Finding the right business intelligence tools is a complicated process, one that often comes with a price.
When it comes to finding the right free BI Tools, we know how difficult it can get. There is no shortage of free business intelligence tools out there but it all boils down to finding the one which fits your needs like a glove. This is why we are listing down top free business intelligence tools in this article as a way to help businesses find their way around a confusing and difficult maze of complicated software jargon and information.
This article will have a round-up of some of the best free business intelligence tools.
Business intelligence software has almost always been really expensive, which is why many people have to either settle for one that doesn’t help them with all aspects or compromise on aspects such as a good UI or different levels of functionality. The other category are ‘freemium’ BI tools.
These tools appear to be free, but they count on ‘premium’ upgrades which put a huge dent on the budget. While we may want to steer away from such tools, the other alternative is using open-source BI tools.
Open-source is completely different from free BI tools, but it’s easy to get confused. Firstly, open-source development requires immense technical know-how and even if we do have it, such software is often owned by companies that are going to try to upsell anyway. The catch either lies in providing additional features or access to their support services, both of which are an important part of open-source development.
Well, if paid tools are expensive, freemium and open-source tools are often misleading, where should we go?
We’ve compiled a list of free BI tools as a medium to help your research process and to make it easier to find the list of best free BI software available right now. These free Business Intelligence tools have been included along with unbiased and helpful reviews that will help make a well-informed decision.
The reviews are written by users who have used these free BI tools and have shared their opinions and experience with these tools. Have a look at the top free BI tools that will hopefully enable faster decision making and offer you a most well-rounded perspective on the industry.
1. Tableau Public
Tableau Public is the free version of Tableau software that can allow anyone to connect to a spreadsheet or file and create interactive data visualizations for the web.
Visualizations that have been published to Tableau Public can be embedded into web pages and blogs, they can be shared via social media or email, and they can be made available for download to other users.
Tableau Public is for anyone interested in understanding data and sharing those findings as data visualizations with the world. Journalists, writers, bloggers, students, professors, hobbyists, critics, citizens and more. As soon as a workbook is published to Tableau Public, the visualization is accessible by anyone on the internet, so be sure to only use data that is suitable for a public audience.
Strengths of Tableau Public
Great Visualizations. As with the paid version of Tableau, the strength of Tableau Public is the amazing power of data visualization. You are quickly able to create interactive visualizations and convert them into powerful dashboards.
Ease of Use. If you have a dataset and you want to visualize it and share, Tableau Public will allow you to do that quickly and without a lot of expertise needed. It uses the Tableau Desktop product which works on both Mac and PC and has all the ease of use that the paid version of Tableau has.
Cost. It's free. It's a great way to get experience with Tableau, or if you are a hobbyist, journalist, student, or anyone with data that you wish to share publically, it's free.
Weaknesses of Tableau Public
Security. Everything you publish in Tableau Public is publically available to anyone.
Data Limitations. It is free, so you can't expect unlimited access. Data storage is capped at 10GB which is a lot for small use cases and fits a public sharing model, but not for most internal production use cases. And the number of rows you can use is capped at 10 million.
Data Source Limitation. While you are using the desktop tool, many of the out of the box data source connections in Tableau are restricted in Tableau Public. For example, you cannot connect directly to an Amazon Web Service Redshift or RDS. You are limited to Excel, Text, and Access files and odata.
Vendor Details
Web Address https://public.tableau.com/
Founded Date 2003
HQ Location Seattle, WA
Twitter @tableau
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/tableau-software/
Pricing
Tableau Public is free
Please leave your rating and feedback of the pros and cons below so that we can improve this listing.
2. Power BI Desktop (Free)
Microsoft Power BI Free is the freemium version of their paid, Power BI Pro.
Power BI Desktop is a free application you can install locally on your computer. The free version of Power BI lets you connect to, transform, and visualize your data.
With Power BI Desktop, you can connect to multiple different sources of data, and combine them (often called modeling) into a data model that lets you build visuals, and collections of visuals you can share as reports, with other people inside your organization.
Most users who work on Business Intelligence projects use Power BI Desktop to create reports, however, in order to share reports with others, the paid version of Power BI Pro is required.
