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BI tools comparison matrix:
Your guide to choosing the right tool
Your comprehensive guide to selecting, implementing, and excelling in BI with expert insights and vendor comparisons
What can BI tools do for your business?
In today's data-rich business landscape, making informed decisions is paramount to success. That's where Business Intelligence (BI) tools come in. With BI tools, your business can:
Gain unparalleled visibility with dashboards: Visualizations and dashboards provided by BI tools give you a clear view of your business performance. With BI, you can monitor key metrics, track progress towards objectives, and uncover insights through intuitive charts and dynamic dashboards. When you have a BI tool at your disposal, making data-driven decisions rooted in a deep understanding of your operations becomes a walk in the park.
Boost efficiency with real-time insights: BI tools help you stay ahead of the curve by reacting to data trends as they unfold. They offer near real-time access to key business metrics and trends, empowering you to monitor your operations, identify areas for improvement, and take proactive actions early on. BI tools facilitate the use of actionable insights for process optimization and improved overall efficiency.
Foster a data-driven culture with self-serve analysis: Fostering a data-driven culture with self-serve analysis involves empowering every team member to make data-driven decisions. BI tools facilitate this by providing user-friendly interfaces, enabling anyone in your company to find answers to their inquiries, create insightful reports, and delve into specific segments. This nurtures a data-driven culture where everyone has the tools to uncover meaningful insights and contribute to company-wide success.
Different types of BI tools
Open-source tools
Open-source tools are usually created collaboratively by a community of contributors in an open and transparent manner
Pros
Lower initial cost: Open-source tools offer a cost-effective solution as they are available for free. Additionally, the parent company often provides commercially available cloud versions, which include services such as cloud hosting, deployment, and access control, all at a more budget-friendly price point.
Customizability and flexibility: With open-source tools, businesses can easily adapt and customize the software to meet their specific needs or integrate it with other systems.
Cons
Require technical expertise: Maintenance and support demand a team of highly skilled developers.
Lack of support: Open-source tools often rely on user communities for support, which may not always offer timely assistance. You might also encounter occasional bugs and issues.
Lack of guarantee of service: The tool's uptime and maintenance are entirely reliant on the technical support team.
Enterprise solutions
Enterprise solutions are commercial applications tailored for large organizations, offering rich features, scalability, security, and comprehensive support
Pros
Comprehensive feature sets: Enterprise tools offer a wide range of robust features, each designed to address the complex needs of large organizations. These include advanced analytics capability, scalability, support for handling large volumes of data, and easy collaboration with alerts.
Integration capabilities: Enterprise BI tools often come with pre-built connectors and integrations to various data sources, databases, and applications commonly used in enterprise environments.
Support and training: Enterprise support includes implementation, troubleshooting, maintenance, and training for new features.
Cons
Cost: Enterprise solutions can be costly due to licensing fees, subscriptions, or upfront expenses.
Vendor lock-in: Since it's a commercial offering without open-source backing, price increases and negotiations are subject to the vendor's discretion.
Learning curve: While many enterprise BI tools come with user-friendly interfaces, they may still have a learning curve, especially when handling complex analyses or advanced features. Users might require training to fully leverage these capabilities.
Factors to consider when deciding on the right BI tool
What’s your budget?
The pricing of BI tools can vary significantly, spanning from hundreds to thousands per month. Various BI tools employ different pricing structures: based on the number of users, license types (e.g., developers, viewers), or exclusively annual commitments. With such extensive price differences, it's crucial to factor in both the number and types of users. Are you making BI tools available to your entire company, catering to non-technical individuals venturing into self-serve data exploration? Or are you specifically targeting executive leadership, providing them with invaluable insights? Be sure to also take into account your end-users' technical skills as you assess the necessary features.
What are the requirements for technical users to build dashboards?
For technical users, certain factors hold great importance: compatibility with current systems and data sources, performance, scalability for managing extensive data volumes, and the ability to customize charts flexibly.
What are the requirements for non-technical users to use dashboards?
Non-technical users prioritize factors like ease of use and learning curve, collaboration and sharing features, alerts/notifications (e.g., via Slack or email), anomaly detection, and data refresh schedules.
