5 Best Business Analytics Tools for Growth Tracking and Analysis

Business analytics tools need no formal introduction to you if you’re here. You might already know how leading enterprises and their top decision-makers use them to track their business growth and performance.

Every 2 out of 3 employees are using business intelligence (BI) tools, adding up to 75% of everyday usage of business data analytics services or software.

This blog will give you an overview of some of the most popular business analytics tools from a toolkit we use for business analytics, visualization, and engineering at BluEnt.

Business Analytics Tools: Significance and Uses

Business analytics is a part of business intelligence (BI) implementation strategies, and most business leaders recommend it for growth analysis and decision-making.

With the help of business analytics tools, organizations collect valuable insights from their in-house databases, software, apps, and systems to identify trends and predict business outcomes.

It’s presumed that you can differentiate between business analytics and business intelligence solutions while querying about tools for business analytics.

If not, let’s briefly discuss business intelligence, business analytics, and data analytics before we enlist top business analytics tools.

• Business Intelligence BI is a set of methods or practices to collect, organize, visualize, and interpret information derived from business operations.

  It gives a detailed view of business activities, including sales, profits, expenses, workforce productivity, turnover, market trends, and customer demands.

  BI tools empower enterprises to view and analyze their growth metrics, identify areas of improvement, and gain competitive advantage. That also covers customer data analytics to drive growth and profitability for sales and marketing benefits.

• Business Analytics, BA is a strategic process that tracks and analyzes business operations via visual data insights and custom reporting tools.

  It involves certified data analytics companies and BI experts specializing in data mining, data aggregation, predictive modeling and forecasting, and data visualization techniques.

  Enterprises leverage business analytics tools or BI software across internal apps and systems to predict future outcomes and make precise business decisions.

• Data analytics and its use cases are beyond business applications, software, and databases.

  Expert data analysts develop custom software to manage, collect, and analyze vast volumes of data stored in different formats.

  Business analytics contributes to the benefits of enterprise business intelligence when the best-suited set of tools and skills are in place.

Now, check out the most popular business analytics tools used by global business leaders, their decision-makers, growth analysts, sales and marketing professionals, and renowned data consulting service providers.

5 Best Business Analytics Tools for Sales, Revenue, and Overall Growth Tracking

We’ve already covered Power BI, Tableau, and Quicksight in our blog series for business data analytics.

In this section, we’ll focus on other tools for business analytics, which are equally good ones.

Talend

Talend is a powerful data integration ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tool in the market. It has been named a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools and Quality Tools.

It aims to deliver accessible, clean, and compliant data for everyone.

The Talend software integration platform is like the MuleSoft data integration platform.

It provides various solutions for data management, quality, integration for enterprise challenges, and more. It has separate products for all these solutions.

It empowers businesses to gather all their data on a single platform so that different teams can access the data they need anytime. It offers a free, open-source version called Open Studio and several commercial alternatives.

Furthermore, it allows users to analyze data without coding. That is done via in-built machine learning components. The platform utilizes clustering, regression, classification, and recommendation algorithms.

Commercial products:

• Talend Data Quality

• Talend Cloud

• Talend Big Data

• Talend MDM (Master Data Management Solutions) Platform

• Talend Data Integration

• Talend Data Fabric

• Talend Metadata Manager

• Talend Data Preparation

• Talend Data Services Platform

Talend is the only ETL tool with all the plugins that can easily integrate with the big data ecosystem. It is now also available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.

Limitations (Open Studio):

• Difficult setup

• Intermittent support

• Can be slow

• Heavy reliance on JAVA

Companies that use or have used Talend: AstraZeneca, EuroNext, Newcastle University, Lenevo, P3 Health Partners, Viking, Royal British Legion, and more.

Price: Free (Open Studio), or $100–$1,200 depending on the package.

QlikView

QlikView is unique compared to many other business analytical tools. Its patented technology offers many features to create advanced business analytics reports from various data sources quickly.

Neither the developers of QlikView apps nor the users manage the relationship between the data. It is done automatically.

In QlikView, data analysts can visualize the relationship between data can be visualized using colors on a business analytics dashboard. Furthermore, this software shows data and provides indirect and indirect searches.

Special features:

• Data, structure, and reports calculations are available in the server’s RAM. That provides a faster UX.

• There is no need to store pre-calculated aggregate values since the data is in memory.

• Compresses data to 10% of its original size because only essential data in memory is required for analysis

Limitations:

• Lower RAM limit

• Difficult app development

• Pricing on the higher side

• Inconsistent customer support

• It lacks some more modern functions, such as drag-and-drop

• Somewhat outdated interface

Companies that use or have used QlikView include SAMSUNG, NHS, CISCO, and more.

