Top 5 Business Analytics Tools: Special Features, Limitations & Price

Introduction

If you're here, you need no formal introduction to business analytics tools. You're probably also familiar with the difference between business analytics and business intelligence.

We'll give you an overview of some of the most popular (with good reason) data analytics tools, complete with products, special features, limitations, and prices.

A good starting point is to answer the following questions:

• How much data do you need to analyze?

• What type of data will you be analyzing?

• What's your budget?

• What's your timeframe?

Once you've jotted these answers down, the overview we will provide of the top business analytics tools will be much more helpful for you.

Top 5 Business Analytics Tools

We've already covered Power BI, Tableau and Quicksight in a different article for business data analytics. In this one, we'll be focusing on other, equally good ones.

Talend

Talend is among the most powerful data integration ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tools in the market. It has been named a leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools and Data Quality tools.

Its aim is to deliver accessible, clean and compliant data for everyone.

Talend is a software integration platform that provides various solutions for data management, data quality, data integration, data quality, and more. It has separate products for all these solutions.

It is designed to empower businesses to gather all their data on a single platform so that different teams can access the data they need at any time. It offers both a free, open-source version called Open Studio, as well as several commercial alternatives.

Furthermore, it allows users to analyze data without coding. This is done via in-built machine learning components. The platform utilizes clustering, regression, classification and recommendation algorithms.

Commercial products:

• Talend Data Quality

• Talend Cloud

• Talend Big Data

• Talend MDM (Master Data Management) Platform

• Talend Data Integration

• Talend Data Fabric

• Talend Metadata Manager

• Talend Data Preparation

• Talend Data Services Platform

Talend is the only ETL tool that has all the plugins to easily integrate with the big data ecosystem. It is now also available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace

Limitations (Open Studio):

• Difficult setup

• Intermittent support

• Can be slow

• Heavy reliance on JAVA

Companies that use or have used Talend: AstraZeneca, EuroNext, ALDO

Price: Free (Open Studio), or $100–$1,200 depending on package

QlikView

QlikView is unique compared to many other business analytical tools. It has patented technology, which allows it to offer many features that can quickly create advanced reports from various data sources.

Like Talend, it was named a leader in Gartner's Quadrant 2020 for Analytics and BI platforms.

Neither the developers of QlikView apps nor the users manage the relationship between the data. It is done automatically.

In QlikView, the relationship between data can be visualized using colors. Furthermore, it shows data that are unrelated and provides indirect and indirect searches.

Special features:

• Data, structure and calculations of reports are held in the server's RAM. This provides a faster UX.

• No need to store pre-calculated aggregate values, since the data is held in memory

• Compresses data to 10% of its original size because only essential data in memory is required for analysis

Limitations:

• Lower RAM limit

• Difficult app development

• Pricing on the higher side

• Inconsistent customer support

• Lacks some more modern functions such as drag-and-drop

• Somewhat outdated interface

Companies that use or have used QlikView: SAMSUNG, NHS, CISCO

Price: Various packages starting at $30/user/month

Apache Spark

Apache Spark is a cluster computing technology, developed for fast computation. It is based on Hadoop MapReduce.

Contrary to popular belief, Apache Spark is not an altered version of Hadoop or dependent on Hadoop. This is because it has its own cluster management. However, Hadoop is one of the ways to implement Apache Spark. Spark uses Hadoop for storage and processing.

Apache Spark is designed to cover a broad range of work, such as iterative algorithms, batch applications and interactive queries.

Special features:

• Supports multiple languages including Java, Python and Scala.

• Offers advanced analytics. Supports machine learning, streaming data, SQL queries and graph algorithms.

Limitations:

• Not ideal for multi-user environment

• Fewer algorithms

• No automatic optimization

• No file management system

• Does not support record-based window criteria

Companies that use or have used QlikView: Visa, Hortonworks, Oracle

Price: Free

Looker

The user-friendly, cloud-based Looker tool is 100% in-database. This empowers your business to gain insights based on real-time information. You won't have to extract your data before using it, and can easily scale your data analytics. Looker is suitable for both large and small companies.

It has platform-exclusive analytics functions such as Looker Blocks, LookML and Powered by Looker. This gives it an advantage over some other BA tools. Its program integration is also good.

Special features:

• Unifies your data sources

• Alerts for changes in data

• Customizable

• SQL Runner for more advanced users

• Good customer support and technical support

• Works well on both PC and Mac

• Easy link-sharing

• Desktop, mobile and tablet friendly

Limitations:

• Lack of flexibility

• Large marketing dashboards take a long time to load

• External tool works best for getting your marketing data into Looker

Companies that use or have used Looker: Etsy, databricks

Price: Customized, but starts at $3,000/month/ten users

RapidMiner

This tool was named a Visionary in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Data Science and Machine Learning Platforms. It helps businesses develop predictive machine learning models. A technical background is preferred to work this tool, since it is aimed at data analysts who handle large amounts of data and take on challenging tasks.

It has various solutions, including TurboPrep (cleaning and preparing data), AutoModel (algorithms for machine learning) and DataStudio (creating a visual workflow).

Products:

• Studio

• Real-Time Scoring

• Radoop

• Server

• GO

All these products have sub-versions with different features and pricing options. There's a free trial available for some of them.

Limitations:

• Software has a reputation for crashing at times

• Free version is somewhat limited

• Load time can increase with big data

• Steep learning curve

• Guidelines can be somewhat unclear

Companies that use or have used RapidMiner: BMW, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, EZCater

Price: Free, or $2,500/user/year, $5,000/user/year, $10,000/ user/year

Conclusion

We hope this article gave you an idea of which business analytics tool is best for your organization!

Regardless of what the tools' websites say, always make sure to check the reviews! (Hint: If all or most reviews are glowing, there are probably at least a few fake ones among them.)

Poor data management or analysis can hinder making the best decisions for your business or organization. The reverse is also true.

Luckily for you, BluEnt prides itself on excellent, affordable data analytics and data management services. We are familiar with various data analytics tools and have worked for many companies since our inception in 2003. We are geared especially for Fortune companies, large energy or tech companies, corporates, and mid-size firms.

Contact us now to grow your organization with business analytics and business intelligence solutions!