Business analytics involves tasks you can’t do with standard analytics software, like documentation, requirements and project management. Searching for best-fit business analytics tools is challenging — you don’t want piecemeal solutions that cost more than they solve. One way to go is shortlisting integrated solutions, but you need to match them with your requirements and budget.

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In this article, you’ll find the business analytics definition, how it benefits organizations and a brief look at the market leaders.

What Are Business Analytics Tools?

Business analytics systems are platforms that support data analysis for operational and big-picture business planning. It includes statistical analysis, mathematical calculations and programming, but that’s not all. Documentation, project management, budgeting and financial planning are also important components.

Business analysts primarily work with pre-prepared data, but it isn’t always the case. If they don’t have sufficient data, they might need to query further, so technical skills are an asset.

For instance, the sales team needs to up their game if sales are down. But why did it happen, and what can you do about it? You might need to allocate a budget for loyalty programs or offer discounts without impacting your bottom line.

It’s what business analytics is all about. It requires more than looking at the sales figures. Assessing requirements, building prototypes, creating predictive models and documenting what the solution will look like is part of it.

Mordor Intelligence predicts the business analytics market will grow to $103.65 billion by 2026, thanks to the demand for faster insight and proactive decision-making to stay competitive.

Read our trends article to know what the future holds.

Business analytics platforms can include the following software.

• Spreadsheet solutions like Excel and Google Sheets.
• Wireframing and diagramming tools like Microsoft Visio, Balsamiq and Lucidcharts.
• Model-building systems like Pencil and InVision.
• Documentation platforms like Microsoft Word.
• Marketing software like HubSpot and Marketo.
• Project management tools like Wrike and Jira.
• ERP software like Oracle Reports and ActiveReports.

The business analytics vs. data analytics overlap can be confusing. Both are means to the same end, but they differ in scope.

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Primary Benefits

Business analytic tools help unlock the information necessary to improve productivity, enhance customer experience and boost profit. Data-backed insight gives you confidence in top-level decisions, motivating you to put in the effort.

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Boost Revenue

Keeping track of your business operations is a great way to build on your wins and cut your losses. Reporting is a great way to monitor performance, and alerts are another. These are standard capabilities you’ll find in business analytics software.

But that’s just half the battle won. Connecting them to everyday operations and the bigger business picture is where business analytics proves invaluable.

Analyzing the statistics, building models based on this data and manipulating the variables to see what the future holds gives you control over your business. With this knowledge, you can focus on potential improvement areas and identify successful initiatives to emulate.

Such a visible push for improvement has a ripple effect — people get motivated to perform better. Everyone wins.

Get Decision Support

Where business intelligence (BI) limits itself to reporting metrics, business analytics solutions support many statistical functions and data exploration techniques. Independent analysis with text searches and intuitive visuals go a long way in conveying accurate information to stakeholders.

Which campaigns paid off? Which ones fell flat? How’s your business doing compared to others? You can answer all these and more questions.

Gain Business Overview

Business analytics is where it all comes together. It includes customer insight from customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, marketing and retail systems, and point-of-sale (POS) systems. It combines this information with operational data from enterprise resource platforms (ERPs), supply chain management (SCM), and inventory and warehouse management systems.

Business analytics software helps make sense of how it’s all connected.

You can fine-tune your business roadmap with a clear view of how customer data impacts your operations, which in turn affects business. Is the company following the roadmap? Or did it get derailed due to external factors like the recent COVID-19 pandemic? How? And what can you do about it?

Business analytics helps fill in the gaps.

Improve Customer Service

Customer insight is gold. When you know what your buyers want, you can align your sales strategy accordingly and stay on top of market trends. What’s selling? What’s not? Why? Why not? When is the best time to push a low-selling product?

Which product(s) can you bundle with your top-selling items to make the offerings more attractive? Which customers are likely to buy? Besides their browsing and purchase history, you also need reasons for customer attrition. Why did they abandon the cart?

Data analysis provides this insight, which is only sometimes in number format. It includes non-numeric data like physical store videos showing buyers’ routes and the products they picked up and put back. Qualitative data analysis software extracts behavioral insight from camera images, videos, customer chats and chatbot data.

This goldmine of insight helps vendors improve the customer experience.

Does Your Team Need It?

How will you know if your team needs a business analytics solution?

• You need to understand how your business performs.
• You wish to understand data results.
• You want to identify potential risks and blockers ahead of time.
• You don’t want to miss lucrative opportunities.
• You want to know the impact of business decisions before implementing them.

