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Want to get an edge on your competition, grow your customer base, or improve the internal workings of your small business? Nearly endless sources of ripe data are out there to help you achieve your goals.
But how do you cherry pick the most relevant data and analyze it in a cost-effective way that grows your business? That’s where the best business intelligence tools come in handy.
Business intelligence (BI) software used to be mainly for the big guns in business, but a rapidly growing number of small businesses have jumped on the BI bandwagon to remain relevant in today’s competitive marketplace.
The market, however, is flooded with BI software products — where do you start your search? And what products are ideal for your small business needs? Keep reading to see our recommendations for the best business intelligence software for small businesses and to learn how to narrow down your field of choices.
Article Overview
- What Is BI?
- Best BI Tools
- Other BI Options To Consider
- Should I Pick A Cloud-Based BI?
- What Other Business Tools Do I Need?
What Is Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence is a blanket term that covers a variety of data analysis software applications that can include such activities as data mining, querying, reporting and online analytical processing.
Think of BI software as Excel on steroids. Business intelligence tools can help you improve your internal processes, get ahead in the marketplace and give you a critical edge over your competitors.
There are three categories of business intelligence tools:
- Guided analysis and reporting, which includes tools such as reporting, dashboards, spreadsheet integration and corporate performance management.
- Self-service BI and analysis tools include ad-hoc reporting and analysis, data discovery and visualization, and online analytical processing (OLAP cubes).
- Advanced analytics include tool styles such as data mining, predictive analytics, statistical modeling, and big data analytics software.
What To Consider As A Small Biz
More than 100 companies offer BI software, with multiple platform and tool style choices. It’s overwhelming for sure. Here are three basic questions to help you wrap your head around what your particular business might need.
- What type(s) of data analysis does your business need? Different applications analyze different types of data related to customers or prospects, competitors, suppliers, internal business processes and more.
- How will you deploy your BI software? Consider how you want your employees to access the software (front-end) and where the application should reside (back-end). There are a wide variety of platforms available.
- What kind of workforce and resources do you have in place? Many BI tools require a dedicated IT person to build and manage your system.
Tip: Don’t just go for the software that has the most features and biggest name. This is especially important for small businesses. If you go too big, you’ll pay an arm and a leg for tools you likely won’t use — and you’ll need more manpower to build and manage the software.
Best Business Intelligence Tools For Small Business
We’ve based our best business intelligence tools reviews on several factors, including ease of use, speed, scalability, price, customer service, online tools and resources and more. Below is our business intelligence tools comparison.
Best Overall | Best Value | Best for Beginners
Best Overall: Tableau Review
Tableau’s suite of products specializes in data analysis and advanced visualization to help your company’s analysts see data connections in ways they wouldn’t necessarily be able to visualize with conventional tools like simple tables and graphs.
Tableau is one of the most popular BI software providers for its ease of use, amazing graphic visualizations, shareable dashboards, and scalability. Due to its higher price point, however, Tableau is probably best suited for larger-end small businesses and medium- and enterprise-level businesses.
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Pricing & Tech Specs
Tableau offers a 14-day free trial on most of its software, and they offer a free Tableau Public option. Below are the standard products, but you also have add-on options like Tableau Mobile and Embedded Analytics.
Tableau Creator
- $70/user/month billed annually
- Tableau Desktop
- Tableau Prep
- Add one Creator license of Tableau Server or Tableau Online
Best Value: Qlik Sense Review
Qlik Sense is another cloud-based, self-service BI software that’s geared more toward small- to medium-sized businesses. Once you get set up and used to maneuvering all the features, Qlik Sense is a fast, robust platform where you can run analytics, reports, snazzy data visualization and more.
A huge benefit of Qlik is its smart data load feature, which all but eliminates the need for SQL query knowledge. Qlik Sense is also optimized to work on any device. They offer a free forever cloud version, so you can test the waters for as long as you’d like.
