The Buyer’s Guide to

Business Intelligence (BI)

Software
2019 edition

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Table of Contents
Why Read This Guide? 3
About TrustRadius 4
Why BI Matters 5
Trends in BI 8
Buying Insights from BI Software Users 12
Spotlight on 10 Leading BI Products 16
Product Comparison Tables 18
Qlik Sense 20
TIBCO Spotfire 21
Alteryx Platform 22
Tableau Desktop & Server 23
Microsoft Power BI 24
Birst 25
TIBCO Jaspersoft 26
Sisense 27
Domo 28
Looker 29
Why Read This Guide?
Business Intelligence (BI) is designed to make sense of the vast
quantities of data that corporations generate to help make informed
decisions and increase profitability. BI platforms include a wide
variety of tools that assist organizations in collecting data from
a broad range of internal and external sources.

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These platforms can then prepare that data for analysis, run
queries, create reports, dashboards, and data visualizations.
Many tools also enable data analysts and scientists to explore
data sets to discover outliers or data patterns that provide
Improving revenues
valuable insight into a company’s operations or strategy. This using BI is now
is a crowded space with a broad range of vendors offering the most popular
products that superficially seem similar. But different products
have different strengths and weaknesses. This guide is designed objective pursued by
to cut through the marketing hype and help buyers choose a enterprises in 2019.
product that meets their specific needs.
The primary goal of this guide is to help you differentiate between 10 BI products, and find
the one that will serve your business needs best.
This guide is based on detailed information from over 4,500 reviews and ratings published
on TrustRadius. Each review and rating has been individually vetted by a TrustRadius researcher
to ensure we’re providing authentic feedback from real users of the software. Along with
detailed reviewer feedback and survey responses, this guide is informed by interviews with
domain experts and vendors. We also collected 178 survey responses from end-users about
the buying process.
In the guide, readers will find:
> BI technology trends and what they mean for buyers.
> Buying insights from BI users.
> At-a-glance summaries of 10 BI products highlighting reviewer demographics, pros and
cons, and end-user feedback.
About TrustRadius
TrustRadius is the most-trusted review site for business
technology, bringing transparency to the $3.7 trillion
B2B market. We help buyers make confident decisions
with in-depth reviews and ratings from real software users.
Every reviewer on TrustRadius is authenticated and every
review vetted by our Research Team before publication. We
also help vendors engage and convert buyers by putting
their customer’s voice to work, authentically and at scale.
200,000 reviews Headquartered in Austin, TX, TrustRadius was founded by
from 100% successful entrepreneurs and is backed by the Mayfield
Fund and LiveOak Venture Partners.
verified users
To learn more, visit www.trustradius.com.
©2019 TrustRadius. All rights reserved. Reproduction or sharing of this publication in any form without TrustRadius’ prior written permission is strictly prohibited.
For information on reprints, please contact marketing@trustradius.com. TrustRadius is a trademark of T-Radius Holdings, Inc. All other trademarks are
the property of their respective owners. The information contained in this publication has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. TrustRadius
disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information and shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies
in such information. This publication consists of the opinions of TrustRadius’ research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. The
opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice.
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Why BI Matters
Enterprises are drowning in data. The sheer volume of data about
customers, suppliers, products, and business partners has never
been so extensive and yet so crucially important. BI tools matter
precisely because they promise to make sense of the tsunami of
data and uncover the insights within that are vital to winning in the
marketplace. The development of BI technology has largely been
focused on fulfilling that elusive goal.

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 The Evolution of BI
The first generation of BI technology was largely managed
by the IT department as the central guardian of all enterprise
data. Data was housed in a common store called a data
Most companies warehouse. Here, it was normalized—removing redundancy
and duplication - to make it easier to run queries and retrieve
only analyze 12% of data for reporting. IT staff would run queries on behalf of
the data they have.1 business users who did not necessarily have expertise in
query languages.
Ultimately, the IT organization would deliver the static report to the business owner. The entire
process could take days or even weeks due to dependence on skilled IT staff. In addition, answers
provided often provoked additional questions which had to go through the same inefficient process.
The drawbacks of this approach were severe enough that it was gradually eclipsed by a more
agile approach that favored self-service capabilities. A new set of BI products emerged which
eliminated the technical stack designed for IT users and focused on providing data discovery
and visualization tools to business users. Business users were empowered to use BI tools to get
their own data, even without advanced technical skills. The focus of these tools is to provide
business analysts the ability to conduct ad-hoc analysis of multiple data sources. These tools
provide data analysts with an intuitive way to sift through large volumes of disparate data to
expose hidden patterns and outliers. They replace the traditional rows and columns of traditional
data presentations with graphical pictures and charts.
The emergence of data discovery and visualization tools, and the emancipation of business analysts
from old-school Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) processes and data modeling, was highly successful.
This revolution democratized data and greatly accelerated the speed of data analysis to help
companies make data-driven decisions in competitive environments. As a result, IT-centric BI
vendors quickly started to build these data discovery and visualization capabilities into their
product portfolios. Conversely, data discovery and visualization vendors were quickly pushed
by customers to provide enterprise licensing and features, like data governance, security, data
preparation and even report generation.
As data sets become increasingly large, capabilities like data
preparation require users with some technical skills to make The term augmented
sense of potentially huge datasets generated by, for example, analytics is was coined
IoT devices. After all, data preparation and integration were
typically handled by IT specialists as part of the ETL process. by Gartner in 2017 to
This, along with a shortage of data scientists with advanced describe the use of
analytics skills, resulted in an evolution of the self-service
approach towards automation. This evolution is referred machine learning
to as Augmented Analytics. to enhance data
analytics and BI.
Exciting facts and findings about Big Data you should know
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Business Intelligence Trends
BI tools have evolved from pixel-perfect reporting engines to analytics platforms powered by
powerful artificial intelligence technology.
Traditional BI Augmented Analytics
> Owned and managed by IT > Business users don’t require IT assistance
to define data models
> No business user autonomy over
performing data analysis > Data preparation and analysis aided by
artificial intelligence
> Limited self-service capabilities
> Ease-of-use greatly increased by AI
> Focus on reporting and KPIs automation