Read our business analytics implementation planning guide to understand what it entails.

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BI vs. Business Analytics

BI is the set of technologies, practices and tools for gathering business intelligence. Spreadsheet software, data mining solutions, reporting software and dashboard tools are some examples.

Business analytics analyzes historical and existing data for business operations and future planning. It includes data mining, aggregation, visualization, predictive analytics and forecasting.

BI is reporting-centric, while business analytics offers decision support by deep-diving into data. Business analytics builds off business intelligence — your company’s performance data and market trends drive business insight to help develop a realistic roadmap.

Read our BI vs. Business Analytics article to learn how the two compare. It has an easy-on-the-eyes comparison table which you might find handy, so go check it out.

Types of Analytics

When you talk about descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive analytics, you’re talking about business analytics.

Descriptive analytics assesses business performance using metrics in reports, dashboards and visualizations. Viewing your metrics in tables and reports helps you plan by identifying existing trends.

Diagnostic analytics analyzes data to determine why the business performs the way it does. It helps answer questions you can’t solve at first glance since you need to dig deeper to find them. It’s an inherent part of prescriptive analytics and is often not considered a separate type.

Predictive analytics is forecasting the probability of a future event, such as an increase in product demand, customer attrition, loan defaults, stock market fluctuations and fraud. You’re better prepared when you know what’s likely to happen. It’s the most in-demand module for software buyers.

Regression, classification, forecasting, K-Nearest-Neighbor, random forest and neural networks are some predictive analytics techniques.

Prescriptive analytics suggests possible courses of action after applying mathematical and computational operators and functions to business data. Linear and non-linear programming, integer programming, goal programming, combinatorial optimization and meta-heuristics are some techniques.

Prescriptive insight helps address business issues like product mix, marketing mix, traveling salesman problem, vehicle routing, workforce planning, capital budgeting, transportation and capacity management. It’s why business analytics platforms that support prescriptive analytics are in demand.

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Best Business Analytics Tools

Business analytical tools bridge the gap between historical data and business planning. Creating a requirements checklist becomes easier by gaining information about leading products from the same category. According to the SelectHub research team, these are today’s best business analytic tools.

Power BI

Power BI works with Azure services to drive business intelligence and analytics by connecting to on-premise and cloud sources like connected devices, sensors, social media feeds, clickstreams and log files. DirectQuery and R scripting lets you extract the necessary data. Its PowerPivot module lets you establish dataset connections and create calculations and data models from your business metrics.

A financial dashboard in Power BI. Source

Top Benefits

• Query Code-Free: Cleanse, prepare and visualize metrics with R programming language and PowerQuery. Predict business trends by grouping similar data points with the Microsoft clustering algorithms. Create and share reports with others, even if they don’t have R installed.
• View Live Dashboards: Get real-time input from factory sensors, social media, and service usage recorders. The system collects statistics from streaming services like Azure Event Hub, PubNub, Temboo, and more.
• Establish Data Associations: Machine learning (ML) algorithms enable visual segmentation and cohort analysis by breaking down datasets to extract and combine similar subsets.
• Enhance Software Offerings: Save resources on building and maintaining an analytics solution from scratch. Give your buyers an at-home feel by providing client-facing reports, dashboards and analytics within your application with white-labeling.

Key Features

• Visual Analytics: Add custom visuals to your dashboards and display the metrics in various visualizations by choosing from the community gallery. Transform your visual perspective from thought into reality — build custom visualizations with R scripting.
• DAX: Derive helpful data results using DAX for modeling your business data. Data Analysis Expressions is a set of functions, operators and constants in a formula used to calculate and return one or more values.
• Data Categorization: Streamline data exploration by grouping related data categories. Saved categories apply to newer data automatically. The platform recognizes records between specific dates or numbers and allows you to group them by range.
• AutoML: Generate performance reports directly in Power BI by training automated machine learning models. Save time and manual effort with automatic data cataloging, metadata generation and data enrichment.

Limitations

• Doesn’t support predictive modeling markup language (PMML).
• Doesn’t offer automated anomaly alerting.

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Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC)

OAC is a suite of pre-built analytics applications that include the generic analytics suite and the Fusion suite. The primary platform supports end-to-end data management and analytics, while Fusion provides integrated analytics with CX (customer experience), ERP, human capital management (HCM) and SCM modules.

With support from Oracle’s native multidimensional analysis engine, Oracle Essbase, predictive modeling and forecasting are available.

