BI buyer’s guide: Top 10 business intelligence tools

• Target audience: Customers in the broader Google ecosystem.
• Notable features: Looker is known for its composability, with a modular architecture that enables headless BI integration with other analytics and BI platforms.
• Pricing: By request; pricing has two main components: platform pricing and user pricing.

Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric is Microsoft’s unified, AI-powered data analytics platform, supporting both data management and analytics. It consolidates data movement, processing, storage, analysis, and visualization into a single stack. Microsoft has incorporated Power BI into Fabric to support data preparation, visual-based discovery, interactive dashboards, and augmented analytics. And Fabric has augmented Power BI’s capabilities with advanced analytics and ML functions. These capabilities enable Fabric to generate insights, automate tasks, and build predictive models.

• Target audience: Microsoft shops.
• Notable features: Integration with Power BI, Azure, and Microsoft 365; Copilot for Power BI.
• Pricing: Pay-as-you-go or capacity reservation.

Oracle Analytics

Oracle has spent the past several years bulking out its Oracle Analytics offering, launched in 2014 as an outgrowth of its flagship Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition suite. In 2020, it added a Cloud HCM offering to provide self-service workforce analytics to HR executives, analysts, and LOB leaders. Oracle has also focused on making its cloud offering intuitive and user-friendly, with powerful reporting and ML features. Other key features include data preparation, data connectors, visualizations, predictive analytics, a native mobile app, and support for embedded analytics. Regarding AI, Oracle has added document understanding to its existing vision, text, and language capabilities, enabling the use of gen AI to create data stories. Additionally, Fusion Data Intelligence, Oracle’s cloud-based analytics warehouse platform can be associated with Oracle Analytics to enable these features by embedding analytics and AI into business applications and workflows.

• Target audience: Users in midsize to large enterprises.
• Notable features: Conversational analytics support natural language queries; can automatically generate natural language explanations to explain visualizations and trends.
• Pricing: Enterprise: $80 per user, per month; Professional: $16 per user; Professional – Bring Your Own License (BYOL): $0.3226 Oracle compute unit (OCPU) per hour; Enterprise – BYOL: $0.3226 OCPU per hour.

Pyramid Analytics

Pyramid Analytics is a business and decision intelligence platform built from the ground up on ML-based data preparation and data wrangling. Its multi-LLM strategy offers customers flexibility, and the platform is deployment-agnostic, enabling customers to host it in AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud, Alibaba, or on-premises. Users can leverage Pyramid’s own internal portable language model or third-party LLMs with the platform’s NLQ interface for text and speech input and output.