Best Business Intelligence Software

The phrase "business intelligence" has meant a lot of different things over the decades it has been in use. In general, it refers to the practice of analyzing data related to a business's operations. Today, business intelligence companies of all sizes rely heavily on software to help them perform that analysis, and most modern business intelligence, or BI, platforms have a fairly well-defined set of capabilities:

• Data preparation

• Data mining

• Reporting

• Benchmarking

• Data visualizations

Some business intelligence software also incorporates other capabilities like advanced analytics or artificial intelligence (AI) features.

Business Intelligence tools are very similar to analytics platforms, but the key difference is that BI software generally primarily utilizes structured data that resides in databases, while analytics tools can ingest and analyze unstructured data as well.

In addition, BI software is meant to be used by ordinary businesspeople, while many analytics tools are more tailored for data scientists or specialized analysts. In keeping with this trend toward greater usability, BI software is also generally easier to deploy and more affordable than an analytics platform.

While more enterprises are investing in advanced analytics, most also continue to use BI tools for a lot of their day-to-day analysis and reporting.