Do you require self-serve analysis capabilities?
Prevent scenarios where the business team notices an unusual trend and has to wait for the analytics team's explanation. Assess the self-serve capabilities' complexity according to your end users' skills (SQL or drag-and-drop) and needs. This may involve accessing answers through pre-built dashboards and reports with simple drill-downs or conducting more in-depth exploratory analysis with raw data.
Are you looking to embed analytics in applications?
When you require external stakeholders to access dashboards or integrate analytics into existing business applications, embedded capabilities become essential. Additionally, it's important to factor in role-based access features within the embedded application.
What are security and access control considerations?
Because BI tools frequently manage sensitive data, robust security and access control features are of paramount importance. Flexibility is key in selectively granting access to datasets, tables, reports, dashboards, or specific data values based on user roles or attributes. For instance, ensuring that sales reps can only access data pertaining to their respective regions or accounts is vital.
How’s important is customer support and new feature release speed?
It is important to consider the availability of timely support and the speed at which new features are released. These factors contribute to a great user experience, especially since enterprise contracts are typically bundled for at least one year.
Popular BI tools comparison
Comparison
Preset
Power BI
Lightdash
Sigma
Looker
Tableau
Preset
Power BI
Lightdash
Sigma
Looker
Tableau
Sigma
Founded in
Headquartered at
Cloud Compatibility
custom cloud-based
Pricing Plans
with 14-Day free tria
Our Recommendation
Use Sigma if ...
Your business teams are mostly familiar with excel, and need to export data into Excel or Google Sheet for their own analysis.
Your data team never leaves cloud data warehouse and want to do explorative analysis of large amount of data in seconds.
You want to enable your clients/customers to perform self-serve analysis in an embedded dashboard.
Pros
Works with billions of rows of data quickly.
Empowers self service analytics via the spreadsheet interface and allows business users to drill down to exact row level data.
Easy data manipulation via familiar Excel formula and built in formula to parse JSON in seconds. You can also easily write the transformations back to your data warehouse.
Users can collaborate via the Live edit collaboration feature, like editing on Google Sheet together.
Cons
Limited visualization options comparing to other BI tools like Tableau.
No Python or R notebook integrations.
Spreadsheet-like UI
Sigma is built for modern cloud data warehouse with your familiar spreadsheet-like UI and your most frequently used features, such as excel formula and pivot tables to manipulate data. You can experience an interactive Sigma dashboard to try it out yourself.
Embedded Dashboards
Sigma allows you to provide your customers with easy self-serve access to their data within your product via embedded dashboards. You can customize the dashboard theme, authenticate your customers using existing sign-on framework, and setup row-level security for the embedded dashboards.
Data Modelling
You can manipulate your raw data, such as changing data type, format, and parse out JSON easily via Sigma’s Datasets feature. Create a new calculated field simply by inserting a column and write Excel formula.
Datasetused to empower workbooks (i.e. dashboards) and updates to the dataset is cascaded to all workbooks built on it. You can also connect directly to dbt to centralize your business logic, and view the metadata for the dbt job, columns, and tables.
“Bringing your own data” with Input Table
When your data is not in the data warehouse, such as finance forecast, you can use Input Tables to integrate new data entries into your analysis. Another useful use case of input table is to dynamically updating calculations in Sigma and creating a sample scenario model.
Drill down to row level data
For business users, they can check the details behind the rolled-up data by drilling all the way to the specific transaction or item.
Dynamic dataset parameters & controls
Creating dataset parameters and referencing them allows you to dynamically replace values used in calculations, which allows you to ask the all-important “what if” from your data.
Show additional data in tooltip
You can customize the content of the data point tooltips and add additional fields to provide more information.
Workbook collaboration with Live Edit
Teams can work together on workbook drafts real-time, with all editors seeing and contributing to one live draft.
Taking notes and leave comments
You can add comments, notes, and analysis right alongside your charts and data so you never have to wonder “What did we do here?” again.
