Top 10 Business Intelligence (BI) Tools for 2024

Oracle BI is a suite of tools and technologies that helps organizations collect, store, analyze, and visualize data to improve decision-making. The platform enables business users, data engineers and citizen data scientists to connect, prepare and enrich all relevant data, evaluate predictions and make quick, accurate decisions. It uses code-free machine learning to discover unseen signals in data that are embedded throughout the analytics platform. Users can also instantly visualise data, jump-starting the analytics process to create compelling data stories from all sorts of data sources, including internal databases, external websites, and social media platforms. 

With Oracle BI, you no longer need to resort to spreadsheets to prepare your data for analytics. Auditable data preparation and enrichment are built-in out of the box so you can complete the last mile of data processing securely. You can also import and integrate data from various file formats, such as CSV, Excel, and XML.

With an impressive portfolio of over 16 thousand customers, Zoho Analytics’ easy-to-use, powerful BI suite stands out for all the right reasons. The platform allows you to connect to multiple data sources, including business applications, files and feeds, and seamlessly create dashboards and insightful reports using AI and ML technologies. It also provides you with actionable insights on real-time data, allowing you to keep an eye on key metrics and get instant updates on your KPIs. 

Available both on-premises and in the cloud, Zoho Analytics BI has a wide range of APIs that allow it to be readily expanded to suit all your analytics needs. Its mobile app is available on both iOS and Android platforms, and it has self-service data preparation and management capabilities, as well as an intuitive drag-and-drop interface and over 500 third-party integrations.

Sisense’s Fusion Analytics platform is a popular BI tool that lets you make more intelligent business decisions by creating more workable plans and strategies. The platform uses AI analytics with pro-code, low-code and no-code capabilities to turn data into revenue and bring intelligence into all of your products and services. Whether you’re using our no/low code application or our flexible, developer-first tools with SDKs and APIs, Sisense’s analytics blend seamlessly into the product UI and the CI/CD pipeline. You can also easily visualize analytics data with charts and graphs, or explore the data through NLQ-interpreted questions and answers tailored using generative AI. 

Sisense makes it easy to build a customised BI solution for your business too. With Sisense Compose SDK, the company’s flexible developer toolkit, You can Embed analytics in a code-first, scalable, modular format that all of your users can understand. This enables your data teams to build analytics and insight-driven experiences into your products faster, reducing maintenance burden, and saving development time over coding from scratch.

While SAS may be best known for its advanced AI analytics platform, it also provides a powerful business intelligence platform that’s great for industries where data security and compliance are crucial. With its fully integrated, open-source cloud native AI and analytics platform, the SAS allows you to make sense of your data and progress faster. Its intuitive and easy-to-use interface also means it can be used by everyone in your organisation, no matter their skill level. Everyone in your organisation can access analytics with ease through drag-and-drop interfaces that facilitate a visual process for finding insights.

A leader in the Forrester Wave: AI Decisioning Platforms for Q2 of 2023, SAS provides robust data governance features and is highly scaleable through its integration of AI, allowing it to handle lagrange datasets and complex analytics tasks. Its single, self-service interface also lets you visually explore data as well as create and share smart visualizations and interactive reports, while its host Augmented analytics and advanced capabilities accelerate insights and help you find valuable insights hidden in your data.

Now part of Google Cloud, Looker is one of the world’s leading self-service, governed and embedded business intelligence solutions. Designed with the user experience in mind, the platform unlocks the power of your data by making it easy to create interactive dashboards and compelling reports from over 800 data sources. Your data team can create meaningful, shareable, customizable, charts and graphs in just a few clicks, allowing them to visualise data and share actionable insights across your organisation. Looker’s Embedding feature also allows you to include your visualise dara in any web page or intranet, enabling you to tell your data story to your team or the world.

What makes Looker so great is that it’s more than just a business intelligent platform. You can turn to Looker for self-service or governed BI, build your custom applications with trusted metrics, or even bring Looker modelling to your existing BI environment. The Looker Studio API also allows Google Workspace or Cloud Identity organizations to automate the management and migration of Looker Studio assets and configure an application to use the Looker Studio API quickly and easily.

