Business Intelligence (BI) Software

What is Business Intelligence (BI) Software?

Business Intelligence (BI) software is a suite of tools organizations can leverage to collect, analyze, transform, and report on business data from internal and external data sources, to guide business decisions, identify issues, uncover market trends, and find new revenue streams. BI software can access and analyze structured and unstructured data from various sources, such as historical or current in-house business data, third-party data, or social media.

BI works by collecting and analyzing business data and transforming that data into insightful reports, graphs, charts, or dashboards to provide companies with insights into their business. In turn, this helps foster data-driven decision-making across the organization. The benefits of BI software include the following:

  • BI software helps organizations analyze data to make informed and timely decisions, enhancing business performance.
  • BI tools automate data processes, reducing time and effort for data analysis, and allowing focus on strategic tasks.
  • BI software ensures data accuracy and consistency, improving the reliability of insights and decision-making.
  • BI software analyzes customer data to provide insights into behavior and preferences, enabling tailored marketing and improved satisfaction.
  • BI tools offer insights into market trends and competitor performance, helping organizations identify opportunities and stay ahead of competitors.

Key Features of Business Intelligence (BI) Software

  • Data Visualization: BI software provides data visualization tools that analyze raw business data and transform it into visual representations that organizations can use to refine business understanding, and make data-informed decisions. BI data visualizations include charts, graphs, animations, infographics, or other types of visualizations.
  • Data Mining: BI solutions provide data mining capabilities that enable companies to extract information from large data sets, and prepare them for processing and analysis.
  • Data Transformation: BI software provides data transformation tools that convert different forms of data from various sources into a human-readable format that the BI system can process.
  • Data Warehousing: BI software offers data warehousing, which is the process of collecting and storing data from multiple sources and consolidating it into a singular data warehouse that can be analyzed by BI tools.
  • Predictive Analytics: BI software (especially platforms that have adopted AI-based capabilities) offer Predictive Analytics tools, which leverage a combination of historical data, data mining, and machine learning to identify patterns and help companies predict future behavior.
  • Augmented Analytics: BI software provides augmented analytics, which leverages Machine Learning (ML) tools and Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to enhance data analysis and automate complex data preparation, data insights, and data visualizations.

To learn more about Business Intelligence software, please visit our Business Intelligence FAQs.

Top 10 Business Intelligence (BI) Software Providers

NetSuite / Necto / Looker / SAP Analytics Cloud / Spotfire / Tableau / Oracle ERP / Infor Birst / Sisense / IBM Planning Analytics

WH Score
8.3
MicroStrategy ONE

MicroStrategy ONE

25reviews
Starting Price:N/A
MicroStrategy Business Intelligence is the first truly complete enterprise analytics solution, and is both easy to use and enterprise-ready. MicroStrategy 10 meets the requirements of both IT and business. It creates the sense of massive data volumes, obtains answers promptly, generates remarkable v...
WH Score
8.3
Qlik Cloud

Qlik Cloud

39reviews
Starting Price:$0 per user / per month
Qlik is a business intelligence (BI) software that allows users to explore, analyze, and visualize data in a self-service manner. The software utilizes a unique associative model that allows users to make connections between data points that may not be immediately obvious, enabling them to uncover n...
WH Score
8.2
Viventium

Viventium

20reviews
Starting Price:N/A
Viventium is a comprehensive HR solution which pays special focus to compliance and employee productivity. Stay compliant with Viventium in all 50 states, while also giving your employees access to their salary and vacation information over a mobile app.   
WH Score
8.2
Pyramid Analytics

Pyramid Analytics

3reviews
Starting Price:N/A
Pyramid Analytics is a powerful business intelligence (BI) software provider, offering a comprehensive decision intelligence platform redesigned for the modern enterprise landscape. This all-inclusive platform seamlessly integrates data preparation, business analytics, and data science, providing a ...
WH Score
8.2
Pentaho

Pentaho

27reviews
Starting Price:N/A
Pentaho BI tackles the obstacles that bar your company’s ability to gain from all your data. Pentaho BI simplifies preparation and combination of any data, including a range of tools to easily analyze, visualize, explore, report, and foretell. Embeddable, extensible and open, Pentaho is design...
WH Score
8.2
SAS Viya

SAS Viya

26reviews
Starting Price:N/A
SAS Viya is a cloud-native analytics platform that provides a single dashboard for setting up data analytics, artificial intelligence, and visualization. It is intended to make it simpler to access, analyze, and share data, to aid enterprises with insight and innovation. The ability to manage vast q...
WH Score
8.1
Alteryx

Alteryx

33reviews
Starting Price:$960 per user / per year
Since 2010, Alteryx Business Intelligence has functioned on four major level: predictive analytics, sharing insights, data blending and spatial analytics. Alteryx Business Intelligence touts their seamless, efficient data blending workflow as being up to one hundred times faster than other offerings...
WH Score
8.1
IBM Cognos Analytics

IBM Cognos Analytics

41reviews
Starting Price:$5 per user / per month
IBM Cognos is a cloud-based BI platform considered to be a truly path-breaking solution in the BI market. It essentially comprises more than thirty different elements to provide a solution to any organization’s analytical goals. At a high level, the solution features include business scorecard...
WH Score
8.0
Datapine

Datapine

18reviews
Starting Price:$0 per user / per month
Datapine makes data integration easy. It will take you minutes instead of months to get set up with datapine. They offer native connectors to almost any relational database, Google Analytics, Google Spreadsheets, SAP ERP/BW and many more. Having secure access to dispersed data combined in one l...
WH Score
8.0
Logi Symphony

Logi Symphony

14reviews
Starting Price:N/A
Logi Symphony is an embedded analytics and business intelligence solution from Insight Software. A strong tool that aids firms in making sense of their data, it offers the ability to link to many different data sources, including cloud-based services, databases as well as worksheets. Logi Symphony c...

Business Intelligence (BI) Topics

Learn more about Business Intelligence (BI) Software

What is the difference between BI and data analytics?

Business Intelligence (BI) refers to the strategies, processes, and technological tools used to collect and analyze historical business data to help organizations make data-driven business decisions. Data analytics, on the other hand, leverages algorithms to extract actionable insights from raw data. While data analytics is typically used to prepare and analyze datasets, BI transforms that data analysis into insights and visualizations that help organizations use historical and current data to make decisions about the future of the business.

Does BI software require coding expertise?

Most SaaS BI platforms do not require coding expertise and can be used by all members of an organization, across the hierarchy. This is because SaaS BI solutions offer drag-and-drop interfaces that are easy to understand and use, thereby presenting little to no learning curve, even for the most non tech-savvy team members.

However, for availing more advanced capabilities pertaining to data mining and data transformation, some expertise in coding may be required. This is especially crucial when building and tuning AI-powered data models. If your organization does not have any skilled programmers available, your BI software vendor should be able to offer you guidance and recommendations.

How is data migrated into a new BI platform?

Data migration when implementing a new BI system can be challenging, but it is a crucial part of the implementation process as it determines the overall workability and efficiency of your new BI platform.

Whether you are migrating data from static databases or from one BI platform to another, most migration processes typically involve:

  • Scoping the volume of data available,
  • Transforming/cleaning/decluttering any data (if needed),
  • Loading data onto the new platform in small batches,
  • Conducting repeated yet comprehensive tests, and finally,
  • Repeating the above process to ensure full workability and a smooth transition.

Data migration workflows and strategies may depend on the BI vendor you have partnered with, as well as any nuances pertaining to your enterprise data. As a result, your BI software vendor should be able to advise on data migration workflows and strategies that are most suitable for your business’s unique requirements.

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