Comparing the best BI tools: A Comprehensive Breakdown

Choosing the right BI tool is a bit like finding the perfect business partner — it needs to be smart, reliable, and help you uncover opportunities you might otherwise miss. Today’s top business intelligence (BI) platforms do more than just crunch numbers. They turn raw data into clear insights, helping teams make faster, smarter decisions. But with so many options out there, how do you pick the best BI solution for your business?

In this article, we’ll break down some of the best BI tools on the market — Tableau, Power BI, Looker, Sisense, Quicksight, and GoodData — and see how they stack up. Whether you’re focused on ease of use, AI features, or getting the most value for your investment, this comparison will help you find the right fit.

But before we begin, let’s recap…

1. What are BI tools?

Generally speaking, BI is the combination of strategies, technologies, and services used to transform raw data into valuable insights — the aim is usually to support better decision-making.

BI tools are software that helps companies manage BI-related processes. They turn raw data into valuable insights by connecting data sources, creating dashboards, and making sharing insights with teams easy.

2. Why is it important to choose the right BI tool for your business?

Choosing the right BI tool and centralizing your data in one accessible location is essential for several reasons:

• Decision-making can get a major boost with augmented analytics. By leveraging machine learning and natural language queries (NLQ), it automatically generates valuable insights, turning data into compelling stories with interactive visualizations. For this reason alone, augmented analytics is among the key features to look for in a modern BI tool.
• Productivity can be increased through the streamlining of processes and workflows, supported by multiple data source connectivity and the creation of analytic models. This includes the ability to centrally manage one version of the analytics, and the capability to connect a wide range of data sources.
• Reusability can encourage the efficient reuse of data and reports. Facilitated by a unified metrics store, the capacity to auto-deliver the user interface saves time and enables effortless replication of valuable insights and dashboards. This is further supported by an “as code” architecture and seamless integration with third-party tools for extensive analytics.
• Future-proofing capabilities ensure a company’s analytics solution is prepared for future data challenges, technological advancements, and further integration with third-party tools — ensuring long-term sustainability.
• The right BI tool can keep expenses in check while maximizing the value of your data analysis. The BI tool provider should be driven to continuously innovate and enhance the platform. Additionally, guaranteed security options and reliable customer support contribute to a comprehensive solution that adds value.

To effectively evaluate a BI tool, it’s crucial to identify the most important features. For a deeper dive into what to look for, check out our eBook, How to Choose the Best BI Tool. It offers detailed explanations of key capabilities that can help streamline your business.

3. Comparing the best BI tools:

Choosing the right analytics platform can shape your organization’s success — not just today, but for years to come. To help with your evaluation, the tables below compare key capabilities of the top BI and analytics tools on the market. For a deeper dive into each tool, check out these companion articles: AWS QuickSight alternative, Sisense alternative, Tableau alternative, Qlik alternative, Power BI alternative, and Looker alternative.

Architecture

100% Cloud-native (Docker & Kubernetes)
Real-time analytics without feature limitations
Exposed semantic data model as a shared service
Open APIs, SDKs, and standard protocols usage
Integrating with other BI and AI/MLs, developer notebooks, and other third-party applications
All analytics definitions are declarative and they can be exported, imported, versioned, shared, and inherited.
Super-high performance, intelligent analytics cache
Integration with leading process management workflow software (or built-in feature) to drive decision intelligence
Composable & reusable metrics
Strong support for multitenancy

Dashboards

Easy-to-use self-service capabilities for non-technical users
Intuitive drag-&-drop UI

Embedding

SSO & white labeling
iFrame
Javascript library to embed and customize anything you need as React, Angular, or Vue components
Web components

Scaling and Change Management

Automated scaling to thousands of user groups — departments, teams, and clients
Streamlined change management to roll out changes to thousands of user groups without breaking their customizations
Possibility to change the underlying data warehouse without breaking your data model, metrics, or dashboards

AI/ML features

AI/ML options for all analytics user personas and skillsets
Natural Language Query (NLQ) features like search, auto-complete, and in-dashboard chat
One-click ML forecasting, clustering, and key driver analysis for non-Data Scientists
Embedded Jupyter notebook integration
Personalized insights surfaced directly from the “exploration” home page

Data Integration

Manual & Automated CSV upload
Use your own data warehouse (e.g., Redshift, Snowflake, BigQuery, PostgreSQL)
Industry-first, Analytics Lake stores analytics-ready artifacts such as metadata, semantics, and pre-aggregated metrics

Data Security and Compliance

End-to-end compliance & security — from data warehouse to visualizations
SOC 2, ISO 27001:2013, CCPA, GDPR & HIPAA

Deployment Options

Fully hosted — managed in the cloud by the provider
Self-hosted — deploy to Amazon Web Services, MS Azure, Google Cloud, or on-premises

Flexible and future-proof analytics

GoodData’s flexible analytics environment empowers companies to strategically deliver data; ensuring the right information gets to the right place for aligned decision-making. This forward-looking approach, rooted in future-proof analytics, prepares businesses to adapt to changes and trends, guaranteeing long-term success.

GoodData offers a range of customization, embedded analytics, and integration options. You can tailor your analytics to match the identity of your brand, use APIs and SDKs to address specific needs, and easily embed analytics into your applications using iFrames, SDK libraries, or web components. These tools are designed for dashboards and UIs, allowing seamless integration with company apps for a faster development process.

GoodData offers access to third-party resources and provides seamless integration with external applications, including Jupyter Notebooks and other BI tools. This enables sophisticated machine learning applications and advanced predictions, thereby expanding the platform’s capabilities and effectively catering to a wide range of use cases.

Thanks to a consistent (‘single source of truth’) metrics store and semantic layer, the data, expressions, metrics, and KPIs remain the same when you use these other tools (developer notebooks, other BI or AI tools, etc.)

Flexible pricing model

GoodData offers a transparent and flexible pricing model tailored to meet the needs of different customers. Customers are given the following options to purchase licensing, depending on what works best for their use case.

• Workspace pricing: Flexible workspace pricing allows businesses to customize their plan based on specific features and services. The pricing is aligned with an organization's unique needs, ensuring value for each workspace and selected feature.
• User pricing: An affordable user pricing model, enabling teams to start small and scale up as the content becomes more valuable and usage grows.
• Cost saving: GoodData stands out from other vendors as it does not include a native cloud data warehouse (which can lead to increasing data warehousing costs) in its analytics stack. Instead, costs are reduced through an advanced caching layer built on Apache Arrow.

Ready to learn more?

Choosing the best BI tool for your business isn’t just about picking software — it’s about empowering your team to make smarter, faster decisions with confidence. The right BI platform can integrate complex data from various sources, turn this into clear insights, and deliver self-service analytics to the people who need it most. To learn more about finding the best BI tool and launching your analytics, check out our eBook on best practices for launching analytics.

And remember, with GoodData, you needn’t choose between ease of use, AI-powered insights, or scalability — you get it all in one platform. Interested in seeing this in action? Sign up for a free trial or request a demo — our experts are here to walk you through the platform and answer any questions.