Preset
Founded in
Headquartered at
Cloud Compatibility
custom cloud-based
Pricing Plans
Professional Plan at $30/user/month;
Annual Enterprise Contracts Available
Our Recommendation
Use Preset if ...
You want to build dynamic and beautiful dashboards quickly.
Your company have small team of 10-20 users with budget ~$500/month.
Pros
Beautiful charts. 40 pre-installed visualization and CSS templates for custom theming.
dbt integration & Preset semantic layer for last-mile SQL transformation.
Built-in SQL Editor.
Cons
Limited filtering capabilities comparing to other tools, for example, limited customization for date range filter.
No support for advanced data analytics such as machine learning and predictive analytics.
User Friendly Dashboards
Preset provides a clean, modern, and customizable user interface and dashboard that are user-friendly and easy to navigate. The dashboard is highly interactive, enabling users to click on any widget to access additional information or take action.
Embedded Dashboards
You can utilize the Superset Embedded SDK to embed your Preset dashboards and analytics within your own applications. A Preset guest token allows your users to access embedded Preset resources, such as dashboards, without the need to log in to Preset as usual. Please note that embedded features come with separate pricing and require annual commitments.
Data Modelling
You can manipulate your data by:
Using Preset’s built-in SQL editor to create virtual datasets by treating the results of a SQL query as a table.
Using Preset’s Datasets feature to change the data type of the data columns and add calculated metrics with SQL or formulas.
Cross Filtering
Cross-filtering feature allows you to filter data from multiple charts at the same time
Filters Scoping
Select specific Charts or Dashboard that will be affected by a specific filter.
Drill to Details
When you want to explore the underlying data of a specific value or a set of values on the chart, for example, all columns in the dataset for rows filtered to the selected values, you can use the Drill to Detail By functionality.
Reports
Reports are snapshots of your data that can be scheduled to be delivered on a regular basis. Reports can be sent via email or Slack, and they can include charts, tables, and text.
Alerts
Alerts are notifications that are sent when a specific condition is met. For example, you could create an alert to be sent when the number of failed login attempts reaches a certain threshold. Alerts can be sent via email, Slack, or SMS.
Power BI
Founded in
Headquartered at
Cloud Compatibility
Pricing Plans
Premium Plan at $20/user/month;
Annual Enterprise Contracts Available
Our Recommendation
Use Power BI if ...
Your organization relies heavily on Microsoft products like Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics 365. Power BI seamlessly integrates with these platforms, which enables you to leverage your existing infrastructure efficiently.
You want to uncover insights faster with Copilot in Power BI. You can describe what you need and Copilot will analyzes, pulls, and visualizes the information.
Pros
Ease of collaboration in a Microsoft-powered environment where reports and dashboards are interactive and can be published and shared with a larger audience.
It offers a wide range of visualizations and customization options, including comparison, correlation, distribution, ranking, and more.
Cons
There is a limit of 1 million rows returned on any query.
When data changes, you have to refresh to display the latest data, as Power BI utilizes a lot of caching.
Non-consistency in visuals may occur when data changes; different visuals on the same page or different pages can show varying results. Refreshing all visuals corrects this problem.
Intelligent Visuals
Power BI is one of the best tools when it comes to the customization functionalities of your visualizations and dashboards With the launch of Copilot, you can simply describe the visuals and insights you’re looking for, and Copilot will do the rest, which leads to faster insights.You can experience an interactive Power BI dashboard and try for yourself.
Embedded Dashboards
You can use Power BI REST APIs and Client APIs to embed your Power BI dashboards and analytics in your own applications. Depending on your hosting region and node type, embedded dashboards starts at $700/month, see detailed price here.
You can check the embedded capabilities in this sandbox.
Data Modelling
You can manipulate your data by :
Create and manage relationships between tables manually or automatically though auto detect.
Utilizing Data analysis expressions (DAX), which is a library of functions and operators, to perform advanced calculations and queries on data in related tables and columns.
Drill down to row level data
You can drill-down, drill-up, and expand to add another hierarchy level to the current view. You can also export the raw data into tables for further analysis.
