Top 11 Business Intelligence Tools You Must Know in 2025: The Definitive Guide

Sisense is a business intelligence and analytics platform that makes it easier to understand complex data and develop analytical applications. Its API-first cloud architecture allows you to embed analytics directly into other applications seamlessly.

It provides a user-friendly, self-service analytics environment that pulls data from multiple sources, including Adwords, Google Analytics, and Salesforce. This flexibility helps businesses build enterprise-quality analytics solutions either on-premises or in the cloud, all while maintaining low total ownership costs.

The platform also utilizes in-chip technology for quick parallel processing and an in-memory, columnar database that supports multiple servers working collaboratively on a single server setup. This design reduces the need for additional hardware or servers, saving costs significantly. Integration with R language functions enables advanced predictive analytics and detailed reporting.

A notable feature is Sisense Pulse, which uses machine learning algorithms to automatically detect and alert users about data anomalies, enhancing data monitoring and decision-making processes.

To give a quick overview, Sisense offers a complete suite of tools for creating analytics applications, including:

Core Features:

Advantages:

Pricing:

Pricing depends on your specific project details such as user count, data volume, and implementation timeline. You can request a customized quote tailored to your needs.

Ideal for data discovery and visualization, priced at $12 per user each month.

Tableau is a business intelligence and analytics platform designed to help you interpret complex data and customize analytics for your products.

It provides an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop interface that allows data professionals to access, analyze, create reports, and share insights easily within their organization. The drag-and-drop functionality makes complex tasks like pivoting and joining data straightforward. You can reorder steps, modify values, and see results instantly.

Additionally, Tableau uses intelligent algorithms to automate repetitive tasks, such as correcting typos and streamlining workflows. The Tableau Prep feature accelerates data cleaning, combining, and preparation processes. It includes two tools: Tableau Prep Builder, which helps build data workflows, and Tableau Prep Conductor, which manages scheduling, scalability, and organizational data flow monitoring.

Key features include device-responsive dashboard design with Device Designer, real-time data exploration through live charts, interactive mapping with Tableau Maps supporting 16 zoom levels and custom geocodes, and Tableau Blueprint for planning and deploying a data-driven organizational strategy.

Advantages of Tableau include support for multiple data sources like Excel, Oracle, SQL, and Google Analytics; the ability to create dynamic stories; secure sharing of reports via Tableau Online or Server; handling large datasets visually on laptops; interactive visualizations to uncover hidden insights; and the Ask Data feature, which uses smart algorithms to index, profile, and optimize data sources.

Pricing details show various options to fit different needs, with a range from $12 to $70 per month, and a special 14-day free trial is available for new users.

Tableau offers a variety of pricing options depending on how you choose to deploy the software.

For on-premises or public cloud setups, the costs are as follows: Tableau Creator is $70 per user each month, Tableau Explorer costs $35 per user monthly, and Tableau Viewer is available for $12 per user per month. If you prefer fully hosted solutions by Tableau, the prices are slightly different: Tableau Creator remains at $70 per user each month, but Explorer is $42, and Viewer is $15 per user monthly. Individuals can purchase Tableau for $70 per month, and additional features such as Data Management are available for an extra $5.50 per user each month, while Server Management costs an additional $3 per user per month.

4. SAP Business Intelligence

This platform is highly recommended for analytics reporting and sharing across different parts of an organization, with pricing that is typically based on quotes.

SAP Business Intelligence is an excellent tool for those seeking comprehensive business insights and data analysis features that can support smarter decision-making across your enterprise. Its reporting capabilities make it ideal for organizations that need to distribute insights widely and securely.

Expert’s Advice: SAP BI is a robust choice if you’re in search of an effective, enterprise-grade business intelligence solution. Its extensive data analysis and reporting functions can significantly enhance your ability to make informed business decisions.

The platform’s pricing structure is quote-based, and it is primarily aimed at organizations that require comprehensive reporting and data sharing across multiple departments or units. The cost varies depending on specific needs and deployment options, so reaching out for a tailored quote is recommended.

