9 Business Intelligence Tools You Need to Know

Key Takeaways

BI tools help businesses collect, process, and analyze data to make smarter decisions. Here are some important facts to know:

• Business intelligence tools perform functions such as data mining, data visualization, predictive analytics, and reporting across all departments, industries, and business users.

• BI tools can centralize data from numerous sources including CRM systems, ERP systems, and databases so that any employee, not just IT teams, can access and analyze it.

• You can strengthen your proficiency with BI tools through hands-on experience on the job or online courses and training.

In the following article, we'll take a look at nine of the most commonly used BI tools. Afterward, if you're interested in advancing your BI career, you might consider enrolling in IBM's Business Intelligence (BI) Analyst Professional Certificate.

What are business intelligence tools?

Business intelligence tools collect, process, and analyze large amounts of structured and unstructured data from both internal and external systems. Data sources might include documents, images, emails, videos, journals, books, social media posts, files, and more. BI tools find this information through queries, which can present the data in user-friendly formats such as reports, dashboards, charts, and graphs.

The tools can perform functions such as data mining, data visualization, performance management, analytics, reporting, text mining, predictive analytics, and much more. As a result, employees can harness this information to make better decisions based on predictions, market trends, and key performance indicators (KPIs).

Top 9 business intelligence tools

Today, there are dozens of BI tools available. To determine the top nine, these were some of the most commonly cited among the websites that ranked the best BI tools. These nine BI tools are not ranked in any particular order.

1. Microsoft Power BI

One of the most popular BI tools is Power BI, offered by leading software giant Microsoft. This tool is downloadable software, so you can choose to run analytics either on the cloud or in a reporting server. Syncing with sources such as Facebook, Oracle, and more, generate reports and dashboards in minutes with this interactive tool. It comes with built-in AI capabilities, Excel integration, and data connectors, and offers end-to-end data encryption and real-time access monitoring.

Learn Power BI on Coursera: Learn to use Power BI to connect to data sources, create visualizations, and build reports from Microsoft themselves in their Power BI Data Analyst Professional Certificate.

2. QlikSense

QlikSense is a BI tool that emphasizes a self-service approach, meaning that it supports a wide range of analytics use cases, from guided apps and dashboards to custom and embedded analytics. It offers a user-friendly interface optimized for touchscreens, sophisticated AI, and high-performance cloud platforms. Its associative exploration capability, Search & Conversational Analytics, allows users to ask questions and uncover actionable insights, which helps increase data literacy for those new to using BI tools.

3. Tableau

Tableau is known for its user-friendly data visualization capabilities, but it can do more than make pretty charts. Their offering includes live visual analytics, an interface that allows users to drag and drop buttons to spot trends in data quickly. The tool supports data sources such as Microsoft Excel, Box, PDF files, Google Analytics, and more. Its versatility extends to being able to connect with most databases.

Learn Tableau on Coursera: Gain the skills necessary to excel in an entry-level BI analytics role and learn to use Tableau Public in the Tableau Business Intelligence Analyst Professional Certificate.

4. Dundas BI

Dundas BI is a browser-based BI tool that’s been around for 25 years. Like Tableau, Dundas BI features a drag-and-drop function that allows users to analyze data on their own, without involving their IT team. The tool is known for its simplicity and flexibility through interactive dashboards, reports, and visual analytics. Since its inception as a data visualization tool in 1992, it has evolved into an end-to-end analytics platform that is able to compete with the new BI tools available today.

5. Sisense

Sisense is a user-friendly BI tool that focuses on being simplified and streamlined. With this tool, you can export data from sources like Google Analytics, Salesforce, and more. Its in-chip technology allows for faster data processing compared to other tools. Key features include the ability to embed white-label analytics, meaning a company can fully customize the services to its needs. Like others, it has a drag-and-drop feature. Sisense allows you to share reports and dashboards with your team members as well as externally.

6. Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft Copilot is a generative AI-powered productivity tool that can be integrated with Microsoft 365 apps—like Word and Excel—to accelerate productivity across an array of business uses. For example, you can use Copilot to help create a striking presentation in PowerPoint or analyze data in Excel. Features like Business Chat also work with your company's knowledge base to more easily surface information, so teams spend less time looking for the answers they need to keep moving. As AI becomes embedded in leading BI platforms, familiarity with AI-powered features is increasingly important for business intelligence professionals. Tools like Microsoft Copilot already integrate machine learning and generative AI to accelerate data analysis, forecasting, and reporting. Gaining proficiency in these capabilities can help you stay competitive in a data-driven workplace.

7. Oracle BI

Like Tableau, Oracle BI utilizes data visualization in an easy-to-use way that makes it suitable for new business intelligence software adopters. Many users also appreciate its flexible features for common business analytics purposes, such as mobile analytics, alerting, data integration, data warehousing, and financial performance management applications.

8. SAP Analytics Cloud

SAP Analytics Cloud incorporates artificial intelligence and machine learning models into a cloud-based platform that can be accessed anywhere. BI professionals can use SAP Analytics Cloud to understand historical data patterns while also forecasting future behaviors with augmented analytics.

9. Zoho Analytics

Zoho Analytics uses AI to integrate your data on its platform, making it easier to maintain than other products. A popular tool for BI professionals, Zoho Analytics connects and blends data from popular platforms like IBM Informix, Facebook Pages, and Microsoft Azure and prepares, analyzes, augments, and visualizes data, among other things. The platform offers cloud-based and on-premise BI solutions.

Other popular BI tools include: SAS Visual Analytics, Domo, Datapine, Yellowfin BI, Looker, SAP Business Objects, Clear Analytics, Board, MicroStrategy, IBM Cognos Analytics, Tibco Spotfire, BIRT, Intercom, Google Data Studio, and HubSpot.

Benefits of BI tools

BI tools can help your business take smart, agile steps toward accomplishing bigger goals. 

Centralized data: All of your data, in one place. Companies collect data from numerous databases, portals, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and more. To make sense of it all, you’ll need business intelligence tools to pool the data together and deliver certain types of views (issues, trends, analytics) based on your queries or what you want to know. 

Self-sufficiency: Data no longer just belongs to your company’s IT team. Now, any employee without technical expertise, even interns, can access and analyze data necessary for their respective teams. They can generate reports on all electronics sales in 2024 or visualize patient records to identify the number of flu cases in 2025.

Make predictions: With access to so much data from the past and present, employees can make evidence-based decisions. Predictive analytics and forecasting enable users to generate insights based on a product or service’s performance history. If a business condition changes, the intelligent tools can automatically figure out the anomalies and you’ll be able to react to disruptions as they arise. 

Automatic reports: Instead of inputting data manually into Excel spreadsheets or toggling between different tools, many BI tools are automated. If you need a report on a product over a specific period of time, the tool will generate that for you. If that information is significant and you want to add it to a presentation, you can create interactive visualizations and download any charts or graphs you may need. 

Reduces business costs: BI tools can do so much, from analyzing consumer behavior and sales forecasting to real-time process monitoring, that analyzing, planning, and reporting processes are more efficient and accurate than ever before.

Learn BI tools and how to use them for business intelligence with the Microsoft Business Analyst Professional Certificate program.

How to list BI tools on your resume

You can get familiar with one or more BI tools by learning independently or on the job. Many top companies use them, so you can benefit from listing the most common ones in the skills section of your resume if it makes sense for the role and industry in which you’re applying. Hiring managers may specifically keep an eye out for applicants who have experience with specific BI tools, especially if it is referenced in the job description.

Read more: How to List Certifications on Your Resume: Guide + Examples

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