Self-service BI > Data correlation and insights automatically

generated to drive decision-making
> Business user-driven
> Some data analysis autonomy for
business users
> Focus on ease-of use for benefit of broad
non-technical user base
> User-driven insights to aid business
decision-making

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Trends in BI
In order to understand buying trends in this market, we talked to
several experts, analyzed review content, conducted research, and
surveyed BI software buyers. This section uncovers the main market
technology trends likely to influence buyer behavior. These include:
augmented analytics, and the automation of processes to simplify
product usage, embedded analytics, and big data and IoT.

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Augmented Analytics
The term Augmented Analytics was introduced by Gartner
in 2017 to denote the use of machine learning and natural
language processing to automate insights into datasets Global augmented
generated by analytics and BI tools. It’s helpful to clearly
understand the problem that this approach is trying to solve. analytics market
The hard truth is that using BI tools to provide actionable was valued at
insight into the business is difficult.
$ 1.6 billion in 2018
The scale and complexity of corporate data has become more
than humans can handle. Therefore, machine learning and AI and is forecast to
are helping to automate data analysis. BI tools begin by gathering grow at a CAGR
data from multiple different sources. The next step is to remove
duplicates and bad data, normalizing the data so that it can be
of over 39% to cross
effectively analyzed. The result of this analysis is actionable $ 11 billion by 2024.1
insight into the business.
Data analysts and scientists spend a large portion of their time working on data preparation tasks,
cleaning large data sets, and preparing them for analysis. This is not easy to do, and data analysts and
scientists are scarce. Augmented analytics removes some of the dependence on data scientists by
using machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms to automate tasks like data preparation.
Today, many well-known BI platforms have built-in capabilities to automate data preparation and detect
some correlations and anomalies in large data sets. Some platforms are capable of analysis and even
isight generation and action plan generation, but there is still a long way to go.
Tip for Buyers
While the traditional BI focus on reports and dashboards is not going away any time soon, companies
should start looking at vendor capabilities in the area of augmented analytics. Most BI vendors
are building augmented analytics into their platforms, but it is easy to get swept up in the hype.
For this reason, it’s important to include analysts and data scientists in the product selection
or validation process to help verify vendor claims and ask the right questions.
Begin with the BI investments you have already made. Talk to your vendors about their roadmaps
to understand their approach to incorporating augmented analytics and timing. It is also a good
idea to look at newer, more innovative vendors to see if switching platforms to benefit from
faster access to these capabilities makes sense.

Global Augmented Analytics Market by Deployment, Organization Size, End-user, and Region—ResearchAndMarkets.com
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 Embedded Analytics
Embedded analytics is the integration of BI capabilities directly
into a business application or portal. The idea is to provide
analytics that are contextual. In other words, analytics tools
are available directly within whatever business application
is being used at a given moment an ERP system, or a marketing
IoT devices alone automation tool.
are projected to Reports, dashboards, and data visualizations are part of the
balloon to around daily workflow of business users. This means that the people
who most need data insights—those making decisions—
75 billion devices have immediate access to analytics tools without leaving
by 2025.1 the application they are working in. Analytics are delivered
in context of an application that someone uses every day.

Tip for Buyers

Embedded BI is becoming the predominant model in the BI space and many vendors offer an
embedded version of their product. But buying a standalone product and an embedded analytics
solution are quite different. These are different use cases with different buyers and buyer concerns.
It is of paramount importance that embedded solutions should be flexible and easy to use
for non-technical users. After all, the users of these systems may have limited skills in the
data analytics.
Furthermore, the ease of embedding into the host application is an important criterion. Ask
vendors to explain in detail how the embedding process works, and how exactly the BI capabilities
co-exist within the host application. It is important to have your technical staff understand how
open the product is. Products should provide both a software developer’s kit (SDK) and support
for open standards, so that the capabilities of the product can be extended if required.

IoT Statistics: Number of Enabled Devices & Growth.