Qlik Sense is a powerful data analytics solution that sets the benchmark for a new generation of analytics by democratising business intelligence across the organisation. With its one-of-a-kind analytics engine, sophisticated AI, and high-performance cloud platform, it enables everyone in your organization to make better decisions and take action – creating a truly data-driven enterprise. 

With Qilk Sense, anyone can visualise and explore your data no matter its size or complexity. Every chart, table, and object is interactive and instantly updates to the current context with each action. You can also create, share and distribute powerful dashboards to support executives, business leaders, and anyone else who needs to stay on the pulse of the organisation. Predictive analytics is available to everyone too. Qlik AutoML enables your analytics teams to create ML models and predictions with full explainability in a simple, code-free user experience, and All your users can interactively explore advanced analytics with real-time calculations, allowing them to ask unique questions and get instant answers.

Acquired by Hitachi Data Systems in 2015, Pentaho software is fast to deploy, easy to use, and purpose-built for the future of business intelligence. By pairing data integration with business analytics, the platform brings together IT and business users to ingest, prepare, blend and analyze all data that impacts business objectives. Its intuitive data integration and preparation techniques drastically reduce the hand-coding required to bring data together for insight. Meanwhile, its analytics capabilities provide a spectrum of analytics for all user roles, from visual data analysis for business analysts to tailored dashboards for all audiences. 

With Pentaho, managing the enormous volume and variety of data is simplified. The platform allows data preparation from any source and automates your data pipeline, allowing you to curate data better for your business user. It also provides a host of data profiling and quality tools, such as row counts, string manipulators, mapping functions and filtering and sorting. This gives you complete control over your data and seamlessly rules out data that doesn’t meet your unique business standards and objectives.

One of the better-known analytics and business intelligence tools on this list, Tableau is an analytics and data visualisation platform with a suite of tools designed to help you bring data to life. Trusted by more than a million active users, Tableau uses AI, ML and other statistical tools to lower the barrier to data. It doesn’t require any knowledge of coding to use, allowing users to seamlessly create reports and share them across multiple platforms of their choice without spending hours analysing complicated datasets. It can also be run on the cloud or on-premise, making it readily available for businesses of all shapes and sizes. 

Tableau recently launched Tableau GPT, which automates data analysis, preparation, and governance, while also providing users with helpful guidance and contextual instructions so that users can understand how prediction and insights are surfaced. It continues to invest big in AI analytical capabilities, to empower users to get answers and uncover unanticipated insights in seconds through AI and machine learning.

Microsoft Power BI is an industry-leading data visualisation tool with a host of features that allow you to explore and visualise your data effectively The platform makes it easy to create rich, interaction data visualisations from multiple data sources so that everyone in your business can make data-driven decisions. You can also easily create and modify data reports and dashboards and share them securely across applications, providing views for deeper insights that drive success across your business. 

Built on the back of Azure, the key focus of Power BI is data mining, exploring and reporting. The platform offers near-limitless data mining capabilities and can extract insights from traditional databases as easily as it can extract data from newer SaaS architectures like GitHub and Zendesk. Power BI also supports third-party custom visuals, allowing you to build the best reports for your business once the right data sources have been mined and relevant insights extracted.

Ranked by Gartner as the number one Analytics Developer use case for 6 years running, Microstrategy ONE is a compelling choice for all of your business intelligence needs. Whether you’re looking for in-depth data analytics, visualization or, exploration tools, the platform offers best-in-class solutions to help your organisation gain actionable insights for making data-driven decisions. You don’t have to do much to gain these insights either. MicroStrategy’s Auto AI assistant – powered by the company’s very own Large Language Model (LLM) – automates complex BI tasks so that you can drive insights faster. And with Auto Dashboard, you can ask for specific data points, summaries, or what-if scenarios in real time and watch your answer appear on the screen in seconds. 

Microstrategy ONE is designed to accelerate data discovery and make it easy to scale to your vision. It allows you to select between multiple hyperscalers including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud that best fit your product strategy. You can also take advantage of the latest in microservices and cloud containers for continuous iterations, fast development, higher fault tolerance, and lower costs. And once you’re up and running, MicroStrategy’s RESTful APIs and a set of rich SDKs enable you to connect to a diverse set of data sources and systems such as Snowflake or Databricks, and blend data sources or embed custom functionalities to adapt to the evolving data landscape.