How to start your business intelligence program on a budget (with free business intelligence software)
How effectively your company leverages data to enhance customer satisfaction, reduce organizational cost and increase profitablity is the key to gaining a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
Selecting a Business Intelligence Reporting Tool that allows your organization to efficiently harness the power of this data is one of the first steps to extracting this value. (A scalable, cost-efficient Data Management and Data Integration strategy are important as well and will be topics of future blog posts) However, there's a problem. There's no shortage of quality business intelligence tools to choose from, so how do you select the best tool? Also, Business Intelligence tools can be expensive and you have a tight budget, how do you launch your business intelligence program on a budget?
The solution to the first problem of how to choose the best tool is simple, contact PowerHouse today! We'll evaluate your current infrastructure, your goals, the skills of your current staff and we'll help you make an informed decision on the best business intelligence tool to initiate your journey of data empowerment.
As for selecting a tool that allows you to start your business intelligence program without busting the budget there are many quality open source and free business intelligence tool options to enable you to begin reaping the benefits of advanced analytics and data visualization at no cost. These are all solid options for establishing the value business intelligence can bring to your organization without a huge initial investment. We'll continue to update this list, but some of our current favorites are:
Open Source Business Intelligence Tools
ReDash* (Self-Hosted) - https://redash.io/help/open-source/setup
Apache Superset - https://superset.incubator.apache.org/index.html
Metabase - https://www.metabase.com/
Knime* | https://www.knime.com/knime-analytics-platform
ReportServer Community Edition | https://reportserver.net/en/download/#community
Free Proprietary Business Intelligence Tools
PowerBI Desktop* | https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/desktop/
Tableau Public* | https://public.tableau.com/en-us/s/
Google Data Studio | https://datastudio.google.com/
Zoho Analytics* | https://www.zoho.com/analytics/
Databox* | https://databox.com/
*These solutions require paid upgrades to enable more robust features
If you have questions, need help or just want to chat, feel free to contact PowerHouse, your Trusted Technology Partner for Strategic Initiatives around Data, Business Intelligence, Digital Transformation and Marketing Technology.