Cross-Filtering and Cross-Highlighting
Selecting a data point in one visual on a report page will cross-filter or cross-highlight the other visuals on the page. Cross-filtering removes data that doesn't apply, and cross-highlight retains all the original data points but dims the portion that doesn't apply to your selection.
Industry-leading AI
Now with Copilot and Power BI, non-technical users can just describe their needs and Copilot can automatically create the reports, and you can ask any deep dive questions in chatbot.
“Get Insights” button
Power BI allows you to run insights on the entire dataset or on a specific report with just one button click and conveniently pin the insight charts to the dashboard.
Lightdash
Founded in
Headquartered at
Cloud Compatibility
cloud-based
Pricing Plans
Cloud version starts at $400/month;
Annual Enterprise Contracts Available
Our Recommendation
Use Lightdash if ...
Your team is proficient in SQL and familiar with dbt.
You aim to harness a Git-based version control system to facilitate collaboration and systematically track changes to dashboards and queries.
Your priority is a lightweight and straightforward BI tool that can be swiftly deployed and seamlessly integrated with your current data infrastructure.
You highly appreciate open-source solutions and seek the flexibility to customize and expand the BI tool to align with your particular requirements.
Pros
SQL-first approach, which is developer-friendly.
Git-Based Version Control.
Lightweight and easy setup.
Granular data access control (user permissions at the table and column levels, granting appropriate privileges to different user roles).
Open-source customizability.
Cons
Limited security and governance features compared to other tools.
Scalability and performance may not be on par with some commercial BI tools specifically designed for handling large volumes of data and complex analytics workloads.
Limited visualization and customization capabilities.
SQL-First Approach
Lightdash allows users to use their favourite text editor and test changes in a sandbox before merging to production. You can also use live previews and development environments to speed up our development workflow.
You can experience an interactive Lightdash Marketing dashboard to try it out yourself.
Using DBT for modelling
In Lightdash, everything you need for BI is written as code in your dbt project. You can use dbt to transform all of the data from your data warehouse, then use Lightdash to explore the data. To get a model in dbt Lightdash-ready, you need to define all of the columns that you want to explore in Lightdash and then test them out in a Lightdash preview environment.
Self-serve exploration
Anyone can get to the right answers quickly using pre-built metrics can get to the right answers fast using pre-built metrics. Define your business metrics once and make it available everywhere for your whole team to use. Lightdash offers powerful analytics capabilities, including the ability to perform advanced calculations and create custom metrics. Users can also create custom data pipelines to transform and clean data before it is visualized.
Using Tables and the Explore view
A Table is the main starting point for exploring data in Lightdash. It contains a group of related dbt models, dimensions, and metrics. You can explore tables, under table view.
Data drill down and Cross-Filtering
It also have the most frequently used features, such as Viewing the underlying data and cross-filtering. It also enables us to implement chart-to-dashboard by using a data point on a chart.
Share insights with your team
You can share a URL to a 'work-in-progress' data exploration or share a link to a saved chart or Download results as a .csv or a .png of the chart.
Personal access tokens & Whitelisting email domains
You can create a personal access token (PAT) to authenticate in the CLI or with the API to provide additional security. Also. organization admins can add allowed email domains to their organization settings so that anyone with those email domains can automatically join their organization (without explicitly inviting them).
Looker
Founded in
Google in 2019)
Headquartered at
Cloud Compatibility
custom cloud-based
Pricing Plans
Annual Enterprise Contracts Available
Our Recommendation
Use Looker if ...
You are on Google ecosystem. You can use your Google credits for Looker license.
You are an enterprise prioritizing data governance, scalability, and advanced data modeling capabilities.
You are seeking robust self-serve data exploration capabilities for your business users.
Pros
A single source of truth for business metrics with Looker’s semantic layer powered by LookML, which is Looker’s own SQL-based modeling language.
Looker excels in providing centralized data governance, allowing administrators to manage data access and control permissions to the most granular levels.
User friendly for business users to do self-service data explorations.
Cons
Initial setup process takes long time and effort.
Learning curve for developers to pickup and implement LookML across the organization.
The tool can slow down for large and complex queries, sometimes takes long time to load dashboards.
