The importance of effective data analytics within an organization is widely accepted by business leaders at this point. With use cases for data analysis spanning every department—from IT management, financial planning, marketing analytics, and so on—the right data analytics tools can have a significant impact on a company’s profitability and growth. With the number of tools on the market, however, it can be challenging to find the right platform for the company or department’s specific use case.
While there is no one-size-fits-all software when it comes to data analytics, in this guide we’ll review 15 of the best analytics tools of 2021 to help you find the right tool(s) for your specific needs. This list includes the features, use cases, and target customers of each platform. In particular, the list is broken up into three main categories:
- Business Intelligence (BI) and Data Visualization Tools
- Business Monitoring, AIOps, and Anomaly Detection
- Customer Experience and Analytics Tools
Business Intelligence (BI) and Data Visualization Tools
Business intelligence software is used to collect, transform, analyze, and report on data. With effective data visualization, these data insights are meant to be understood by any stakeholder in the organization, regardless of technical expertise.
Domo
The Domo Business Cloud provides an integrated platform that lets you connect data from any source, turn raw data into live visualization, and extract insights to empower your team. The integrated platform offers several BI tools, including:
- Data integration: This makes disparate data from any source accessible and ready for analysis
- BI & analytics: The data analytics layer turns raw data into live visualizations alongside real-time metrics with the goal of driving more informed decision making across the business.
- Intelligent apps: Domo also offers a flexible app building framework that allows you to go beyond simple charts and graphs and build customized apps that provide new data experiences.
- Embedded & extended analytics: With embedded and extended analytics you can securely share and distribute data outside of the organization.
Domo is used by customers in all industries and primarily targets enterprise-level customers.
Tableau
Tableau is another leading BI and visual analytics software used by IT professionals and business executives. Tableau offers several products that support the entire lifecycle of self-serve analytics, all the way from data preparation to sharing insights. In particular, their product offerings include:
- Tableau Prep: This tool offers self-service data preparation solutions to visualize, combine, transform, and clean data.
- Tableau Desktop: Their desktop solution offers nearly unlimited ways to visualize and explore data in an intuitive interface.
- Tableau Server & Tableau Online: These products enable organizations to extend their data analytics capabilities by securely governing it on-premise, in a public cloud, or hosted as a self-service analytics platform.
- Tableau Mobile: This product is a simple way to get a curated view of important metrics and KPIs on mobile.
Tableau is used across industries and primarily targets enterprise-level customers.
Looker
Recently acquired by Google Cloud, Looker is a browser-based BI software and big data analytics platform. A few of their core capabilities include:
- Business intelligence
- Embedded analytics
- Data delivery
- Prepackaged or custom applications
- Workflow integration
One of the differentiators between Looker and other BI platforms is their modeling language LookML, which “is a language for describing dimensions, aggregates, calculations, and data relationships in a SQL database”.
Sisense
Sisense is an agile BI solution that offers a suite of tools for data analytics, visualization, and reporting. The platform enables businesses to combine multiple data sources into a single database, which is then rearranged into a standardized format. This provides organizations the ability to extract insights from disparate data sources. In particular, a few of their core capabilities include:
- Data warehousing
- ETL processes
- Query and report writing
- Dashboard and scorecards
Sisense is used across industries and can be deployed on-premise or hosted in the cloud.
Business Monitoring & AIOps
Business monitoring, AIOps, and anomaly detection software are used to proactively monitor business activities ranging from cloud costs, IT operations, and customer experience. The goal of this software is typically to detect and respond to incidents before they negatively impact the user experience and bottom line.
Anodot
Anodot is an industry leader in the field of business monitoring that uses an AI-driven approach to anomaly detection. Businesses use their patented technology to monitor their data in real-time and detect incidents that can impact revenue. By constantly analyzing and correlating business metrics using machine learning, their autonomous solution provides real-time alerts for faster detection and resolution times of incidents. Specifically, Anodot’s core product offerings include:
- Autonomous detection: After learning the normal behavior of all business metrics, the autonomous detection technology is able to collect, analyze, correlate, and act on incidents. With feedback from end users after each alert instance, the machine learning algorithms are always being fine-tuned to meet the needs of each business use case.