For more details or to request a demo, visit the SAP BI product page linked above.

SAP Business Intelligence provides an all-in-one analytics platform to assist with visualizing data, analyzing trends, and generating reports. It helps reduce uncertainty by tracking key metrics and offering accessible insights that drive decision-making.

The cloud-based system leverages advanced technologies such as in-memory computing and machine learning to enable quick resolution of complex issues with just a few clicks. It also supports real-time sharing of data and reports across the organization, facilitating collaboration. Integration with Microsoft Office allows users to refine and explore data more efficiently while identifying different patterns and trends.

In addition, the platform empowers users to perform large-scale data analytics and incorporate insights directly into PowerPoint presentations. The scalable BI tool offers personalized, in-context insights accessible on any device. Users can also create customized reports quickly by designing them efficiently and including graphics or videos.

Key features include SAP Analytics Cloud, which consolidates multiple database solutions and analytical tools in one platform; Predictive Analytics, which employs machine learning to forecast future trends with built-in algorithms and ML model management; and the BusinessObjects BI Suite, which provides real-time data access along with capabilities like reporting, interactive dashboards, on-the-fly reports, and data visualization.

Advantages of SAP BI include availability in both on-premise and cloud formats, support for multilingual reporting, augmented analytics for complex data interpretation, embedding analytics into business applications, and a color-coded analytics interface for easier understanding. It serves as a centralized hub for insights and reporting data through customizable dashboards, supports integration with Microsoft Office, and offers free demos along with tailored pricing options.

Pricing for SAP BI generally requires a quote, where prospective customers submit details such as company size and structure to receive a personalized quote.

Looking at Looker, another prominent BI tool, it is best suited for startups and mid-sized companies, with pricing based on quotes.

The platform is ideal for those requiring real-time analytics and seamless sharing of data with clients or partners. Features designed to support strategic decision-making help businesses rely on accurate intelligence.

Expert’s Advice: Looker is highly recommended for businesses that need instant analytics and easy data sharing with external stakeholders. Its features enhance decision-making confidence through timely and reliable insights.

Looker is a Business Intelligence platform that helps users analyze and share real-time data insights. It integrates data from various sources to provide a comprehensive overview of business performance, giving a full picture of operations and customer behavior.

This tool offers a total view of your business and customers, enabling detailed analysis and strategic investments. Its dashboards facilitate deep data tracking and reporting, enhancing existing systems with new data integration. Looker’s collaborative features empower teams to make smarter, data-driven decisions easily.

This approach allows businesses to spot sales opportunities, tailor messaging, and understand the behaviors of successful customers to improve efficiency. Employees can monitor customer interactions across multiple touchpoints, fostering personalized communication. The platform also connects directly to row-level data, revealing detailed information and current trends.

It provides alerts for potential issues, such as fraudulent orders, so problems can be addressed proactively. Additionally, integrations with tools like Slack, Dropbox, Marketo, and Segment support data sharing and workflow automation.

Key features include:

– Looker Blocks: pre-built tools like SQL templates, visualizations, and data models to speed up analysis.
– Embedded Analytics: easily integrate customizable reports into other applications.
– Sales Analytics: combine data from various systems to generate insights that boost sales and reduce customer churn.

Advantages include customizable workflows for different teams, a library of over 100 modeling patterns, flexible cloud and database options, and the ability to develop custom applications. Looker’s SQL Runner allows quick data analysis and straightforward reporting for non-technical users.

Pricing depends on your company’s size and needs, with tailored plans that include features like internal embedding, API access, and live support.

Another leading option is MicroStrategy, ideal for large organizations with bigger budgets.

Expert Insights

MicroStrategy excels in data visualization and connects seamlessly with a variety of data sources. Its comprehensive tools give users a complete view of their business operations, empowering smarter decision-making.

MicroStrategy is a comprehensive enterprise BI platform that provides access to all company data assets and visualizes data effectively. Its features include a self-service dashboard and location-based analytics, enabling users to analyze data without needing extensive IT support. This setup eliminates the necessity for robust IT infrastructure during data analysis and reporting, and you won’t even need to write complex code to use it. It offers flexible deployment options—either on cloud or on-premise—and promises to set up a cloud platform within 48 hours. Additionally, it can transfer data seamlessly from various sources like cloud storage, relational databases, enterprise applications, Hadoop, and big data ecosystems.