But you can’t access Qlik’s full data warehouse unless you upgrade to its Cloud Plus version at $20 per user per month. For most small businesses, Cloud Plus has all the features and generous data access you’ll need at an affordable price.
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Pricing
Qlik Sense offers a Desktop Version for individuals that’s entirely free.
- Qlik Sense Cloud Basic: Free forever
- Qlik Sense Cloud Business: $30/user/month billed annually
Best For Beginners: IBM Watson Campaign Automation Review
IBM Watson Campaign Automation platform is a newcomer to the BI industry, but IBM is no stranger to BI — its Cognos BI software is an industry leader for enterprise-level businesses. IBM Cognos, however, is out of most small businesses’ price range (starting at $12,000).
Watson Campaign Automation is geared toward small business needs. A cloud-based, self-service platform, Campaign Automation guides data exploration, automates predictive analytics and makes dashboard and infographic creation a breeze. No coding skills required!
You’re not going to get the level of data access you would with some of the bigger players in our reviews, but you still get a powerful and easy-to-use set of BI tools that should be more than enough for most small businesses.
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Pricing
IBM Watson Campaign Automation Analytics offers a 30-day free trial of its Premium edition.
- Premium: starting at $70/user/month
- Partial Cognos Analytics capabilities
- Upload data or connect to cloud data sources
- Share content with users
- Enterprise: must contact for pricing
- Full Cognos Analytics capabilities
- 500GB user storage and backup
- Can add storage for an additional fee
What About Birst And Sisense?
Birst and Sisense are powerful BI tools that you can scale down to small business. They’re both on the expensive side compared to the other BI software we’ve reviewed. In case you have the budget, they’re certainly worthy of consideration.
Birst Review
Want to improve your sales, marketing and financial analytics in one simple platform? Birst could be your answer. Birst is an up-and-coming self-service BI software that’s especially suitable for beginners.
A SaaS platform, Birst is feature rich but very user-friendly. Its cloud-based architecture makes file and data sharing a breeze. One of Birst’s best features is its automated data warehouse that’s easier and speedier to set up with minimal IT guidance compared to many other BI platforms.
Birst also releases improvements every couple of weeks and is very reactive to customer suggestions.
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Pricing
Must contact Birst for pricing or to request a demo.
Sisense Review
Sisense is an extremely popular cloud based BI software solution for businesses that work with large or diverse data sets. What sets them apart? The marriage between Sisense’s ability to handle complex data and its user-friendly automated features that require little to no data crunching experience.
Sisense masterfully unifies data into a single location with an easy drag-and-drop data blending tool that eliminates the need for IT departments or hardware. And it makes creating dashboards and infographics a breeze. Sisense offers a free trial and a unique “test drive on your data” offer, so you can see exactly how Sisense can help with your own data.
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Pricing
Must contact Sisense for its annual licensing pricing.
See Sisense In Action
Check out the video below to visualize how Sisense (and other best business intelligence tools) work to improve your business’ data analysis.
Is A Cloud-Based BI Solution Better For Small Business?
A 2018 CIO study reveals that cloud adoption soared to 96% in 2018, with 81% of enterprises adopting multi-cloud landscapes. Cloud-based solutions, including business intelligence software, are especially beneficial for small businesses for many reasons.
The most obvious benefit is major cost savings — going with a cloud solution saves you a ton of money on hardware, IT support, expensive licensing and maintenance. But there are many other benefits, including faster and cheaper deployment, enhanced mobility, multi-tenant environment (more users and easier sharing of data), cheaper and better access to integrations, and much more.
For these reasons, the majority of companies in our BI tools comparison are cloud-based. It just makes sense to get your small business intelligence in the cloud!
Top Business Tools To Add To Your Suite
We’ve got a slew of other resources for you to consider for your business needs. Here are just a handful of them for you to consider reading and learning more about.
- Social Media Management Tools
- Human Resources Information Systems
- Email Marketing Service Providers
- Inventory Management Software
How does your small business plan to use BI tools to get ahead of the competition?
Tagged With: Comparison
