Today, there are numerous business intelligence services and tools available in the market. These tools help you with data analysis, visualization, and transformation. However, the issue is, when you go on your BI tool hunt, you’ll find uncountable options, all of which termed as the ‘best’ business intelligence service. So, what do you do?

Most people check the reviews, but that is a tedious task, and you never get 100 percent honest feedback about anything. We have compared features of some main tools like Klipfolio, Tableau, and Power BI, which will help you figure out the right fit for your business.

Tableau

Tableau is a perfect tool for medium and large companies. It enables easy, fast analysis of interactive, beautiful dashboards. These tableau dashboards are flexible as they cater different needs of different organizations and offer various visualizations, layout options, visualization sharing, and innate data exploration. It has three products:

• Tableau Desktop, for personal use (6 data sources) and enterprise use (44 data sources)
• Tableau Online, a cloud-based business intelligence service
• Tableau Server, a complete solution for businesses

Pros

• Better visualization capabilities than any other available BI tool
• User-friendly interface and easy way of analyzing data
• A high-performance tool with robust and reliable visualization functionalities
• Ability to connect with various data sources such as SQL Server, Excel, Success Factor, etc.
• Mobile friendly tool available for both IOS and Android users
• Eliminates the need for coding and almost all the functionalities can be carried out with drag and drop
• However, if a user is acquainted with programming, Tableau is great for front-end of tools like Alteryx or other languages including R

Cons

• Tableau is an expensive business intelligence tool
• Only row level security is available and does not allow data level security
• Tableau lacks IT support, as someone extracting dataset from SQL will have to run a SQL query first

Klipfolio

Klipfolio is a 100 percent cloud-based business intelligence service. It offers various tools for dashboard creation and data visualization. You can integrate it with various online storages such as relational database, Google Sheets, and other such providers. This tool is highly feasible, enables efficient processing of data and supports real-time optimization.

Pros

• Allows integration with 145 tools, and eliminates the need to manually upload data
• Hassle-free data manipulation after creating a data source
• Ability to completely customize data sources and dashboards
• Since it is cloud-based, it gives great flexibility of accessing data from anywhere

Cons

• There are numerous formulas for fully utilizing all the functionalities
• Basic package only has limited functionalities and dashboards

Power BI

Power BI is a data visualization software by Microsoft. It is a powerful tool for rich visualization, authoring, and mobile exploration, and it further offers a tool for quick insights that let you determine patterns and correlations within your data. Power BI’s biggest advantage is that it is deeply integrated to Microsoft stack which makes it a great tool for reporting and sharing.

Pros

• If you are well acquainted with MS Excel, then using Power BI will be extremely easy. Its interface is user-friendly which feels more like MS Excel’s advanced version
• Affordable with free desktop version and the pro version at $9.99 per month, per user
• Integrated with other tools such as Azure, Salesforce, GitHub, Circuit ID, MailChimp, Excel, etc.
• Broad database connectivity with data sources such as Google analytics, Oracle, SQL Server, Excel, Azure, etc.
• Integration with PowerPoint is important for many organizations. Power BI offers seamless integration with PowerPoint, after which you can directly use Power BI reports in PowerPoint
• One of its amazing features is that it provides language query engine. Here, you can type questions like ‘ What were my sales on Wednesday?’ to receive a response

Cons

• Complex to understand because of various product options and components such as Gateway, Power BI Desktop, etc.
• For advanced analysis, you need traditional data warehouse (DW) preferably build on MSSQL
• Reports generated by Power BI can only be shared across same domain

Data studio

Google Data Studio is a relatively new tool that promotes simple usage, easy but attractive visualizations, and direct way of sharing dashboards just like documents. Till now, it is only available as a web-based solution and desktop services are not offered. Though it is still in its initial stages, Google has an edge as it is providing combination of its BI tools with Google Analytics Data toolkit.

Pros

• It is free, and creation of 5 reports is allowed for every Gmail user
• Easy integration with Google products such as Analytics, Google Sheets, AdWords, etc.
• Attractive visualizations, and reports can be fully customized
• Easy to understand, and you can even add comments and notes

Cons

• Reports can only be accessed online and there is no procedure for exporting reports
• Does not support Google Analytics Segments
• Still in beta phase so has a lot of bugs

Here’s the table containing parameters related to above four BI tools:

Conclusion

There are various options for Business Intelligence tools, however, the ultimate decision depends on your requirements, and that is where we can help you. ActiKnow is a leading provider of business intelligence and data analytics consulting. In addition we also offers automation solutions for office tasks, mobility services for enabling data collection and reporting, data management, and data analytics for predictive modeling, forecasting, etc. We assist you in building a roadmap leading to your perfect solution.

For more details, reach out to us at [email] and someone from our team will contact you soon.