Key features include location-based analytics, which contextualizes data geographically for better insights; vibrant, interactive visual reports that simplify understanding complex data; and a user-friendly self-service dashboard that consolidates key business metrics such as revenue, profit, and sales into one convenient view.

Advantages:

Cost Details: While there is no detailed pricing listed on their official website, FinancesOnline indicates that MicroStrategy provides four main pricing options:

Ideal for collaboration within Microsoft ecosystems like Office 365, Dynamics 365, and Azure, starting at $9.99 monthly.

Power BI is a cloud-based business intelligence tool that simplifies discovering and sharing insights through visual data representation. It includes features like integrated AI, Excel compatibility, and custom data connectors.

It allows users to create and distribute reports tailored with specific branding and integrated KPIs. Its AI features enable conversational queries that understand natural language, enhancing data exploration. The platform ensures data security across dashboards, reports, and datasets, even when sharing outside the system or exporting to formats like PDF, Excel, or PowerPoint. With over 120 free connectors, it provides extensive access to various data sources, including on-premise and cloud services like Azure SQL, Dynamics 365, Excel, Salesforce, and SharePoint.

Integration with Azure allows handling petabyte-scale data and offers advanced AI tools, stronger data protection, and effortless insight sharing organization-wide. For a comprehensive comparison with Tableau, check out the review article on Power BI vs. Tableau.

Key Features:

Advantages:

Pricing Options: Microsoft offers two main subscription plans:

Premium is designed for large organizations requiring comprehensive reporting, deployment, and management tools.

Best suited for extensive data connections through a wide range of data connectors (Pricing is quote-based).

Domo is a cloud-based business intelligence platform that transforms raw data into meaningful insights and interactive applications for entire organizations. It provides tailored solutions for different roles such as finance, CEO, marketing, IT, and sales, allowing teams to access the data they need most effectively.

It supports multiple data connectors, including Twitter, Google Sheets, Facebook, Zendesk, Excel, Salesforce, and more, making it flexible to integrate diverse data sources. The platform features an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface that empowers users without technical expertise to analyze data directly. Additionally, Domo can connect seamlessly to existing business databases, whether in the cloud, on-premise, or hybrid setups.

Furthermore, Domo offers built-in ETL tools and data pipelines for designing, visualizing, and managing data flows — helping users extract, transform, and load data effortlessly into the system, streamlining the entire data processing process.

Key features include a report scheduler that allows scheduling automatic report delivery to teams, an alert center that notifies users about important metrics and KPIs, and a comprehensive app store populated with pre-built applications and APIs for custom development. These tools help improve decision-making speed and accuracy.

Domo’s pros include mobile accessibility so data can be viewed anytime and anywhere, a powerful query engine for quick insights, customizable dashboards, task management workflows, natural language AI-driven chatbots, and the ability to upload large datasets or import from various sources like ODBC, XML, and Excel, all with just a click.

Pricing is tailored to each organization; potential users are encouraged to contact Domo’s sales team for a personalized quote. A free trial is available to explore its features before commit.

Best suited for large enterprises seeking advanced AI and machine learning features (Pricing varies on request). Oracle Analytics offers comprehensive data management, integration, alerting, reporting, and insights. It leverages embedded AI and ML to help analyze complex datasets, generate predictions, and support smarter decision-making processes. The platform enables users to perform scenario analysis and generate financial forecasts based on predictive modeling, providing a powerful toolkit for data-driven strategies. Its interactive dashboard supports intuitive exploration of insights and facilitates deep analytical capabilities for large organizations.Utilize organization-wide data, work collaboratively, and uncover insights from around the globe.

The business analytics platform is composed of four key sub-products:

Core Features:

Advantages:

Pricing: The official website does not specify prices, so you may need to contact the vendor for a customized quote. A free trial option is available for prospective users.