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Big Data and the Internet of Things (IoT)
Most large companies are trying to figure out how to harness
IoT devices alone
the terabytes of unstructured data, like streaming data, video are projected to
data, machine data, etc., to improve business decision-making balloon to around
and business outcomes. Business data is no longer only collected
from operational and transactional internal systems, but from 75 billion devices
physical devices like IoT sensors and machines, and from by 2025.1
human sources like social media, image designers, etc.
The relational data warehouse was designed for highly-structured data stored in tables. It cannot
comprehend this kind of unstructured data, or this volume of data. Hence, the rapid ascension of
Hadoop and so-called data lakes, or vast repositories of raw data stored in its native format until needed.
This used to be the province of highly-trained data scientists, but the focus today is on democratizing
this data so that business users have access. These business users need the ability to integrate data
from multiple sources. Data in Hadoop repositories, but also data warehouses, databases, and spreadsheets
must be available to users a single analytics layer. In other words, analytics tools should be capable
of desegregating and connecting siloed data so it can be managed from a single place.
It’s important to understand the IoT data is not the same as Big Data. While Big Data is crucial for
organizational decision-making, there is usually a lag between data collection and data analysis. IoT
data is different. Data is collected in real-time to detect security breaches, correct malfunctioning
equipment, and more. IoT data analytics therefore depend on managing real-time streaming data.
Big Data and IoT processing usually require specialized applications that are beyond the purview of
standard BI capabilities. For example:
> Data Lakes: These are unstructured data stores, often created using data from the open-source Hadoop ecosystem
> NoSQL databases: Used for storing large volumes of rapidly changing data, or unstructured data
that is not a good fit for a relational database
> Predictive Analytics: Applications that can determine the likelihood of future scenarios
> In-Memory Database: Very fast data stores for analyzing time-sensitive or streaming data (like IoT data)
> Streaming Analytics: Tools for analyzing rapidly-changing data, like social media data, in real time
Tip for Buyers
Integration to Big Data and IoT technologies is crucial to creating the single analytics layer in BI tools. BI
tools should be able to access data from multiple different technologies, and integrate that data so that a
common set of data is available for analysis at the point of decision. Ask vendors about how this works in
practice. Some key questions:
> Does the vendor have pre-built connectors to these key technologies?
> Does the vendor offer a high-performance in-memory data engine to help users analyze data faster?
> What kind of data ingestion and data preparation tools are available for preparing data for analysis? Are
these data preparation tools proprietary and built into the products, or does the vendor partner with data
preparation specialists to provide this important capability?
IoT Statistics: Number of Enabled Devices & Growth.
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Buying Insights from
BI Software Users
A survey of BI users on TrustRadius provides data on overall user
priorities, use of AI and machine learning technologies, and the
extent to which DataOps best practices are being used to encourage
data specialists and business users work together more effectively.

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BI User Priorities
BI users’ top analytics priorities make up a fairly heterogeneous
list of initiatives. Nevertheless, two themes recur frequently: 80% of respondents
Data Governance
indicate that BI tool
One frequently mentioned theme is an increased focus on
data governance. As data discovery and visualization tools usage has shifted
have become common, the problem of centralized governance to business users.
is an inevitable concern. A common scenario is that multiple
groups within an organization purchase more and more seats for their own instance of a data
discovery and visualization tool. This inevitably leads to calls for enterprise licenses and, once a
product becomes a standard offering deployed across the enterprise, the IT organization is inevitably
involved again to ensure that corporate data is consistent and trustworthy. Over 65% of survey
respondents indicated that data management/data governance is either currently in place or
planned for the near future.
Data Democratization
About 10% of BI priorities fit into the bucket of evangelizing the importance of data for driving
the decision-making process across the organization. The overall goal is to extend the internal
BI user base to a much larger number of employees.
When asked whether IT or business users are the primary users of BI tools in the organization,
19% of survey respondents indicate that IT is still in the driver’s seat. A healthy 80% of respondents,
however, indicate that usage has shifted to business users. These business users do include
employees with advanced analytics skills, even if they exercise those skills within business
functions like marketing and sales. Total self-service by unskilled business users is probably still
an aspiration rather than reality.
There is a strong desire for tools that are simple enough that business users can leverage them
to make data-driven decisions. Here’s what survey respondents said about their BI data
democratization priorities:

Give our users the data they need to Broader adoption of analytics within the
make better business decisions. organization.

Get more users actively using BI.
Sell more employees on the value of
analytics for our organization.
Engage people across organization to
use [our BI tool] more frequently to
analyse their activities.

IoT Statistics: Number of Enabled Devices & Growth.

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Reviewers of BI tools on TrustRadius show a bit of a different breakdown. About half (51%) of the
reviews and ratings of BI products featured in this guide are contributed by business users, and the
other half (49%) are contributed by technical users (those in IT or Engineering departments). There is
a great deal of variance by product, however, indicating that some products may be better suited for the
business-user use case:

Percentage of Business Users vs Technical Users

Business User % Technical User %

Domo 73% 27%

Alteryx Platform 71% 29%

Looker 64% 36%

Tableau Desktop 55% 45%

Microsoft 48% 52%

Power BI

TIBCO
Spotfire 47% 53%

Birst 44% 56%

Sisense 43% 57%

Qlik Sense 40% 60%

Tableau Server 39% 61%

TIBCO
Jaspersoft 33% 67%

Based on reviewer department: IT and Engineering vs all others.

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AI and Machine Learning
Almost 70% of respondents have already deployed AI or
machine learning capabilities as part of their analytics tool
set. Some firms are testing the waters with small-scale test
projects. Typical use cases where respondents are deploying Almost 70% of
this technology today include:
respondents have
> real-time forecasting/predictive analytics
> automatically detecting data anomalies as part of the data
already deployed
preparation stage AI or machine
> identifying patterns in very large data sets learning capabilities
> making automated decisions with limited human interaction as part of their
> fraud detection analytics tool set.
> natural language processing
DataOps
DataOps is an emerging approach to managing data across the enterprise and is used by just
over 20% of survey respondents. DevOps is a set of best practices that allows companies to
reduce their software release cycle time through continuous delivery and integration. DataOps
is inspired by the DevOps agile movement, and the goal is to reduce the end-to-end cycle time
of data analytics from ideation to creation of charts and visualizations that create value.
Essentially, DataOps introduces agile methodologies into data analytics so that data specialists
and business users work together more effectively to solve big data challenges. Based on the
sheer number of articles in the technical press on this topic, we can expect increasing adoption
of this approach to managing data across the enterprise.

