business intelligence

Business intelligence is strategically designed to help businesses make better decisions. And also, it’s a pillar for digital transformation. Any business looking to stay relevant and meet modern business demands must employ business intelligence practices, methodologies, processes, and tools for relevant data collection, storage, analysis, and decision-making.

At Svitla Systems we meet new businesses every day and know how valuable are benefits driven by various BI tools. While some of them are commercial there is still quite a list of open source tools that also can be successfully and effectively implemented in daily operations. You are most welcome to learn more about them or turn to Svitla Systems consultants for more information. 

Apache Superset

A modern, enterprise-ready web application for business intelligence. Known as one of the best BI tools open source, this BI software is fast, lightweight, intuitive, and packed with capabilities that allow users of all skill levels to easily explore and visualize their data, from simple pie charts to highly detailed geospatial maps.

Features/advantages: 

  • An easy-to-use interface for displaying data and creating interactive dashboards.
  • Stunning visuals to highlight your data.
  • A code-free visualization creator for extracting and presenting datasets.
  • A world-class SQL IDE with a metadata browser for preparing data for visualization.

Freeware availability/price: Although Apache Superset is free for all users, there are some installation charges. Setting up and accessing complicated queries in this platform requires the assistance of SQL-savvy experts.

Examples of use in large companies: Many businesses are currently using Superset on a large basis. For example, Superset runs in Airbnb’s production environment inside Kubernetes and serves 600+ daily active users viewing over 100K charts per day.

BIRT 

Stands for Business Intelligence Reporting Tool. BIRT is one of the best BI tools for reporting that can collect and aggregate data from a variety of data sources (databases, files, Java, Javascript, online services, etc.) and use it for textual reporting and graphing (visual). 

Features/advantages:

  • Easily customize dashboards and visualizations.
  • Combine information from various sources into a single source.
  • Discover insights and patterns by organizing, filtering, and grouping specific data sets.
  • Use visualization techniques to prepare reports. Insert tables, charts, explanatory text, and other visual aids.

Freeware availability/price: BIRT is an open-source software project that is free to download on the website.

Examples of use in large companies: IBM uses BIRT as its reporting tool. 

ChartMogul

A real-time reporting and analytics solution for subscription businesses that use Stripe, PayPal, Chargify, Braintree, or Recurly as their payment gateway. 

Features/advantages:

  • Key metrics are calculated automatically in real-time, allowing users to automate their reporting.
  • Customer lifetime value (CLV), customer, revenue, and quantity churn rates, customer growth, and other management and investor data are included.
  • MRR by marketing channel, retention cohort analysis, churn rate by net promoter score (NPS), and retention rate by sales rep are examples of sales, marketing, and customer success metrics.

Freeware availability/price: 14-day free trial, no credit card required. The launch is our freemium plan and caters to businesses with less than $10K MRR.

Examples of use in large companies: Instapage leverages ChartMogul to track the health of the business, plan for the future, and experiment with optimizations.

Cluvio

Cloud-based business intelligence and analytics system that allows companies to evaluate data via a dashboard. 

Features/advantages: 

  • Bank-level security:  Cluvio has drawn inspiration from the most stringent security procedures used in banking organizations. As a result, security equals or exceeds some of the most stringent measures available, in addition to the physical insurance offered by vigilant audits and monitoring of anything critical to the integrity of your data.
  • Quick and powerful analytics:  SQL and R running beneath the hood to discover hidden connections in your data stockpile means you acquire important insights in the quickest amount of time.

Freeware availability/price: All plans come with a 14-day free trial period of the Business plan. You can switch to the Free Forever or any of the paid plans at any time during the trial or after.

Examples of use in large companies: Amazon uses Cluvio to drill down on sales or marketing channels and explore/discover data insights.

Databox 

A cloud-based business analytics solution that enables users to build custom analytics dashboards that incorporate data from numerous sources and can be accessed from any device. 

Features/advantages: 

  • Custom metrics, data, events, and goals can be imported and added to dashboards from numerous cloud services.
  • Advanced data modeling capabilities to change currencies and formats, compare various metrics on the same graph, pick between average and total values, switch between hourly and daily graphs, and more.
  • Datawall designer to create personalized datawalls without writing any code.

Freeware availability/price: Free plan and free trial available. Subscription-based pricing.

Examples of use in large companies: Smartbug Media, HubSpot’s top agency partner use Databox to automate reporting.

KNIME  

Analytics Platform is an open-source data analysis platform that allows data scientists to create and manage visual data analytics workflows. 

Features/advantages:

  • Scalability via clever data management (intelligent automatic caching of data in the background while maximizing throughput performance)
  • High extensibility using a well-defined API for plugin extensions
  • Simple user interface
  • Workflow import/export (for exchanging with other KNIME users)

Freeware availability/price: 100% free with options for annual-based subscriptions for additional features.

Examples of use in large companies: Würth uses KNIME Partner Miriade to develop its big data recommendation engine.

Hitachi Vantara (Pentaho)

Hitachi Data Systems, Pentaho and Hitachi Insight Group have merged into one company: Hitachi Vantara. The tool’s goal is to assist organizations across numerous industries in extracting value from all of their data, including big data and IoT.

Features/advantages: 

  • Intuitive web-based data access wizard and interactive reporting.
  • Robust data integration and federation for IT and developers, allowing them to access and integrate data from Excel to Hadoop.
  • Interactive visual analysis.

Freeware availability/price: The software comes in a free community edition and a subscription-based enterprise edition.

Examples of use in large companies: flydubai, a United Arab Emirates transportation company uses Pentaho for Analytics and BI.

Tableau Public

One of the most prominent tools for BI. This free online platform for sharing and exploring data visualizations. Tableau Desktop Professional Edition or Tableau Public Web Authoring can be used by anyone to create visualizations. 

Features/advantages: 

  • Visualizations published to Tableau Public are viewable online by anybody. 
  • Anyone can browse and contribute to Tableau Public’s millions of visualizations. 
  • Vizzes that are fully hosted on Tableau Public can support millions of views. Tableau Public manages all infrastructure for free.

Freeware availability/price: Free tool with different hosting (paid) options.

Examples of use in large companies: Lenovo India uses Tableau Public to increase reporting efficiency by 95% across the enterprise.