Poor mobile experience.
Self-serve Explorations
Looker's direct connection to live, row-level data enables you to dig deeper into the metrics and gain a deeper understanding of the underlying "why". Business users can access “Explores”, which are created and verified by the data team, ensuring everyone is looking at metrics with the same definitions.
Embedded Dashboards
Looker’s embedded dashboards works with public embedding and private embedding via Looker login, Google OAuth, OpenID Connect, or even SSO. Lookers offers extensive customization of the embedded dashboard, granular access and data control, and you can even configure the session-level security such as how long users can stay logged in.
You can experience a looker embedded dashboard at Atom Fashion (requires Google account to log in).
Data Modeling
Looker's data modeling relies on LookML, the Looker Modeling Language. LookML is used to create semantic data models, describing dimensions, aggregates, calculations, and data relationships in your SQL database. By writing a LookML model, Looker constructs SQL queries tailored to a specific database, facilitating efficient data analysis and exploration.
Your Looker data model exists in two states: Production Mode and Development Mode.
Development Mode
Development Mode lets you make changes to LookML files and to preview how they will affect content on your instance. The changes you make to LookML files in this Mode do not affect the production environment, until they are pushed to the production environment.
Production Mode
Production Mode is the production version of Looker. Everyone using a Looker instance in Production Mode accesses their projects in the same state. Project files are read-only in this mode.
Drill down to row level data
For business users, they can check the details behind the rolled-up data by drilling all the way to the specific transaction or item.
Filters Galore
Offer users the magic of data manipulation with multiple types of filters, providing intuitive and powerful environments for personalized exploration and empowering users to find the information they need independently.
Cross Filtering
Cross-filtering makes it easier and more intuitive for viewers to interact with a dashboard's data and understand how one metric affects another. With cross-filtering, users can click a data point in one dashboard tile to have all dashboard tiles automatically filter on that value.
Threshold based Alerts
The user-friendly alerts available on each tile of a Looker dashboard allow you (and your users) to react to small changes before they become big problems.
Unique Visualization
Different businesses require different visualizations. In the Looker Marketplace there are a host of add-on visualizations, built to fit more custom data needs. And if you want something even more bespoke, you can add custom Javascript visualizations for everyone to leverage.
Tableau
Founded in
Headquartered at
Cloud Compatibility
and Tableau Cloud
(formerly known
as Tableau Online)
Pricing Plans
for desktop version,
Annual Enterprise Contracts
Our Recommendation
Use Tableau if ...
your business requires scheduling tasks such as refreshing data sources, publishing dashboards, and sending email alerts to others.
your business has a high volume of concurrent users, a large volume of data, or requires integration with other data sources.
you have large teams are familiar with data visualization, need to share data and collaborate on projects.
Pros
Powerful visualization capabilities with Wide range of visualization options that are easy to understand and share.
Flexible on-premises or in the cloud deployment options.
Support both R and Python.
Connects to a wide range of data sources.
Cons
Expensive BI platform than some of its competitors.
Tableau Server can be complex to setup and configure. This is especially true if you are deploying it on-premises.
Requires a bit of a learning curve to start using Tableau.
Drag-and-drop and Easy-to-find UI
Tableau's UI is clean and uncluttered, makes it easy to create and move dashboard objects by simply dragging them from one place to another. This makes it easy to experiment with different dashboard layouts and find the one that works best for your data.
Embedded Dashboards
Tableau allows you to embed dashboards, views, and metrics into your own applications(web page/portal/mobile app) . This gives your users the ability to interact with your data in a visual and interactive way, without having to leave your application. You can also control who has access to your dashboards by using role-based security.
Data Modelling
The data model in Tableau allows you to integrate and prepare multiple data sources into a single semantic model. This enables users to easily join and analyze data from different sources without having to manually merge tables or manage complex relationships.
To do this Tableau creates a logical layer on top of your physical data sources. This logical layer allows you to define relationships between tables, even if they are not physically joined in the database. This can be useful for creating more complex visualizations and for improving performance.
Drill down to row level data
for business users, they can check the details behind the rolled-up data by drilling all the way to the specific transaction or item.