- Autonomous forecasts: AI-powered forecasting removes the need of a data scientist to forecast time series metrics. The solution uses deep learning to create, train, tune, and deploy a forecasting model that can anticipate changing business conditions.
- AWS cost alerts: Real-time cost alerts and forecasting for cloud usage enables organizations to proactively monitor their cloud management stack and avoid surprises in their monthly bills.
Anodot’s solutions are used in numerous industries including telecom, fintech, gaming, ecommerce, and more. A few of Anodot’s primary use cases include customer experience monitoring, partner monitoring, revenue and cost monitoring, and network monitoring.
Numerify
Now part of Digital.ai, Numerify provides enterprise IT leaders with AI-powered business analytics software to be more efficient and agile, while also reducing disruptions and risk. A few of their core IT analytics solutions include:
- IT change risk prediction
- IT service management process optimization
- DevOps performance management
The primary use cases of Numerify’s platform include driving innovation through insights, optimizing IT costs, and improving the service experience.
Moogsoft
Moogsoft is an AIOps and observability platform built for ITOps and DevOps teams. Companies use their platform to streamline incident management and resolution, prevent service outages, and meet SLAs. In particular, a few primary use cases of their solution include:
- Optimizing the digital experience through continuous observation
- Ensuring continuous availability by anticipating outages
- Providing agility to IT departments and minimizing false positives
Moogsoft is primarily targeted towards enterprise-level customers.
Dynatrace
Dynatrace is another AI-powered observability platform that’s focused on managing cloud complexity. Aside from autonomous cloud monitoring, a few of their core solutions include:
- Microservice and container monitoring
- DevOps management
- IoT monitoring
- Digital experience monitoring
Dynatrace is priced lower than many other competitors, making it a viable solution for small-to-medium businesses.
BigPanda
BigPanda provides IT Ops automation tools that help businesses prevent outages and resolve incidents faster. The platform accomplishes this with event correlation, root cause analysis, and level-0 automation. The main value proposition of the platform includes;
- Reducing operating costs
- Increasing performance and availability
- Increasing business velocity
BigPanda is primarily targeted for enterprise-level companies.
Customer Experience and Analytics Tools
Customer experience and analytics tools are used to monitor how users are interacting with an organization, whether it’s on the website or inside a product. These tools are typically used to optimize conversions and improve product decision making.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one of the most widely used tools for website analytics. The tool provides website and app owners with insights into traffic, conversions, audience demographics, and metrics to measure the ROI of marketing campaigns. Google Analytics is completely free to use, making it a valuable tool to use alongside other software.
Adobe Analytics
Adobe Analytics is a tool used to turn customer interaction data into realtime and actionable insights. As part of the Adobe Cloud, the platform combines data insights from other tools such as Adobe Audience Manager to create a single customer journey and profile. The platform also provides customer journey reporting, dashboards, and predictive intelligence. Adobe Analytics is primarily targeted towards enterprise customers.
Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics is a marketing analytics tool that specializes in customer engagement automation. Specifically, the platform is designed to help marketers understand and engage with each customer through behavioral analytics, segmentation, and email campaign automation. Kissmetrics focuses on ecommerce and SaaS companies and is targeted towards small-to-medium sized businesses.
Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is a website optimization tool that’s designed to improve the user experience. The platform offers several tools to do so, including:
- Heatmaps
- Visitor recordings
- A/B testing
- Surveys
Crazy Egg offers a 30-day free trial and is primarily used by small-to-medium businesses.
Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a product analytics tool for both web and mobile. The tool provides customer insights designed to convert, engage, and retain more users. Specifically, it provides marketers and product designers with interactive reports and dashboards, customer segmentation, data management, and more. Mixpanel is free to try for up to 100K monthly tracked users.
Amplitude
Amplitude is another product intelligence tool for web and mobile. Their platform is designed to help teams with product-related decision making with real-time analytics, data management, behavioral targeting, and team collaboration. Amplitude is free to try and is used by both startups and enterprise-level customers.
And that’s our list! While there’s no single tool that will perform all of a company’s analytical needs, with the right mix of software you’ll be in a much better position to optimize user experience and increase the bottom line.
Written by Anodot
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