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Spotlight on 10 Leading BI Tools
This guide aims to give you a snapshot of 10 of the most reviewed
BI products on TrustRadius. An exhaustive list of platforms can be
found on the BI category on our website. The product profiles in this
report showcase aggregate data from reviews collected on TrustRadius,
including the most commonly listed pros and cons, exemplary
quotes from reviewers, and customer demographic information.

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 BI technology has been in existence for over 30 years and
has seen several technology shifts as the focus has shifted
from IT users to business users. The market is still vast
and growing. Market Watch predicts that the global BI
market is projected to reach close to USD 150 billion by
57% of buyers 2025, and is growing at a CAGR of almost 30%. This is
evaluating BI a very crowded and fast growing market with a broad range
of products available that are not always clearly differentiated
products on one from another. Almost all products include capabilities
TrustRadius are such as data source connectivity, data ingestion, data
cleansing, and data visualization. For this reason, new
looking at these trends like augmented analytics that using machine learning
10 products. technologies to automate some of the more onerous BI tasks
such as data cleansing, tend to have outsize importance.
In order to be included in this guide, products must have met the following requirements:
> The product must be in our BI software category.
> The product must have at least 40 reviews.
> The product must be ‘customer verified’—indicating there have been at least 10 new or
updated reviews within the past year.
Products are presented in order of percentage of users in enterprises.

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 Product Comparison Tables
Overall Comparison
Satisfaction Product Metrics Reviewer Company Size Information
Rating

trScore # of Reviews Share of Small Midsize Entreprise Most

Traffic Compared To
Microsoft Power BI
Qlik Sense 7.9 114 4.0% 10% 29% 61% Google Data Studio
SAP Business Objects BI
Microsoft Power BI
TIBCO Spotfire 8.5 284 4.4% 16% 25% 59% JMP Statistical Discovery
TIBCO Jaspersoft

Microsoft Power BI
Alteryx Platform 8.5 43 10.9% 10% 32% 58% SSIS
UiPath Enterprise RPA Platform

Tableau Online
Tableau Server 8.2 104 2.5% 12% 36% 52% ThoughtSpot
Microsoft BI

Amazon QuickSight
Tableau Desktop 8.3 14 12.7% 14% 35% 51% IBM SPSS
Datorama
Google Data Studio
Microsoft
Power BI 8.2 84 15.9% 16% 38% 46% Alteryx Analytics
Amazon QuickSight
Microsoft BI
Birst 6.9 96 1.5% 13% 43% 44% Microsoft Power BI
Tableau Desktop

Microsoft BI
TIBCO
Jaspersoft 7.9 107 2.2% 19% 46% 35% Tableau Desktop
TIBCO Spotfire
Microsoft Power BI
Sisense 8.4 54 1.7% 26% 46% 29% Amazon QuickSight
Microsoft BI

Microsoft Power BI
Domo 8.3 58 1.4% 13% 59% 28% Datorama
Amazon QuickSight
Amazon QuickSight
Looker 8.2 53 1.9% 19% 56% 25% Google Data Studio
Microsoft Power BI

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 Product Comparison Tables
Overall
Satisfaction
Rating
BI Standard Ad-Hoc Report Output Data Discovery Access Control Mobile
trScore Reporting Reporting & Scheduling & Visualization & Security Capabilities

Qlik Sense 7.9 7.1 7.3 6.7 6.7 7.8 6.3

TIBCO Spotfire 8.5 7.7 7.7 8.0 8.2 8.3 6.4

Alteryx Platform 8.5 5.3 5.3 7.1 7.1 8.0 4.0

Tableau Server 8.2 8.2 8.2 7.7 7.7 8.1 7.7

Tableau Desktop 8.3 8.4 8.4 8.4 8.2 8.2 7.9

Microsoft
Power BI 8.2 8.2 8.2 6.9 7.9 8.5 8.7

Birst 6.9 6.9 6.9 7.7 6.6 8.1 7.3

TIBCO
Jaspersoft 7.9 7.7 7.7 7.7 6.6 8.1 6.9

Sisense 8.4 8.5 8.5 8.8 8.5 8.5 7.7

Domo 8.3 7.5 7.5 6.7 7.4 7.4 7.8

Looker 8.2 7.5 7.5 7.9 6.7 8.5 6.1

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Qlik Sense
Score 7.9 out of 10

Qlik Sense began life as a self-service visualization tool designed for business users rather than
developers. Now, it is the lead product in Qlik’s product portfolio. Qlik Sense provides a governed,
multi-cloud architecture and the Qlik Associative Engine, which allows users to explore data
freely using interactive selection and search. The company acquired Podium Data in 2018 for
data management capabilities, and Attunity earlier this year for data integration and big data
management. Qlik has also added augmented analytics capabilities, notably the Cognitive
Engine that provides context-aware suggestions to help users identify insights. 73% agree that Qlik
Sense delivers good
Reviewer Company Size Distribution Top 5 Reviewer Industries value for the price.
Information Technology | 19
10%
Financial Services | 16
Small
61% 29% Midsize Computer Software | 13
100% are happy with
Enterprise Hospital & Health Care |13 Qlik Sense’s feature set.

