Business Intelligence (BI) is a technology-driven process for analyzing data and presenting actionable information to help executives, managers and other corporate end users make informed business decisions.

Commonly, business intelligence is used to refer to the creation of reports, dashboards, and data visualizations to help organizations make data-driven decisions.

While Product Analytics can also be included under the umbrella of Business Intelligence, this term is most commonly used to refer to tools that help you visualise SQL data.

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Business Intelligence Tools

There are hundreds of BI tools available in the market today. Your choice of BI tool will depend on your specific needs and requirements.

Here are a few examples of categories of BI tools:

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Traditional Tools

Some of the most popular, classic examples of BI tools include:

  • Tableau
  • Power BI
  • Looker
  • Sisense

These tools are often more expensive and require a higher level of technical expertise to use. They’ve been around for a long time and have a lot of features. They are typically used by larger organisations.

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New and Upcoming Tools

Some examples of these tools include:

  • Lightdash
  • Preset
  • Holistics
  • Hex

These tools, while not as feature-rich as the traditional tools, are often more affordable and easier to use. Additionally, being newer, they are often more innovative and have a more modern user interface.

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Open Source Alternatives

There are also a number of open source BI tools available, including:

  • Metabase
  • Redash
  • Apache Superset
  • Grafana

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