Ideal for data exploration and creating visual dashboards, with plans starting at $30 per month.

Qlik is a business intelligence and analytics platform that facilitates data modeling, dashboard creation, and multi-cloud data integration. It offers a comprehensive suite for deploying, designing, and managing data without requiring programming skills.

Qlik’s core functionalities include:

Additionally, QlikView adds data exploration with visually dynamic dashboards, making data understanding more accessible. The platform also offers on-demand webinars focused on AI and analytics, as well as options to optimize data pipelines.

Key Features:

Advantages of Qlik include seamless API integrations and comprehensive cloud data connectivity, along with strong security and compliance certifications. It monitors system usage and allows customization of analytics embedded into applications. The platform also offers personalized consulting, training, and extensive support options.

Pricing details are available upon contacting Qlik directly, with certain features and enterprise solutions tailored to your needs.

Both business plans offer features such as augmented analytics, self-service data creation, and interactive dashboards to enhance user experience.

There are also custom quote-based plans available for specialized data functions like data replication, warehouse automation, and catalog management.

Ideal for generating and analyzing reports ($15 per month). IBM Cognos, based in Ottawa, combines artificial intelligence with business intelligence tools, assisting users in preparing, analyzing, and reporting data.

It enables seamless data discovery with visual reports, aiding better decision-making. The mobile app allows you to monitor key metrics and access dashboards from any location. Additionally, you receive notifications about urgent issues directly on your phone.

Cognos supports dynamic visualizations like graphs, charts, and tables for comprehensive data monitoring. It automates data exploration, helps in report creation, and allows users to add or hide columns, perform calculations, and reorganize data structures.

Key features include:

Pros:

Pricing begins with a 30-day free trial. Following that, Cognos offers several subscription plans:

All plans come with core features like interactive dashboards, animated stories, and natural language data exploration.

Designed for mid-to-large organizations seeking customized reporting and data analysis (Quote-based). Dundas BI provides real-time, data-driven insights through comprehensive dashboards, reports, and visual analytics. Its main aim is to enable organizations to harness their data for informed, fact-based decisions.

This platform offers personalized consulting and training support throughout your data journey. Dundas also consolidates data from numerous sources, removing duplicates and irrelevant information for cleaner analysis. You can connect to various data sources like relational databases, web data, ODBC/JDBC connections, file-based data, and OLAP cubes.

Dundas BI is designed with HTML5 and offers fully open APIs, allowing you to tailor and extend its functionalities according to your needs. This flexibility enables you to personalize dashboards, labels, scoreboards, and overall design to match your specific requirements.

Some of its latest updates include features like:
– Enhanced chart zooming capabilities
– Direct connections to Microsoft Azure Table storage and Azure Cosmos DB
– The ability to restrict access to certain IP addresses and manage login permissions
– Automatic text size adjustment for better readability
– The option to install Dundas BI on Linux systems

Its standout features include:
– Slideshows that let you organize a sequence of dashboards or news updates
– Advanced chart options such as column, pie, curved line, and bar charts for effective data visualization
– A mobile-friendly experience that allows you to build, view, and share dashboards, reports, and scorecards from anywhere at any time

Advantages of Dundas BI:
– Supports sample and Excel data for testing and analysis
– Integrates seamlessly with various data sources
– Visualizes data through heatmaps for quick insights
– Features drag-and-drop tools for straightforward report customization
– Offers a live demo and free trial to explore its capabilities

Pricing for Dundas BI is based on quote requests, giving flexibility depending on your organizational needs.

What Are BI (Business Intelligence) Tools?
Business Intelligence (BI) software helps you analyze company data critically and generate actionable insights. It enables businesses to identify their strengths and weaknesses through data forecasting and trend analysis. BI tools facilitate data visualization, decision-making, and optimal resource deployment by connecting different data sets and presenting complex information in an easy-to-understand format. They aggregate data from multiple touchpoints, process it, and produce relevant reports, often leveraging big data and cloud technology to simplify complex analyses. In an era where up to 90% of online information is unstructured, having organized business data is crucial. BI also supports the integration of analytics practices across teams and can be deployed alongside legacy systems, ensuring broad applicability.