Government Admin | 12

Great Fit For: Qlik Sense was designed for business users to explore data without assistance
from IT and is a true self-service tool. It is particularly appropriate for data analysts in 54% agree that Qlik
larger companies, since it also has extensive data governance and security capabilities. Sense lives up to sales
and marketing promises
(30% were not involved).
PROS CONS
Easy for non-technical users Chart customization
(mentioned in 22 reviews) (mentioned in 31 reviews)
53% thought that
Easy to produce quality visualizations and More detailed control of the layout of KPIs, implementation
reporting easily, but it still has the ability to charts, and graphs (labels, legends, size of fonts,
perform more complex functions for more positioning of titles, etc).
went as expected
experienced users. (20% were not involved).
Lauri S. | Manager of Informatics
Wayne A. | Database Manager Hospital & Healthcare
Hospital & Health Care

Connects to multiple data sources Learning curve 86% said would

(mentioned in 20 reviews) (mentioned in 17 reviews) buy Qlik Sense again.

Bringing together data from multiple sources:
We have multiple servers that each house many
databases along with secure file share folders.
Qlik makes it so easy to connect to all of these
sources and choose which data I want to bring in
to the app within the snap of a finger!
Mitch S. | BI Analyst
Financial Services
Most of the basic stuff was pretty easy, but
others still require looking on the net for help. Set Based on a survey of
analysis is a prime example. It’s a very powerful 15 Qlik Sense users.
tool that has provided good solutions, but the
syntax is not exactly intuitive.
Verified User | Manager
Industrial Engineering

Interested in learning more about Qlik Sense? Read reviews on TrustRadius.

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TIBCO Spotfire
Score 8.5 out of 10

TIBCO Spotfire is a data discovery and visualization tool that is capable of processing very large
data volumes. It includes a built-in predictive analytics runtime engine along with location
analytics. Spotfire provides dashboards, interactive visualization, and data preparation in a
single design tool and workflow, and can be deployed either in-memory or in-database.
Spotfire X, released late in 2018, includes Natural Language Queries (NQL), automated data
wrangling, and support for streaming data analytics.
87% agree that TIBCO
Reviewer Company Size Distribution Top 5 Reviewer Industries Spotfire delivers good
value for the price.
Oil & Energy | 122
16%
Information Technology | 36
Small
59% Pharmeceuticals | 29
Midsize
25% 94% are happy
Enterprise Financial Services | 25 with TIBCO Spotfire’s
feature set.
Computer Software | 24

Great Fit For: Organizations in data-intensive industries like retail, energy, life sciences, or
financial services where advanced analytics capabilities are paramount. Its broad set of 62% agree that TIBCO
capabilities also makes it a good choice for large organizations with multiple use cases. Spotfire lives up to sales
and marketing promises
(37% were not involved).
PROS CONS
Complex data visualization capabilities User Interface
(mentioned in 31 reviews) (mentioned in 14 reviews)
56% thought that
Visualizing and displaying the data. We can UI design a little different to most products, implementation
analyze and compare quickly, then summarize increases learning time.
and show visually concise graphs to went as expected
management so we can make good decisions. Verified User | Analyst (25% were not involved).
Finance and Accounting
Brian L. | Design Engineer
Electronic Manufacturing
Inadequate documentation/support materials
(mentioned in 9 reviews)
Scripting language support 94% said would buy
(mentioned in 10 reviews) TIBCO Spotfire again.
Lack of thorough documentation: particularly
when comparing Spotfire documentation to
For tech savvy users, there is an ability in Spotfire to the documentation for Python, JMP, or Matlab,
input IronPython, and for statistical analysis using R. Spotfire’s documentation is lacking. Based on a survey of
16 TIBCO Spotfire users.
Verified User | Consultant Josh S. | Engineer
Management Consultancy Electronic Manufacturing

Interested in learning more about TIBCO Spotfire? Read reviews on TrustRadius.

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Alteryx Analytics
Score 8.5 out of 10

Alteryx Analytics is best known as a self-service data preparation and blending platform.
However, Alteryx also provides a drag and drop environment that automates the workflow, from
data discovery through preparation, modeling, and presentation. The company is establishing
itself as a data science platform, but its reputation in the market is as a solid self-service data
preparation tool. It is capable of accessing data from multiple sources and preparing it for
analysis by a number of visualization tools like Tableau, QlikView, Microsoft Power BI.

Reviewer Company Size Distribution Top 5 Reviewer Industries

IT & Services | 9
10%
Financial Services | 8
Small
58% 32% Marketing and Advertising | 8
Midsize

Enterprise Retail | 6

Computer Software | 5

Great Fit For: Companies with a need for data blending and data modeling before staging
the data for visualization in specialized tool.

PROS CONS
Data preparation Data visualization capabilities
(mentioned in 10 reviews) (mentioned in 8 reviews)

We use Alteryx for data prep, cleaning and
analytics, to funnel data into Tableau. Used
solely in our analytics department...Data prep
becomes a fun activity with Alteryx.
Clinton S. | Health Information Analytics
Hospital & Healthcare
Data ingestion and merging
(mentioned in 9 reviews)
Alteryx is capable of connecting with a multitude of
data sources from SQL databases to cloud-hosted
solutions like Salesforce, Tableau, or Google Analytics.
Also supports OleDB & ODBC connections.
Though it provides good data blending
functionality, the visualization aspect is missing.
For visualizing data you need Tableau or Power BI.
Karan G. | Marketing Analyst
Financial Services
Mapping capabilities
(mentioned in 6 reviews)
The mapping and graph/charting tools continue
to be a drawback for Alteryx. We’d love to use
Alteryx as the all in one stop shop solution for
analysis, mapping, and reporting but it’s maps
and charts can’t hold a candle to Excel Charts or
Mapinfo/ESRI maps.

Joe R. | Marketing Intelligence Adrian H. | VP Analytics

Computer Networking Market Research

Interested in learning more about Alteryx? Read reviews on TrustRadius.

