You know there is one characteristic which differentiates best in class business leaders from the rest- it is their ability to find growth opportunities and trends before their competitors do. They focus on what’s upcoming in technology and how it can help their business now and in the future and so, they get the early-mover advantage.
Organizations today, generate and have an incredible amount of data at their fingertips, but getting insights from it and making those insights actionable is pretty much difficult with traditional Business Intelligence (BI) solutions that cannot aggregate and handle the huge data from disparate sources.
Smart organizations use data to quickly assess market conditions and outperform their competitors and for this, they use modern business intelligence and analytics tools. The best BI tools implemented following proper requirement evaluation, help an organization discover opportunities, predict and curb issues in the tracks.
BI tools that provide critical capabilities in below three categories can be counted among the best business intelligence tools:
- Analysis – Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)
- Information delivery – Reports and interactive dashboards
- Platform integration – BI metadata management and development environment.
Today, businesses need BI platforms which are more user-driven, offer visual and interactive dashboards, are characterized by easy-to-use tools, cloud-based deployment and provide support for all analytic workflow capabilities.
Top Business Intelligence tools 2018 comparison: Birst vs Domo vs Salesforce vs Sisense vs MicroStrategy
We had compared five analytics and business intelligence platforms in the first part of this two-post series blog. This is second and concluding part of the series where we have discussed other five business intelligence software vendors.
Read the first post here: Top 10 Modern Analytics and Business Intelligence platforms 2018: Microsoft vs Tableau vs Qlik vs IBM vs Oracle (Part-1)
Based upon Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms 2018, we discuss 5 more Business Intelligence and analytics platforms per their customer ratings and positions.
6. Birst
Positioned in the Niche Players quadrant, Birst is an enterprise business intelligence platform that is focused on ‘networked analytics’. It connects both centralized and decentralized groups through a network of virtual BI instances. Birst, the end to end cloud business intelligence platform delivers fast data discovery, self- service and agility, security and control at low TCO via public or private cloud deployment.
It supports everything from data preparation to dashboards to scheduled, formatted report distribution. Being a multitenant cloud-provider, Birst allows customers to access and merge multiple data sources while still providing governance.
- Domo
Placed in the top quartile of magic quadrant, the BI and analytics platform – Domo, is designed for those businesses who need intuitive business-facing dashboards and either less or no support from IT.
This is mostly used in decentralized use cases. Businesses prefer using it for ease-of-use capabilities, data access and integration, and its cloud deployment model. It has the ability to connect to enterprise applications and maintains the connectors in the form of API-like connectors that are capable of responding to the changes in source-side schemas.
8. Salesforce
Salesforce analytics portfolio includes basic operational reports and dashboards for Salesforce data, the Einstein Analytics Platform (which was formerly known as Wave), Einstein Analytics-based packaged applications and Einstein Discovery.
With the Einstein Analytics Platform, users can create interactive visualizations, dashboards and perform analysis for Salesforce and non-Salesforce data.
Whereas, Einstein Discovery is an augmented analytics platform which uses machine learning to generate insights and prepare data.
Thus, with Salesforce business analytics platform, businesses can easily find sales opportunities and take action on the customer data, without any need of building mathematical models, writing algorithms or seeking expert help.
Placed in the quadrant of visionaries, Salesforce is the leading vendor in augmented analytics, and is visually appealing and easy to use.
9. Sisense
Sisense provides agile business intelligence for everyone which includes data collection and data preparation, storage, visual data exploration, interactive dashboards and embedded advanced analytics features along with discovery of insights. This BI technology supports enhanced data ingestion, machine learning and mashup capabilities.
Sisense 7 is a browser-based BI Single-Stack™ Platform which provides easier-to-use, intuitive and centralized ElastiCube manager to help its users to navigate and manage data faster. With Sisense, users get unified, cloud-ready BI experience via a single interface.
According to Gartner, nearly 53% of Sisense’s reference customers leverage the product for the OEM and embedded use case which is highest of all vendors evaluated here.
- MicroStrategy
MicroStrategy business intelligence platform was shifted to the Challengers quadrant from Visionaries, due to its strong integrated product BI administration, architecture and security; data source connectivity; scalability and model complexity; metadata management; mobile and ease of use, visual appeal; and platform workflow integration.
It is preferred for its mobile BI capabilities and governed data discovery, interactive visual exploration and best-in-class enterprise reporting.
MicroStrategy 10 delivers agile yet governed enterprise deployment.
The tabular comparison of critical capabilities for Analytics and Business Intelligence platforms based on ratings from Gartner Peer Insights review
| Critical capabilities | Birst | Domo | Salesforce | Sisense | MicroStrategy |
| Product capabilities | 3.9 | 4.5 | 4.2 | 4.5 | 4.1 |
| Collaboration & Social BI | 3.1 | 4.5 | 4.3 | 3.9 | 3.6 |
| Analytics Dashboards | 4.2 | 4.6 | 4.6 | 4.7 | 4.2 |
| Self-Contained Extraction, Transformation & Loading (ETL) & Data Storage | 3.9 | 4.5 | 4 | 4.4 | 3.7 |
| Ease of use to deploy and administer | 3.6 | 4.5 | 4 | 4.4 | 3.9 |
| Cloud BI | 4.3 | 4.5 | 4.5 | 4.4 | 3.8 |
| Interactive Visual Exploration | 4.2 | 4.5 | 4.6 | 4.6 | 3.9 |
| Governance and Metadata Management | 3.5 | 4 | 3.8 | 4.1 | 3.9 |
| Embedding Analytic Content | 4.2 | 4.2 | 4.1 | 4.3 | 4 |
| Pricing Flexibility | 3.7 | 4.2 | 3.7 | 4.3 | 3.6 |
| Security and Use Administration | 3.6 | 4.4 | 4 | 4.4 | 4.1 |
| Self-Service Data Preparation | 3.5 | 4.4 | 3.8 | 4.3 | 3.8 |
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