Comparison of popular BI and analytics tools

Business Intelligence and analytics products help businesses to make informed, data driven decisions. Hence, the analytics capabilities of these tools are an important factor when choosing to purchase from one of the vendors in the BI market segment. In this post, I have analyzed a few products and ranked them based on key parameters like cost, and user-friendly interface and functionality, customer support and user experience, product performance and support for big data analysis.

Let us look at some of the top vendors that featured in Gartner’s Magic quadrant for business intelligence and analytics platform, their strengths and weaknesses. I have chosen one or two products to represent each of the four quadrants: Visionary, Leader, Challenger and Niche Player.

#5 Alteryx

Alteryx features in the visionary quadrant in the magic quadrant results this year because of its focus on innovation and product performance. This product also offers excellent support for handling big data sources. It provides sophisticated spatial and predictive tools and handles various sources of data such as Hadoop, excel, Teradata etc.

However, Alteryx does not provide good data visualization options which most of the traditional BI tools offer. It is ideal for customers who do not need good visual outputs and who have very specific needs related to merging data and analytics.

It is also considered a high price solution and this is the main detractor that hinders customers from purchasing this product.

It comes in 3 packages and the prices are listed in the table below:

Alteryx Designer	$3,995 /Per User, Per Year
Alteryx Server	$85,000 /Per Server, Per Year
Alteryx Gallery	$1,500 /Per User, Per Year

#4 Logi Analytics

Logi Analytics provides a BI tool called Logi that provides a way to create reports and dashboards in any platform without the need to code. Logi analytics provides excellent customer support and improves the overall analytics experience while keeping the cost at the minimum. Logi is widely known in the BI market for its ease of use and customer-friendly user interface.

Logi is more of a development environment found usually used in small or medium sized companies with less number of users when compared to the other vendors.

#3 Pentaho

Pentaho is currently placed in the niche players’ quadrant, but is slowly moving towards the visionaries’ quadrant due to the constant innovative development efforts by the vendor. Pentaho, currently offers a full range of analytics and data integration platform with a heavy emphasis on big data. Thus, Pentaho constantly tries to keep itself up-to-date on the expectations of its customer base.

It is widely used by end users for the following capabilities:

•         Low license cost
•         Ease of use
•        Data access and integration capabilities

Some of the drawbacks of this BI and analytics vendor are:

•        Customer experience
•        Some of the features are difficult to use and implement
•        Product performance is a primary concern for users

#2 Qlik

Qlik is another market leader in the BI and analytics domain with capabilities in data discovery. This vendor is trying to bridge the gap between the needs of IT enterprises for data governance and the expectations of the business users. It is ranked in the top two vendors for its ease of use, especially for the interactive dashboard. Customers of Qlik have reported achieving higher business profits as a result of using QlikView BI tool.

It is widely for the following reasons:

•        Lower cost
•        Support for Big data analytics
•        Ease of use
•        Breadth of functionality offered

Qlik is however not so good in delivering visual interactive exploration and customer experience as it takes time for business users to become proficient in using this software. Qlik plans to solve this issue in the release of the next version called Qlikview.Next

#1 Tableau

Tableau has featured as a leader in Gartner’s Magic quadrant - BI and analytics for the fourth year in a row. Following are the reasons for this continued trend:

•        Visual-based interactive data exploration experience that customers rate highly
•       Tableau offers a broad range of support for direct-query SQL and MDX data sources, as well as a number of Hadoop distributions, native support for Google BigQuery, and support for search-based data discovery platforms, such as Attivio.
•       Tableau provides a rich interactive UI at a price that is lower than the competitors in this market segment
•       Excellent product quality and performance that has garnered the customer’s trust.

Now that we have had a chance to assess the pros and cons for going for each vendor, let’s look at their individual scores and ranking based on the criteria discussed above:

Criteria	Weight	Alteryx	Logi Analytics	Pentaho	Qlik	Tableau
Friendly UI and Functionalities	25%	5	7	6	8	8
Customer support and experience	25%	6	8	6	6	10
Cost	20%	3	7	8	8	9
Performance	15%	6	5	7	8	9
Big data analysis support	15%	7	5	9	8	9
Total	100%	5.3	6.65	7	7.5	9
Rank		5	4	3	2	1

As per my analysis of these vendors and based on the criteria that I considered for rating them, Tableau wins hands down without much competition.