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Tableau Desktop and Server
Tableau Desktop Tableau Server
Score 8.3 out of 10 Score 8.2 out of 10
Tableau is, in many ways, the blueprint for visual analytics.It is an exceptionally easy-to-use
platform for exploring and visualizing large volumes of data from multiple sources. The product
was acquired by Salesforce earlier this year. Tableau Desktop is used to visualize and analyze data,
create workbooks, visualizations, dashboards, and stories. Tableau Server allows users to publish
workbooks so that they are available in a central location for viewing by others. The product was
designed with business users in mind. Tableau introduced an in-memory data engine, called Hyper,
in 2018. Hyper can boost query speed by 5X and extract large data sets faster. 78% agree that Tableau
delivers good value
Reviewer Company Size Distribution Top 5 Reviewer Industries for the price.
Information Technology | 476
13%
Marketing | 108
Small
51% Finance & Accounting | 80
Midsize 81% are happy with
Enterprise Research & Development | 67
Tableau’s feature set.
36%
Engineering | 60

Great Fit For: Companies with business analysts doing discovery and visualization on
data from a large number of data sources, and then sharing the data with others across 62% agree that Tableau
the organization. Tableau is not designed for scheduled reporting. lives up to sales and
marketing promises
(27% were not involved).
PROS CONS
Data visualization Expensive at scale
(mentioned in 21 reviews) (mentioned in 19 reviews)
62% thought that
Tableau is perhaps the most aesthetically pleasing The licensing model was very expensive and required implementation
software to create beautiful visualizations that get us to continually buy more seats...It’s best for very
updated in real-time. I wish this software had been small teams or when you get over the ~100 user
went as expected
around 20 years ago. mark. You still need to purchase the Tableau Desktop (16% were not involved).
license for each of your data scientists/engineers.
Thomas Y. | CEO
Financial Services Verified User | VP Product Management
Internet

Data preparation
91% said would buy
Usability
(mentioned in 20 reviews) (mentioned in 12 reviews) Tableau again.

Tableau’s interface allows data analysts
of all experience levels to quickly begin
producing compelling and useful analysis and
visualizations. As a user gains experience,
Tableau’s feature set continues to keep pace.
Tableau Desktop lacks the basic functionality of
cleaning and prepping the data to be imported Based on a survey of
in Tableau Desktop. This is one of the major 37 Tableau users.
features which it lacks, you need additional
support from Tableau to get these things added.

Benjamin P. | Technical Project Manager Rahul M. | Team Lead

Hospital & Healthcare IT & Services

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Microsoft Power BI
Score 8.2 out of 10

Power BI is a separate visualization and data discovery product providing data preparation,
data discovery, and interactive dashboards as a standalone web-based tool running in the
Azure cloud. It is also available as an on-premise version called Power BI Report Server. The
product is capable of combining data from multiple sources, regardless of where it resides.
Augmented analytics capabilities are a development focus, with capabilities being built for
users with limited technical skills. Power BI is a relatively inexpensive tool and has seen rapid
uptake by users of the Microsoft BI SQL Server-based reporting product. 95% agree that Microsoft
Power BI delivers good
Reviewer Company Size Distribution Top 5 Reviewer Industries value for the price.
Computer Software | 33
16%
Financial Services | 13
Small
48% Construction | 10
Midsize 95% are happy with
Enterprise
Microsoft Power BI’s
Higher Education | 8
38% feature set.
Hospital & Healthcare | 8

Great Fit For: Price-sensitive organizations with staff familiar with other Microsoft
products. The free version is fully functional, although somewhat restricted. The product 70% agree that Microsoft
is ideal for organizations with many Excel power users. Power BI lives up to sales
and marketing promises
(17% were not involved).
PROS CONS
Powerful visualization capabilities Feature differences in online version
(mentioned in 29 reviews) (mentioned in 11 reviews)
74% thought that
The visualizations are top notch, and Not all features are available in the online implementation
available without additional cost. Everything version: If you want to use more advanced
is in vibrant colors and crisp, clear lines that features, you will probably need to download
went as expected
whatever your produce is clearly pleasing to the desktop version of Power BI. (17% were not involved).
the eye. From mapping down to pie charts, the
visuals are well done. Gabriel C. | Marketing Consultant
Verified User | Finance Manager Consumer Electronics
Consumer Goods
91% said would buy
Integrated with other Microsoft products Microsoft Power BI
(mentioned in 23 reviews)
Difficult to customize charts and graphs again.
(mentioned in 10 reviews)
Similar to office 365 applications such Based on a survey of
as Excel and Access, that is, it facilitates 23 Microsoft Power BI users.
the usability of those who already have Greater flexibility in formatting the look and feel
advanced knowledge of these tools. or reports and dashboards.

Gabriel O. | Programmer Verified User | Project Manager

Mining and Metals Computer Software

Interested in learning more about Microsoft Power BI? Read reviews on TrustRadius.
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Birst
Score 6.9 out of 10

Birst provides an end-to-end BI platform that combines data exploration and visualizations with
scheduled reporting capabilities. The company provides an in-memory columnar data store and a
BI layer comprising a reporting engine, predictive analytics tools, mobile native apps, dashboards,
and discovery tools. Following the acquisition by Infor in 2017, Birst is now the de-facto analytics
engine embedded in Infor business applications. Birst developed the concept of “networked BI”
which constitutes a shared virtual analytics layer, creating a fabric of data for centralized teams and
decentralized end users to collaborate. Birst 7 was released earlier this year.

