BI Tools
QuickBI showcases the most popular BI tools and helps you choose the reporting solution that best fits your business.
What are BI tools?
BI applications let you edit, combine, filter, and segment data, as well as visualize and analyze it in versatile ways. That way, information can be shared onward in a controlled manner. Below, QuickBI introduces the most popular BI tools.
Tableau
Tableau is one of the fastest-growing BI systems in the world, offering solutions at different scales and budgets for all kinds of companies, from startups to large enterprises.
Explore Tableau
Power BI
Power BI is a cloud-based business intelligence application from Microsoft for gathering, analyzing, and reporting business data.
Explore Power BI
Data Studio
Data Studio is a browser-based tool from Google Marketing Platform for visualizing, reporting on, and analyzing data.
Explore Data StudioBI tools – what to consider when choosing one
BI tools help turn masses of data into understandable information and build an overall picture from combined data. Their job is to help you see what happened, why, and how you should act on that going forward. How comprehensively and smoothly that works depends on many factors.
Everything is built on integrating data sources into your BI system. The more comprehensively you can bring data from your company's important systems into the scope of analytics, the more insight and understanding you get into the state of the business and the right actions to take. QuickBI connects BI tools and source systems, so you can confidently choose the BI application that best serves your needs.
It's worth checking which operating systems and server platforms the BI candidates you're considering support, especially if you want to use your existing IT infrastructure. Dashboards usually need to work across different devices and browsers, including on mobile. Versatile capabilities for combining, filtering, segmenting, and modeling data are an essential selection criterion.
A BI tool's visual capabilities are also surprisingly important. Even the most advanced analysis has no value if the data isn't easy to understand. Different presentation styles, customization, and interactivity all help people absorb information. Creating reports and dashboards should be intuitive and fast. BI tools also differ in what collaboration options they offer users.
Automation saves time and effort and reduces human error. Most BI applications let you schedule data refreshes, as well as automatic report exports and distribution, for example by email. An alert about a critical change in a KPI can end up saving a company a lot of money.
The most popular BI tools pay particular attention to security (authentication and user permissions, logs, data encryption, security policies, and so on). It should be an important criterion when choosing a BI system. Price and the support services on offer naturally also factor into the decision.
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