find the right one for your needs, please see below a larger list of 24 tools where we hope you will find it.
Let’s see our short list!
Google Data Studio
Google Data Studio helps businesses easily understand and manage data with dashboards and reports to get insights and help taking decisions consequently.
Pricing Overview
- There is a free version, but Google Data Studio does not offer a free trial.
- Find out additional pricing details on the website.
If you are interested in Google Data Studio, please read also: Business Intelligence tools: a focus on Google Data Studio
Holistics
Holistics is a modern Self-Service Business Intelligence Software designed for everyone to explore data and reports without any technical knowledge.
Pricing Overview
- It starts at $50 per month.
- They do not have a free version, but they offer a free trial.
- Find out additional pricing details on the website.
Microsoft Power BI
Power BI is a suite of tools from analytics to reporting, data preparation and visualization to run your business effectively and efficiently.
It is used by developers, analysts, IT, and other business users.
Pricing Overview
- It starts at $9.99 per feature, per month.
- There is a free version and a free trial.
- Find out additional pricing details on the website.
Mode
Mode has a full-featured dashboard and can be considers an analytics tool for data analysts and business stakeholders. It combines a cloud-based SQL editor, collaborative Python & R notebooks, interactive visualizations, and shareable live reports and dashboards, to help any company understand their business and take informed decisions.
Pricing Overview
- It has a free version and a free trial.
- The pricing plan is not provided, so you need to contact them on the website.
Qlik Sense
Qlik Sense is a Business Intelligence Software that helps global companies move faster, work smarter and put modern analytics at everyone’s disposal.
This tool easily combines, loads, visualizes, and explores data, creates, and shares powerful, interactive dashboards, deepens into customer behaviour, reinvents business processes, discovers new revenue streams, and balances risks and rewards to accelerate your path to business value.
Pricing Overview
- It starts at $30.00 per user, per month.
- There is a free version and a free trial.
- Find out additional pricing details on the website.
Sisense
Sisense is a Business Intelligence Software that helps organizations by offering them a powerful analytics tool and the highly customizable and AI-driven Sisense cloud platform.
More than 2,000 global companies, from emerging startups to established enterprises, rely on this tool to innovate, disrupt markets, scale, grow and drive meaningful change in the world.
Pricing Overview
It has a free trial, but for more details please go on the website.
Tableau
Tableau is a Business Intelligence Software that empowers people throughout the organization to easily look their data in real-time, leading to smarter business decisions every day. In fact, it easily connects to data stored anywhere, in any format and quickly perform ad hoc analyses, using drag and drop to create interactive dashboards with advanced visual analytics and allows to share them with anyone.
This tool can be used by anyone, from global enterprises to early-stage startups and small businesses.
Pricing Overview
- The pricing plan is not provided, so you should contact them to know more
- Tableau has a free version and a free trial
Business Intelligence Software: comparative table of the top 7 tools with key features
Looking for an alternative? Explore the following tools to discover the best option for your business.
Business Management Software: the full list of tools for Startups and Small Businesses
Looking for an alternative? Explore the following tools to discover the best option for your business.
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SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence
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Conclusions
Be curious! Do not limit yourself and do not stop at our proposal of tools! Check out our article Software Discovery platforms: the top 9 for us to find the one that best suits your needs.