A database dashboard in Oracle shows session, disk and buffer activity. Source

Top Benefits

• Get Integrated Analytics: View all metrics on a single, unified interface with more than 1000 pre-built best-practice KPIs, metrics and dashboards.
• Gain Executive Buy-in: Build engaging visual stories with natural language generation and more than 45 pre-built visualizations. These include the waterfall bridge report, spark chart, heat maps and custom image maps. Automated visualization recommendations help you get set up in no time.
• Keep Data Secure: Restrict data views to specific users by assigning role-based access permissions. The platform enables SSO across applications by integrating with federated identity management systems.
• Deploy Flexibly: Choose to deploy on a public or private cloud or on-premises. Standard and Enterprise editions are available, with a flexible pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Key Features

• Augmented Data Prep: Get a comprehensive business picture by enriching data with machine learning insight. Learn about more than 20 data enrichment types in its knowledge base.
• Semantic Layer: Query multiple data sources with a single SQL query using a central interface with its semantic layer working at the back end, and get search and visualization recommendations. Analyze user expressions grammatically and semantically, instead of matching keywords, with Oracle’s virtual assistant.
• Smart Data Discovery: Get answers quicker. Do away with SQL queries — use text and voice searches instead. Add explanatory text or visuals to the dashboard using the tool’s Explain module.
• Mobile Analytics: Give your users a consistent experience — allow them to switch between desktops, laptops and mobile devices with a unified homepage. Upload datasets from the mobile app and see the changes reflected in the web view. Listen to audio reports and dashboard highlights on your mobile device.

Limitations

• Doesn’t provide automated anomaly alerting.
• Doesn’t support reverse geocoding.
• Doesn’t integrate with Mapbox and Bing Maps.

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MicroStrategy

MicroStrategy supports business analytics with advanced statistical algorithms and techniques like classification, regression and clustering. It lets you aggregate data from on-premise and cloud warehouses, other BI and analytics systems, and ERP, CRM and web applications. Automatic prep profiles the data to offer context-aware recommendations for data transformations — no need to export the data to a spreadsheet.

A customer accounts list in the sales dashboard in MicroStrategy.

Top Benefits

• Acquire Business Insights: Obtain a clear picture of your organization – uncover what works and what doesn’t with machine learning insight. Make informed business decisions in time to stay ahead of market trends.
• Improve Performance: Boost productivity by speeding up data pipelines with faster responses to data queries. The platform optimizes resource usage with workload balancing.
• Scale With the Business: Scale from supporting small teams to thousands of users. The platform can handle massive data sets without impacting processing power and response times.
• Embed Analytics: Infuse business intelligence and analytics into your business application with its embedding API. Automate processes by deploying triggers that set off workflows when users perform specific transactions. Provide better customer service with personalized information about customers with a click.
• Try It Free: The vendor offers a free 30-day full platform trial.

Key Features

• Predictive Analytics: Gain future insight with its rich analytical functions and scoring algorithms library. Connect to data mining tools and statistical analytics products with an out-of-the-box software development kit.
• Federated Analytics: Make existing analytics tools — Tableau, Power BI, Qlik and spreadsheets — work with MicroStrategy. The tool excels at blending information from multiple sources, many of which are BI and reporting platforms.
• Zero-click Insight: Save time searching for information — get insight where you need it. HyperIntelligence gives information upon a search term on hovering over it. Available as a Chrome extension, it integrates with websites, applications, Excel, email inboxes, Slack and more and is unique to MicroStrategy.
• OLAP Services: Store input in intelligent cubes and retrieve, explore and manipulate this information using pivoting, sorting and subtotals. Display metrics on the fly by filtering the datasets on attributes.

Limitations

• Doesn’t support edge analytics.
• Doesn’t support augmented data prep, automated algorithm selection or anomaly alerting.

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Spotfire

Spotfire is a BI and analytics platform that supports business reporting by capturing real-time input. The solution supports streaming analytics by pulling information from Internet of Things (IoT) devices, chatbots, social media and web-based content. Though it provides advanced analytics out of the box, native PMML support isn’t available.

Brand sales per region shown in a donut dashboard in TIBCO Spotfire.

Top Benefits

• Drive Revenue: Reduce costs by presenting the correct information to the right people at the right time. Analyze events in context, mashing up metrics at rest and in motion. Access live sources, analyze processes and get alerts for opportunities and issues using predictive analytics.
• Enhance the Customer Experience: Give your teams and clients a consistent user experience by embedding metrics and links into websites or integrating the tool with other web applications. Establish your brand identity by personalizing the dashboards with the company logo, themes and colors.
• Obtain Mobile insight: View essential metrics on any mobile device or PC when you need them. Drive decision-making with deep-dive filtering and collaboration through comments and messaging.
• Access Community Support: Upskill with vendor-provided e-learning courses, wiki entries and free-to-use community-contributed dashboards.