Price: Various packages starting at $30/user/month

Apache Spark

Apache Spark is one of the best business analytics tools powered by cluster computing technology. It is based on Hadoop MapReduce and developed for fast computation.

Contrary to popular belief, Apache Spark is not an altered version of Hadoop or dependent on Hadoop.

That is because it has its cluster management. However, Hadoop is one of the ways to implement Apache Spark. Spark uses Hadoop for storage and processing.

Apache Spark is designed to cover a broad range of work, such as iterative algorithms, batch applications, and interactive queries.

Special features:

• It supports multiple languages, including Java, Python, and Scala.

• It offers advanced analytics and supports big data analytics trends such as machine learning, streaming data, SQL queries, and graph algorithms.

Limitations:

• Not ideal for a multi-user environment

• Fewer algorithms

• No automatic optimization

• No file management system

• Does not support record-based window criteria

Companies that use or have used QlikView include Visa, Hortonworks, Oracle, and many others.

Price: Free

Looker

This business analytics tool is user-friendly and 100% in-database. That empowers your business to gain insights based on real-time information. You won’t have to extract your data before using it, and you can scale your data analytics quickly. Looker is the best pick for business analytics for a small business.

It has platform-exclusive cloud data analytics functions such as Looker Blocks and LookML. That gives it an advantage over some other BA tools. Its program integration is also good.

Special features:

• Unifies your data sources

• Alerts for changes in data

• Customizable

• SQL Runner for more advanced users

• Good customer support and technical support

• Works well on both PC and Mac

• Easy link-sharing

• Desktop, mobile, and tablet friendly

Limitations:

• Lacks flexibility

• Big marketing dashboards take a long time to load

• Requires external tools or mobile apps to leverage big data in sales and marketing data into Looker

Companies that use or have used Looker: Etsy & data bricks

Price: Customized, but starts at $3,000/month/ten users

RapidMiner

This tool was named a Visionary in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for data science and machine learning platforms. It helps businesses develop predictive machine learning models.

Since this business analytics tool is aimed at data analysts who handle large amounts of data and take on challenging tasks, hiring skilled data engineers is recommended to make the most out of it.

It has various solutions, including TurboPrep (cleaning and preparing data), AutoModel (algorithms for machine learning), and DataStudio (creating a visual workflow).

Products:

• Studio

• Real-Time Scoring

• Radoop

• Server

• GO

All these products have sub-versions with different features and pricing options. There’s a free trial available for some of them.

Limitations:

• Software is more likely to crash at times

• The free version is somewhat limited

• Load time can increase with big data

• A steep learning curve makes it less ideal for beginners

• Guidelines can be somewhat unclear

Companies that use or have used RapidMiner: BMW, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, EZCater

Price: Free, or $2,500/user/year, $5,000/user/year, $10,000/ user/year

Transform Numbers into Actions with BluEnt’s Business Data Analytics Solutions

This article gave you an idea of which business analytics tool is best for your organization.

Regardless of what the tools’ websites say, always check the reviews! (Hint: If all or most reviews are glowing, there are probably a few fake ones among them.)

Data management or analysis can help you make the best business or organization decisions. The reverse is also true. Luckily, BluEnt prides itself on excellent and enterprise-grade business solutions and business intelligence consulting services.

Our certified data scientists bring unparalleled expertise in data science, data engineering, data visualization, and data analytics.

We are familiar with different types of data analytics tools and have worked for global leaders and enterprises in healthcare, gaming, finance or banking, research, manufacturing, education, human resources, sales and marketing, logistics, and other emerging industries.

Contact us for business data analytics and business intelligence solutions to grow your business.

We excel in innovating value-engineered solutions for Fortune, considerable energy or tech companies, corporates, and mid-size firms. View our technology portfolio for more insights into our work.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you choose the right tools for business analytics?

A good starting point is to answer the following questions:

• How much data do you need to analyze?

• What type of data will you be analyzing?

• What’s your budget?

• What’s your timeframe?

Once you’ve jotted these answers down with the help of our BluEnt’s data engineers, you can choose the correct set of business analytics tools.

How do BI tools use predictive analytics for business analytics?

Business analytics depends on data mining techniques to record data across business applications, databases, websites, and other internal sources within a company.

Data mining enables enterprises to dig deeper into historical data and generate actionable insights. They further involve predictive analytics and machine learning techniques to anticipate future outcomes.

Advanced business analytics tools, including TIBCO Spotfire, Tableau, PowerBI, and SAS Business Analytics, give access to custom business analytics dashboards to visualize data and automated reporting to track patterns.