Reviewer Company Size Distribution Top 5 Reviewer Industries

Computer Software | 20
13%
IT & Services | 13
Small
44% 43% Financial Services | 5
Midsize

Enterprise Hospital & Healthcare | 5

Information Services | 5

Great Fit For: Organizations looking for a multi-tenant cloud-based BI platform that
can help operationalize analytics across decentralized or centralized teams. It is a good
choice for organizations that require a broad range of BI capabilities in a single platform.

PROS CONS
End-to-end tool with broad set of capabilities Documentation and training
(mentioned in 9 reviews) (mentioned in 10 reviews)

End-to-end solution, from raw source data,
ETL, warehousing and reporting, Birst is able
to do everything we need in one package
instead of needing to develop and maintain
multiple technologies.
Verified User | IT
Mining and Metals
Drill-down and data filtering in dashboards
(mentioned in 8 reviews)
Documentation of the product in the help files is
outdated and incomplete in many cases. Several
features are only documented in the community
because enough people have asked questions
about a topic. The search functionality in both
help and community is really bad.
Lee Ann B. | BI Architect
Information Services
User administration
(mentioned in 6 reviews)

The drilling and filtering capabilities are
outstanding! We’ve really been able to get to
the lower level of detail that we needed, but
could not get, before we started using Birst.
Scott G. | Business Analyst
Hospital & Healthcare
User administration could be greatly improved.
Most user administration tasks (creation, security
assignments, etc.) are singular i.e., one action at a time.
If you want to batch these activities up, it is up to you to
have scripts or create your own mini app to do this.
Tim W. | Database Admin
Market Research

Interested in learning more about Birst? Read reviews on TrustRadius.

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TIBCO Jaspersoft
Score 7.9 out of 10

TIBCO Jaspersoft is an open-source reporting and analytics tool that was acquired by TIBCO
Software in 2014 to round out its product portfolio with a true pixel-perfect reporting solution.
It has a modern user interface and is thus relatively easy to use by end users. It is now most
often used in an OEM or embedded scenario where it is integrated as the reporting engine
for business applications, improving context and usability of data.

Reviewer Company Size Distribution Top 5 Reviewer Industries 81% agree that TIBCO
Jaspersoft delivers good
Computer Software | 33 value for the price.
19%
35% Financial Services | 13
Small

Midsize Construction | 10

Enterprise Higher Education | 8 81% are happy with

46% TIBCO Jaspersoft’s
Hospital & Healthcare | 8 feature set.

Great Fit For: Companies that wish to embed a self-service reporting and dashboard engine in
a commercial software application or customer-facing applications. This product should be on
the shortlist for an embedded BI tool that can integrate easily with a JavaScript front end. 36% agree that TIBCO
Jaspersoft lives up to sales
and marketing promises
PROS CONS (36% were not involved).

Easy to create pixel-perfect scheduled reports Performance

(mentioned in 23 reviews) (mentioned in 8 reviews)

We had many client requests for pixel perfect If a domain is extremely large and contains 82% thought that
reporting as well as ad hoc use of their own several derived tables, slowness is a big issue. implementation
data and not enough resources to expend on the Not only is there slowness in the domain went as expected
effort; Jaspersoft fulfills both of these requests. designer, but there is slowness when using said
domain as the data source of an ad-hoc view. (9% were not involved).
Ashley L. | Project Manager
Computer Software Verified User | Engineer
Computer Software

Embedding in 3rd-party applications Jaspersoft Studio report builder 81% said would buy
(mentioned in 16 reviews) (mentioned in 8 reviews) TIBCO Jaspersoft
again.
Very easily integrated reporting engine into The JasperSoft Studio (Eclipse + plugins) is not
Java applications. Very easy to integrate with always a joy to use. The choice of using Eclipse as Based on a survey of
external applications using the API for the an IDE base is understandable, but it comes with 11 TIBCO Jaspersoft users.
server component and libraries for standalone. the issues and difficulty of Eclipse. The Eclipse
integration lacks any useful debugging features
and the error messages are vague.
Verified User | Research and Development
Legal Services
Brian B. | Business Analyst
IT & Services
Interested in learning more about TIBCO Jaspersoft? Read reviews on TrustRadius.
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Sisense
Score 8.4 out of 10

Sisense is a fully-featured product with a columnar data store, an ETL layer and a set of front-
end tools for data cleansing for constructing dashboards and visualizations. Sisense has
abandoned the familiar in-memory technology common to visualization tools for an “in-chip”
solution which uses the data storage provided by the chip set, in addition to RAM and disk
storage. This platform can process very large volumes of data in the columnar database, and the
in-chip memory is efficient. The company released Hunch in 2018, which provides machine
learning analytics. Sisense merged with data science vendor Periscope in May of this year.

Reviewer Company Size Distribution Top 5 Reviewer Industries

Computer Software | 10
25%
29% IT & Services | 8
Small

Midsize Higher Education | 5

Enterprise Internet | 5

45%
Financial Services | 4

Great Fit For: Companies needing to process large volumes of data from disparate sources
without heavy reliance on an IT organization. Sisense also provides self-service analytics
tools that are designed for the business user rather than the IT organization.

PROS CONS
Easy to create dashboards quickly Admin permissions
(mentioned in 12 reviews) (mentioned in 7 reviews)

Sisense allows anyone to build their own dashboard. Admins currently cannot edit each others’
The interface is “uber” intuitive, and “uber” efficient : dashboards. This gets very cumbersome once
no need to declare filters, data hierarchy or anything. admins change - it takes duplicating and
Once your data are loaded, just build dashboards. republishing dashboards to let them take over.