Key Features

• Forecasting: Arm yourself with predictive capabilities through TIBCO’s statistical engine, TIBCO Enterprise Runtime for R Engine (TERR). Save time by reusing tried and tested code — no need to build new code and test it every time.
• Embeddability: Embed visualizations and dashboards into web pages or open a Spotfire analysis from a link. Create mashups with multiple interlinked views of the same analysis. Spotfire connects to external web applications with a Javascript API at the backend.
• Location Analytics: By blending geographical information with business data, you get the complete picture. Geocoding and multilayered maps are available out of the box.
• IoT Analytics: The tool supports IoT and edge analytics with more than 80 native connectivity options to IoT, MQTT, OSI PI, capital market data providers and message buses like Kafka.

Limitations

• Doesn’t support augmented data prep.
• Doesn’t support automated anomaly alerting.

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Qlik Sense

Qlik Sense is a self-service business analytic software for insight into internal operations, workflows and your bottom line. Besides app-building, it supports table and chart customization from the front end without additional development. Its associative engine indexes all possible data relationships, so you don’t miss anything.

The vendor offers a 30-day free trial of its Business edition. The desktop version is free for personal use.

Explore your data with the Insight Advisor in Qlik Sense.

Top Benefits

• Stay Competitive: Get performance insight and monitor market trends by tracking industry metrics. Support resource optimization with hardcore numbers.
• Gain Smart Insight: Understand how your business performs and support strategy-building by blending customer intelligence with domain insight. Get contextual recommendations to guide your searches and visualization-building.
• Build Trust: Ensure data integrity and quality by keeping it safe from malicious intent and inadvertent tampering with data encryption and auditing. Row and column-level permissions restrict access to only the relevant insight.
• Use Value-added Products: Get conversational analytics, data indexing and location-based analytics with Qlik NPrinting, Qlik Big Data Index, Qlik Insight Bot, Qlik DataMarket and Qlik GeoAnalytics.

Key Features

• Multiple Sources: software interfaces with Microsoft, Google, AWS, Snowflake, Salesforce and SAP applications. Other repositories include common databases, warehouses, web applications, spreadsheets, static files and cloud systems.
• Web Connectors: Don’t miss any social media insight – put a search term on Twitter and pull in all text containing that string. Or collect stats on likes, shares and comments for your Facebook posts and YouTube videos.
• Forecasting: Build predictive models on the strength of its integration with the KNIME Analytics Platform and R and Vizlib Line Chart plug-ins.
• Data Replication: Stream data fast by creating copies of on-premise and cloud-based databases. Working with the Qlik Data Integration platform, the tool draws information from mainframes, SAP systems and other data repositories, delivering it to streaming systems, data warehouses, and lakes.

Limitations

• Doesn’t provide geocoding, geospatial functions and spatial file support natively.
• Doesn’t provide time-series analysis out of the box.
• Doesn’t support automatic algorithm selection and model tuning.

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How We Choose Products

Our team of writers and analysts at SelectHub is committed to giving you the best recommendations based on our data. To make our list, products had to meet two criteria:

1. Closely match the topic
2. Earn a top-5 analyst score in our selection platform

Our analyst scores are based on an in-depth research process using primary and secondary sources. This includes SelectHub Analyst Briefings, direct communication with vendors, and reviewing materials such as user reviews, product brochures, specification sheets, case studies, user manuals, and technical documentation.

Our platform’s Scoring Engine processes the research and computes the analyst score. The score also factors in platform settings such as industry and company size.

Learn more about our research methodology and editorial standards

Next Steps

Many vendors refer to their software as business analytics platforms. Still, the tool might offer only one or a couple of analytics capabilities, so it’s better to do your due diligence when choosing business analytic software.

This interactive requirements template can help you identify the must-have and nice-to-have features you want in a business analytical tool. Head to our comparison guide to see how the different business analytics tools rank based on your specific requirements.

Wrapping Up

Self-service, machine learning and AI-driven automation support proactive business analytics. Trends like secure data sharing across domains and IoT-enabled prescriptive analytics enrich business insight, allowing you to take advantage of available opportunities.

Do you agree with our list of top business analytics tools? Which tools would you include and why? Let us know in the comments!