PeerSpot) takes a user-centered approach to creating product comparisons that help IT decision-makers arrive at informed decisions. Instead of relying on the word of the companies that create the technological solutions, they go to the users themselves. Real users offer true feedback without any of the partiality that the solutions’ vendors may have.
IT Central Station’s users of business intelligence solutions have ranked the products according to how potentially valuable they may be to other users. What follows are the top ten ranked products:
#1 Microsoft BI
IT Central Station users ranked Microsoft BI as the number one business intelligence solution of 2021. Here is what is being said about it:
An operations and BI analyst writes that "Power BI is a complete ecosystem. It has an integrated ETL tool and good connectivity with applications such as Office 365 and SQL. There are also solutions for RPA, such as Microsoft Power Automate and Microsoft Power Apps. Power BI now has integration with Power Query, which has an AI feature for text analytics. Text analytics is a very good feature. This feature is also there in Tableau, but I like it in Power BI because you can write something like, ‘What is the total sale in the Eastern region?’ and it will give you the answer. For example, when you have different types of user opinions, you just run one algorithm and you will have the output that provides the number of positive and negative responses”
They also say that, "It should be more user-friendly. There are very small or tiny icons that you need to move very carefully. If you go a little bit up and down, some of the values change. Its user interface should be improved. It should be like Tableau.”
#2 Tableau
Tableau was named the number two business intelligence solution of 2021.
Yawantwi-Adjei, a data visualization specialist, writes "Tableau is easy to use. That's the first and most important thing. I not only provide consulting but I also train people to use it, so with its ease-of-use it's not as difficult for me to train executives and management staff, because they don't have the IT background, unlike when I'm using Python. It's a good product and very easy to use, making the introduction of key technologies extremely simple.”
He states further, "Overall, the only major frustration that I have had so far is with Tableau Public. I first used Tableau Public when I was building capacity, and when there was a later release to download and you wanted to upgrade, all your work would have to be manually re-entered."
#3 Oracle OBIEE
Users named Oracle OBIEE the number three business intelligence solution of 2021.
A finance systems analyst says, “It's quite nice to create a dashboard in OBIEE, and that's pretty straightforward in the way you drag and drop everything. You can create sections, and you can add elements to your page. That bit of the interface is relatively straightforward.”
However, Robin Saikat Chatterjee writes, "One significant improvement is the need for simplification. The set up could be more intuitive. An enterprise setup with HA and DR are pretty complex and to get a robust solution one has to play around with Real Application Cluster data sources and FAN notifications as well as WebLogic clustering and external load balancers. SSO also is not that simple to set up especially if you want all your Oracle systems to use the same SSO solution, i.e., no cheating with direct LDAP connectivity."
#4 SAP Analytics Cloud
Users of IT Central Station ranked SAP Analytics Cloud the number four business intelligence solution of 2021.
An analytics practice lead notes that, “A point of differentiation in the market for Analytics Cloud compared to other analytics products, is it offers not only business intelligence within the application, but also it has inbuilt AI and machine learning capabilities that can be used not only by data scientist types in the organization, but for general users who can get the benefit of inbuilt predictive features in the tool. The other really compelling part of it is that it's also a planning application. You can do full life cycle - from plan through execution - in a single platform. That's quite unique for SAP. A lot of the other software vendors do analytics products and they do planning products. This is quite a unique combination that has both BI predictive and planning in a single application. And that's really where its strengths is.”
However, the user continues to state that “I think what could be improved is a lot of those intelligent features that I mentioned, the AI and predictive functions within the tool work really well with data that you import into the platform, but it doesn't work as well with SAP live connections. If they could make those predictive features available to any source, whether it's SAP or non SAP, it would be a really, really compelling product.”
#5 SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is ranked as the number five solution of 2021 by IT Central Station users.
Popoola Adams, director of a tech services company, writes, "If I were to compare it with Power BI and I wanted to build proper well-formatted reports, BusinessObjects Business Intelligence does that much better. Power BI is just getting into that space. They've concentrated more on visualization, which is what the SAP Lumira does. With Web Intelligence, you are able to build reports that users can interact with.”
A business intelligence functional manager notes, "The self-service area, or dashboard, needs some improvement. While the reporting itself is great, the dashboard and Analytics Cloud are not user friendly."
#6 MicroStrategy
MicroStrategy was ranked as the number six solution of 2021 by IT Central Station users.
Mahipal Pannala, a senior microstrategy architect, writes, "The dashboard features and functionalities that come through the MicroStrategy Suite are the most valuable. It can be used by end users with minimum knowledge of the product. They can run a report or create a dashboard on their phones, which is kind of cool."
He also notes, “It crashes multiple times for even small changes that I make on the fly in the dashboard. After doing all the necessary changes, the MicroStrategy desktop or even the web version kicks the users out, and all the changes are lost. This functionality is buggy in MicroStrategy. It is hard to keep track of all the changes that I have done before. I don't want to make copies of each change that I have made because I would end up creating a hundred dashboards.”
#7 Domo
Domo was ranked as the number seven solution of 2021 by IT Central Station users.
A project manager states, "The ease of use, overall, is one of the valuable features, as is the ease of setup. Other than making sure IT was aware of, and agreed with our proceeding, we did not need IT for any of the setup. The ease of setup is more valuable than you might think. The ease of configuring the security policies, setting up groups, and setting up personalized data permissions so that only certain people can see certain data - that stuff is amazing... Domo really is extraordinarily full-featured, but it's really easy to use."
A business analyst notes, "In Tableau, you can create virtually any kind of visualization. Based on your creativity, you can create a visualization on a human body structure, you can create a visualization on anything that you want. But Domo is limited to a few kinds of visualization views: standard things like bar, pie, and some other charts... I would like to see them add new views for presenting the data in the visualization space."
#8 IBM Cognos
Users of IT Central Station ranked IBM Cognos as the number eight solution of the year 2021.
The co-founder of Enterprise BIDI Solutions states “IBM Cognos offers tools so that you can design and develop your own test queries and reporting solutions. You have Report Studio and Analytics Studio, where they have different tools for designing reports. These include report templates and comping up with canned reports.”
He also writes, “The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved. The way they have designed the framework, the framework manager is a critical part. If you have a properly-designed framework manager then whatever stories you generate through the Report Studio or Query Studio will give you better results. However, if the modeling is incorrect then it will kill your free memory and detract from the performance.”
#9 TIBCO Spotfire
TIBCO Spotfire was named the number nine business intelligence solution of 2021.
An integrating manager notes, “The two features that I have found most valuable are its ability to customize the dashboards when it comes to the evaluation. The second feature is its ability to handle a large amount of data, which is also something very unique about it."
They also write, "When it comes to data manipulation, there are features which are good, but one of the features which has really been missing in Spotfire is an offline ability for data manipulation."
#10 Oracle Analytics Cloud
Oracle Analytics Cloud was named the number ten business intelligence solution of 2021.
Eric Brosseau, an independent consultant, finds that "It's really an enterprise solution. It has a dashboard, like standard dashboarding functionality. It also has reporting capabilities for producing pixel-perfect reports, bursting large volumes of a document if you need to. It has interactive data discovery functionality, which you would use to explore your data, bring your own data, and merge it with maybe the data from an enterprise data warehouse to get new insights from the pre-existing data. It has machine learning embedded in the solution. If you're new to machine learning, it's a really good way to get into it, because it's all within this platform, and it's really easy to use."
A managing partner at a tech services company feels that “The interfaces could be improved and some in-memory operations could be built in.”
Read more user reviews for the Top BI Tools of 2021 here.
