Tableau Alternatives: 8 Best Data Visualization Software That Work Great

Tableau is running a new initiation of Business Intelligence (BI) applications. These applications help business users to execute sophisticated analyses and create interactive visualisations with little training and support from IT staff.

Despite Tableau’s part as a self-service BI innovator and its growing share of the market, the vendor now faces robust competition from some players.

We observed the competitive set up to find eight best alternatives to Tableau currently on the market. Below are the vendors.

1. Qlik Sense

Qlik is a leading light in the self-service BI market. Qlik also offers a guided analytics solution known as Qlik View. The Qlik sense contribution is more directly comparable to Tableau Desktop.
Qlik Sense Desktop is free for a single user while Tableau gives a 14- day trial version. Qlik Sense Desktop only functions on Windows, while Tableau Desktop also works on Mac OS.

One key variance between Qlik Sense and Tableau is that Tableau Desktop must be installed on the mobile device or computer, while Qlik gives and suggests a cloud-based version of their desktop client that can be logged online with a standard web browser.

Qlik Sense Desktop emphasizes on data discovery through interactive visualizations. The interface for Qlik Sense Desktop is similar to Tableau’s—both products enable users to merge both dimensions and measures into complex visualizations through drag-and-drop manipulation.

2. Microsoft Power BI

Power BI Desktop (only accessible for Windows) gives a direct interface for generating visualizations and also integrating them into dashboards. Power BI Desktop is available for free.

The Power BI Service offers many “content packs” for opening, formatting and visualizing data from modern Software-as-a-Service applications.

Content packs comprise of pre-built dashboards to get users begin with analysis. Microsoft gives content packs for some services and programmers, including Github, Google Analytics, Mail chimp, Salesforce and much more.

3. Tibco Spotfire

Tibco Spotfire is also a potent alternative remedy for self-service visualizations, Like Tableau Desktop; spot fire recommends visualization templates for a given data-set, which is helpful for less trained and skilled users.
Spot fire is obtainable as a desktop application for Windows or as a cloud-based offering. Companies need to pay to license spot fire Desktop applications for end users, unlike Power BI or Qlik Sense.

4. Good Data

Good Data is one of the first BI vendors. The company gives Platform as Service BI software which makes it so easy to execute. The product is used by over 15000 different users all over the world. The product can join an organisation’s internal and external data to one single view. You can access data from your internal and open sources such as MySQL / Oracle, social media websites, cloud- based sources like sales force and Intuit and combine it with data from public feeds and also store it in one place. It takes the five step process which is – analyse, store, collect and visualise. The software can be used by both IT staff and business users as it requires little or no training.

5. Birst

Birst is a Silicon Valley- based BI tool. They have clients like Kellogg’s, Backspace and Citrix. Birst is used by a host of users in many different companies like Life Sciences, HealthCare, Hi-Tech, Finance, Manufacturing/Trade, Public Sector and Retail. It can be used both in the public cloud or positioned as a separate private cloud. Birst uses your raw data, runs it through its ETL (Extract Transform Load) layer and loads it into its data storage which can be accessed by your business users to analyse and for reporting purposes. The product comes in two editions – Discovery and Enterprise.

6. Chartio

Chartio provides a relatively simple and cool business intelligence tool. The company has raised different rounds of funding from some of the prominent venture capitalists. The company also focusses on providing an apparatus which is simpler to use (i.e. less training) when compared to other tools described above which are more complex and dense. Ideally, for small and medium businesses – mainly internet firms and start-ups. You can connect chartIO straight to your database and immediately start visualising large datasets in near real-time. ChartIO supports, MySQL, Oracle, MS-SQL, PostgreSQL, Amazon Relational DB and many others.

7. Bime Analytics

BIME is business intelligence and Analytics Company. It is used by companies like Shell, Lenovo, Cisco, PWC, Sony and Western Union. BIME can connect with a host of other services and open sources like SalesForce, Facebook, Zen Desk, YouTube, Google Analytics and other big data sources like SAP HANA, Windows Azure and Redshift. The product gives an intuitive and great user interface and is also cheap. The software provides over 14 different advanced visualisation types and over 400 various methods to customise the software.

8. Insight Squared

This is a simple business analytics and intelligence tool built on top of sales Force. It can be used by small and medium scale businesses and large companies alike. The software is targeted at small and medium size businesses. The platform is very cost friendly for small business owners who want to utilise the power of data. Data can be imported from multiple databases on cloud sources. The system brings with it 100+ native integrations.