Dynamic dataset parameters & controls
Creating dataset parameters and referencing them allows you to dynamically replace values used in calculations, perform what if analysis.
Show additional data in tooltip
you can customize the content of the data point tooltips and add additional fields to provide more information.
Data Guide
Provides helpful information about a dashboard and insights about the data behind it.
Tableau GPT
Tableau GPT lowers the barrier to data with generative AI. Automates data analysis, preparation, and governance, providing users with helpful guidance and contextual instructions within the product.
Tableau Pulse
Tableau Pulse brings analytics to life for everyone. Tableau Pulse provides data digests in your flow of work and an intuitive, personalized metrics homepage that you can tailor to your needs. Gone are the days of filtering five different ways in a dashboard to find the numbers you care about—now you can have a simple, curated, ‘newsfeed’-like experience of key KPIs that you select. Over time, this experience will return more personalized results as Pulse learns what insights you care most about.
Accelerators
Tableau Accelerators are pre-built dashboards designed to help you get a jumpstart on data analysis. Tailored to specific industries and enterprise applications, Accelerators are built with sample data that you can swap out for your own data, allowing you to discover insights with minimal setup.
Future trends of BI
Business intelligence is a rapidly evolving field, driven by advancements in technology and ever-changing business requirements.
NLP integrations with BI tools: With the explosion of innovation in natural language processing, business intelligence is transforming from reporting to prediction and prescription of insights based on available data. With NLP-enabled tools leveraging semantic structures, people can ask questions and get insights on the go. For instance, Delphi serves as an AI-powered conversational interface for the semantic layer, enabling you to ask a wide range of questions through Delphi's Slack chatbot, providing insightful responses and assistance.
Input tables: Until now, tables in Business intelligence have been read-only, only analyzing data present in warehouses. With input tables, business teams can now break through the Data-to-Warehouse barrier. For example, Sigma launched the new input table feature to incorporate human context, such as projection, into analysis.
More niche tools: Such tools cater to specific industries or business needs allowing companies to gather more targeted and relevant data for their analysis. By focusing on specific niches, these tools can provide deeper insights and more specialized functionality compared to broader business intelligence platforms.
How 5X helps with BI tool selection and management
Needs assessment and tool recommendations
We thoroughly assess your existing systems, pain points, and strategic priorities to gain a deep understanding of your business use cases. Based on this analysis, we recommend the best BI tools that align with your budget, industry, company size, special requirements, and specific use cases.
Proof of concepts with your real data
After narrowing down the options to 2-3 tools, we help you build dashboards using your actual data across different tools. This allows your business end users to interact with real contextual information, aiding in the decision-making process. This process usually takes 2-3 months for scheduling vendor demos, fighting for data team resources; 5X can make it happen in less than 2 weeks.
Streamlined negotiations and contract handling
5X takes care of all the negotiation, paperwork, and contract management on your behalf. We engage with BI tool vendors to secure the enterprise contract, eliminating the need for you to navigate complex sales conversations.
Seamless integration with 5X data platform
Our end-to-end data platform ensures effortless integration of your chosen BI tool with other tools through a simple 1-click process. Once you onboard your data vendors, such as data warehouses, ingestion, and modeling tools onto the 5X platform, your new BI tool gets seamlessly added and configured with your existing tools. This eliminates manual work and maintenance concerns, enabling you to focus entirely on analytics.
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Effortless migration & support to new tools
Transitioning to a new BI tool is a breeze. Our specialists handle data migration, tailored planning, and user training, guaranteeing a smooth switch, and post-migration support ensures a successful transition.
Centralized billing, user management, and usage insights
Through the 5X platform, all vendors provisioned under 5X are consolidated into a single monthly bill. This simplifies financial management by eliminating the need to handle multiple invoices. Additionally, 5X platform allows you to manage user access, monitor usage, and access all your dashboards from a single location.
Choosing a 5X vendor means partnering with a trusted expert, ensuring your BI journey is backed by industry-leading innovation and support. Book a demo now to tap into the efficiency, growth, and innovation that BI tools bring.
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