How Are BI Tools Different From Data Analytics Tools?
While Business Intelligence (BI) is a comprehensive term that includes data analytics and reporting features aimed at making decisions based on past data, data analytics specifically employs algorithms to discover relationships across various data sets. A key difference is that data analytics often offers predictive capabilities, helping forecast future trends, whereas BI primarily focuses on analyzing historical data to support decision-making.

Which Features Do You Need in BI Tools?
Selecting the right BI tool involves looking for critical features such as:
– Ranking Reports: To identify what strategies are effective and analyze performance across different dimensions, focusing on areas needing improvement.
– Executive Dashboards: Offering real-time insights through visual summaries, charts, and graphs for strategic overview.
– Interactive Reports: Simplify complex data sets for easy interpretation, helping to identify trends, outliers, and anomalies.
– Geospatial Mapping: Visualize data geographically with maps, aiding in understanding location-specific insights and making data accessible to non-technical stakeholders.
– Operational Reports: Essential for tracking daily activities and informing immediate decisions.Open Integration – Your Business Intelligence (BI) system should be capable of retrieving data from a wide variety of sources, including emails, websites, social media platforms, and more.

Although each BI platform offers different features and functionalities, their core processes are generally similar.

For demonstration purposes, I am using Microsoft Power BI to show how basic BI tools operate.

Step 1. Download and Install. To get started, visit the Power BI service website and download Power BI Desktop. Click on the Download button, then select ‘Power BI Desktop’. On the welcome screen, you’ll see three main options:

Once installed, the main window displays three options: Get Data, Recent sources, and Open other reports. On the left sidebar, there are three views—Report, Data, and Relationships—with Report being the default view. The Power Query Editor launches in a separate window when needed.

Step 2. Connect the Data. To link Power BI with multiple data sources, navigate to Get Data > More and choose from a list of options. If you want to connect to web data, select Get Data > Web. Just paste the URL of your desired webpage and click ‘OK’. Power BI will display the data tables, allowing you to make modifications before importing. Choosing Transform Data will launch the Power Query Editor for further shaping.

Step 3. Shape Data.If adjustments are needed, such as changing data types, select the relevant columns. To select multiple columns, hold the Shift key for adjacent columns or Ctrl for non-adjacent ones, then choose the appropriate data type from the dropdown menu next to Data Type in the Transform section.

For more detailed guidance, you can follow this step-by-step tutorial on getting started with Microsoft Power BI. These instructions will help you understand the core features of this powerful business intelligence tool.

Hope these steps clarify the basic functions of a BI tool like Power BI.

Making use of business intelligence reporting tools enables professionals to integrate data from multiple sources to enhance decision-making processes. This data can originate from internal systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), financial applications, and others. External data sources like market research reports, news articles, and demographic information can also be incorporated. Selecting the appropriate reporting tools allows data analysts to perform online analytical processing, which helps improve business performance and generate actionable insights for decision-makers. An ideal data analytics platform should combine comprehensive reporting features with the capability to connect seamlessly to various data sources.

In summary, these are my top picks for the best business intelligence tools to explore this year. As the big data analytics market is projected to reach over $103 billion by 2025, it’s crucial to start leveraging cloud-based data and advanced analytics techniques. The good news is that all these BI tools provide easy-to-install capabilities such as data augmentation, reporting, visualization, and more. Each tool offers unique advantages— for example, Domo and Microsoft Power BI excel in complex reporting suitable for large enterprises, while Looker is ideal for tracking customer behaviors and boosting sales in ecommerce businesses. Overall, my top recommendation is Sisense because of its user-friendly interface, scalability for large data volumes, and capabilities to develop and deploy customized analytics applications. Be sure to evaluate each platform’s core features, strengths, and limitations before making your final choice.

Which BI tool do you think fits your business needs best? Share your thoughts in the comments below. For additional insights, visit StepThroughThePortal.com to explore this list of top big data tools for better analytics in 2025.