David H. | Founder Gudrun B. | Product Management

Retail
Combining data from different sources
(mentioned in 12 reviews)
Data source connectivity is one of Sisense best
capabilities. It connects to all of your available
sources and creates a virtual Data warehouse,
which not only prevents from disconnecting,
but it prevents...data errors.
Computer Software
Mobile capabilities
(mentioned in 5 reviews)
Mobile system is wonky and not as intuitive as
the desktop version. I would recommend against
viewing the dashboards on a mobile device as well.

Verified User | C-Level Executive Joseph S. | Senior Analyst

Management Consulting Information Services

Interested in learning more about Sisense? Read reviews on TrustRadius.

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Domo
Score 8.3 out of 10

Domo is a web-based BI tool that provides a suite of capabilities from data warehouse and ETL
to visualizations, scheduled reports, and alerts. The product has a much-praised user interface.
Domo is capable of ingesting and integrating data from many different sources and producing
high-quality visualizations of that data. Integration with enterprise applications is facilitated
by a large library of pre-built connectors. Domo also incorporates strong collaboration tools,
facilitating real-time discussions around data. Domo’s go-to-market approach is somewhat
different to its competitors in that Domo primarily targets business decision-makers. 80% agree that
Domo delivers good
Reviewer Company Size Distribution Top 5 Reviewer Industries value for the price.
Computer Software | 13
13%
28% Construction | 10
Small
IT & Services | 6
Midsize 100% are happy with
Enterprise
Domo’s feature set.
Marketing & Advertising | 6
59%
Retail | 6

Great Fit For: Companies that want a modern line of business and executive
54% agree that Domo
dashboard tool with strong collaboration capabilities will benefit from Domo’s
lives up to sales and
integrated chat and data sharing capabilities.
marketing promises
(36% were not involved).
PROS CONS
Strong visualization capabilities Product training is inadequate
(mentioned in 22 reviews) (mentioned in 5 reviews)
54% thought that
Visualization layer is clean and is very business The training was very lacking and should have implementation
presentable. It’s simple but includes depth. been sold up front with much more options than
Visuals can be created/used by all roles
went as expected
after the fact.
throughout our firm, it’s not limited to analysts. (36% were not involved).
John S. | VP of IT
Kyle T. | Business Operations Engineer Plastics
Financial Services
Elegant user interface 80% said would buy
(mentioned in 16 reviews) Steep learning curve
(mentioned in 5 reviews) Domo again.
As a tool it’s comfortable, approachable and
forgiving. If you have a tool that end users can Not for the faint of heart! Even if someone
else implements for you and builds out initial Based on a survey of
dive into without fear, and create and think
data tables, you’ll likely need SQL skills to build 11 Domo users.
and collaborate, without training, without
hand-holding, you quickly realize how rare and complex visualizations or to make any changes
important that is. to your data structure.

Jesse M. | VP Data Analytics Katie N. | Business Process Manager

Insurance Computer Software

Interested in learning more about Domo? Read reviews on TrustRadius.

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Looker
Score 8.3 out of 10

Looker provides a cloud-native BI platform that connects directly to modern, high-speed

analytics databases like Amazon.com’s RedShift, Snowflake, Google’s BigQuery, or Microsoft’s
SQL. Looker also created its own modeling language called LookML that allows developers
to define the relationships in their database. This means non-technical business users can
explore, save, and download data without needing to know SQL. These data models make
it possible for non-technical users to build dashboards, drill into row-level detail, and access
metrics. Looker also provides support for data science including Google BigQuery ML and 70% agree that
Action Hub. In June of 2019, Google announced that it is in the process of acquiring Looker. Looker delivers good
value for the price.
Reviewer Company Size Distribution Top 5 Reviewer Industries

Internet | 28
19% Computer Software | 23
25%
Small
Financial Services | 8
100% are happy with
Midsize Looker’s feature set.
Enterprise IT & Services | 8
56%
Consumer Goods | 3

Great Fit For: Organizations that wish to empower business users to build 70% agree that Looker
their own dashboards and reports, and have skilled BI developers that can lives up to sales and
leverage LookML to build data models on behalf of business users. marketing promises
(30% were not involved).

PROS CONS
Building data models Visualization capabilities could be richer
(mentioned in 9 reviews) (mentioned in 7 reviews)
90% thought that
implementation
The LookML language for creating data models Looker needs some improvement in the went as expected
is extremely intuitive. It blurs the line between visualization aspects of the product, they are
the data integration aspect of BI and the very good at getting the data, but the choices for (10% were not involved).
visualization or self-service BI component. visualizing that data are somewhat limited, there
are workarounds for some of the weaknesses but
they tend to be labor intensive and fragile.
Ian H. | Manager Business Analytics
Oil & Energy
Verified User | Information Technology 100% said would buy
Consumer Electronics Looker again.
Customer Support
(mentioned in 9 reviews) Calculations can be difficult to run
(mentioned in 6 reviews)
Based on a survey of
Support is AMAZING. Our live chat support 10 Looker users.
team are always super friendly and go above The calculation field can be incredibly useful but,
and beyond to help us. I even had their CTO again, requires technical expertise which not all
Lloyd respond to me once. of our users have.

Michael S. | Head of Online Advertising Verified User | Product Management

Photography Computer Software

Interested in learning more about Looker? Read reviews on TrustRadius.

29
We hope that you find this guide helpful for your software
buying journey! If you have any questions about this
Buyer’s Guide or its contents, please contact us anytime.

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About TrustRadius Reviews

TrustRadius scores and visuals are designed to create
the most accurate, data-based picture of products
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