Strengths of Power BI Desktop
Data Sources. As with Power BI Pro, in the free version, you also have over 70 data sources that you can connect to and access your live data. No matter where your data is located, most likely you will be able to make a connection from Power Bi Desktop free, however, the caveat to that is your local machine will need to have direct access to your data source which is generally the limitation in a production environment.
Visualizations. Also, all of the visualization types available in Power BI Pro are available for use in the free version. You have the ability in the free product to build visualizations and create reports in the same fashion as the paid version.
Exporting Reports. With the free version of Power BI you are able to publish a report to the web or export into PowerPoint, Excel, or CSV. The key is that you cannot collaborate with many of the enterprise features needed for a team use case.
Weaknesses of Power BI Desktop
Distribution. The biggest area of difference between the free and paid version of Power BI is around areas of how you can share your data with others. To do any type of peer to peer sharing, both parties will need a paid Pro license. To do any embedding, email notifications, or analysis in Microsoft Excel, a paid license is needed is well. The free version is really useful for a single data analyst who wishes to simply export their reports, but not for team use cases.
Data Storage. This is the same weakness as with the paid version, but it should be mentioned here as well. Both Paid and Free Power BI have a 10GB data storage limit.  For many use cases that will be enough, but for larger use cases, Power BI is not going to be a suitable solution.
Complexity. While many praise Power BI for ease of use, the reality that we hear from most organizations is that it is still a power user tool. Similar to most Microsoft tools, there are a few who master it and many who barely touch the surface of its power. There are many ways to do the same thing and between the need to understand database schema, table joins, to DAX programming language, Power BI is not for the non-technical user or the beginner in data analytics.
Vendor Details
Web Address http://powerbi.microsoft.com
Founded Date 1975
HQ Location Redmond, WA
Twitter @Microsoft
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft/
Pricing
Power BI Desktop free is free.
Please leave your rating and feedback of the pros and cons below so that we can improve this listing.
3. Google Data Studio
Google Data Studio is a free version of Google Data Studio 360.
The free version, Data Studio allows anyone to create up to 5 reports with unlimited sharing, editing, and collaboration.
Google Data Studio has a lot of tight integration with many other Google products, including AdWords, Google Analytics, YouTube, BigQuery, Attribution 360 and Google Sheets for reporting.
Strengths of Google Data Studio
Tight Integration with Google Environment and others. If you are currently using a lot of Google products as part of your marketing and sales, Google Data Studio is a natural extension of your tech stack. Data Studio integrates seamlessly with data from Google Ads, Analytics, and YouTube. You can also pull from 3rd party data sources like Facebook, Twitter, as well as database feeds such as MySQL.
Report Customization. Google puts a focus on making reports customizable and attractive. You can start from a pre-built template or design from scratch. But unlike some in the BI space, Google adds a lot of customization around the look and feel of a report, such as color selection, even adding gradients to the coloring of visualizations. For those who care about the refinement of the report colors, this is a feature not many other BI products offer.
Sharing Live Data. Google Data Studio allows you to have real-time updates from the data source to any report created. And you can share the report in a variety of ways just like you can with any G Suite Doc or Sheet.
Weaknesses of Google Data Studio
Online Only. Many organizations have a requirement to view data offline but with Google Data Studio the only way to share a report is online. Your report can't be exported to a pdf, csv or any other file type. This means you also can't do a scheduled report that is sent via email to see a snapshot in time.
Ease of Use. This depends on your use case, if you are simply connecting to other Google products, you can generate metrics and reports pretty easily. But if you are connecting to other data sources or a database, expect to be very knowledgeable in data prep skills in order to leverage Google Data Studio. Similar to all Google products, something that seems easy requires a lot of clicks, research (googling answers), and troubleshooting. Google has never been known for designing intuitive interfaces and Google Data Studio is no exception. This is a power user tool.
Data Blending. The product makes it very difficult to join data from multiple sources. So if you are looking to combine data from multiple data sources, Google Data Studio may not be a good fit.
Vendor Details
Web Address https://datastudio.google.com
Founded Date 1998
HQ Location Mountain View, CA
Twitter @Google
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/google/
Pricing
Google Data Studio is currently free, with the limitation of 5 reports.
It's likely that Google will start charging for it (or a premium version of it) in the future or perhaps with the acquisition of Looker, Google starts to merge or somehow combine that as a premium offering of Google Data Studio.
Please leave your rating and feedback of the pros and cons below so that we can improve this listing.
