These data analytics tools are a must-have

Data analytics tools are pieces of software that collect and analyze massive volumes of user data in order to discover patterns and anticipate user behavior. Installing a tracking package on your site, smartphone apps, or servers to capture data is the first step in using data analytics software. The data analytics platform may then track activities like sessions, entry and departure points, video views, and items added to the cart.  

Microsoft Power BI

Microsoft Power BI is a top business intelligence platform with support for dozens of data sources. It allows users to create and share reports, visualizations, and dashboards. Users can combine a group of dashboards and reports into a Power BI app for simple distribution. Power BI also allows users to build automated machine learning models and integrates with Azure Machine Learning.  

SAP BusinessObjects

SAP BusinessObjects provides a suite of business intelligence applications for data discovery, analysis, and reporting. The tools are aimed at less technical business users, but they’re also capable of performing complex analysis. BusinessObjects integrates with Microsoft Office products, allowing business analysts to quickly go back and forth between applications such as Excel and BusinessObjects reports. It also allows for self-service predictive analytics.  

Sisense

Sisense is a data analytics platform aimed at helping both technical developers and business analysts process and visualizes all of their business data. It boasts a large collection of drag-and-drop tools and provides interactive dashboards for collaboration. A unique aspect of the Sisense platform is its custom In-Chip technology, which optimizes computation to utilize CPU caching rather than slower RAM. For some workflows, this can lead to 10–100x faster computation.  

TIBCO Spotfire

TIBCO Spotfire is a data analytics platform that provides natural language search and AI-powered data insights. It’s a comprehensive visualization tool that can publish reports to both mobile and desktop applications. Spotfire also provides point-and-click tools for building predictive analytics models.  

Thoughtspot

Thoughtspot is an analytics platform that allows users to explore data from various types of sources through reports and natural language searches. Its AI system, SpotIQ, finds insights automatically to help users uncover patterns they didn’t know to look for. The platform also allows users to automatically join tables from different data sources to help break down data silos.  

Qlik

Qlik provides a self-service data analytics and business intelligence platform that supports both cloud and on-premises deployment. The tool boasts strong support for data exploration and discovery by technical and non-technical users alike. Qlik supports many types of charts that users can customize with both embedded SQL and drag-and-drop modules.  

SAS Business Intelligence

SAS Business Intelligence provides a suite of applications for self-service analytics. It has many built-in collaboration features, such as the ability to push reports to mobile applications. While SAS Business Intelligence is a comprehensive and flexible platform, it can be more expensive than some of its competitors. Larger enterprises may find it worth the price due to its versatility.  

Tableau

Tableau is a data visualization and analytics platform that allows users to create reports and share them across desktop and mobile platforms, within a browser, or embedded in an application. It can run on the cloud or on-premises. Much of the Tableau platform runs on top of its core query language, VizQL. This translates drag-and-drop dashboard and visualization components into efficient back-end queries and minimizes the need for end-user performance optimizations. However, Tableau lacks support for advanced SQL queries.  

Google Data Studio

Google Data Studio is a free dashboarding and data visualization tool that automatically integrates with most other Google applications, such as Google Analytics, Google Ads, and Google BigQuery. Thanks to its integration with other Google services, Data Studio is great for those who need to analyze their Google data. For instance, marketers can build dashboards for their Google Ads and Analytics data to better understand customer conversion and retention. Data Studio can work with data from a variety of other sources as well, provided that the data is first replicated to BigQuery using a data pipeline like Stitch.  

Redash

Redash is a lightweight and cost-effective tool for querying data sources and building visualizations. The code is open source, and an affordable hosted version is available for organizations that want to get started fast. The core of Redash is the query editor, which provides a simple interface for writing queries, exploring schemas, and managing integrations. Query results are cached within Redash and users can schedule updates to run automatically.