The magic quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics platforms by Gartner
shows the relative positions of the market competitors. By examining the
quadrant at a high level, Tableau is a clearly the unmatched leader in the
market for 2014.
I have chosen the following 5 BI tools for final
comparison:
|
S. No.
|
Tool Name
|
Magic Quadrant Position
|
|
1
|
Tableau
|
Leader
|
|
2
|
Microstrategy
|
Leader
|
|
3
|
Qlikview
|
Leader
|
|
4
|
GoodData
|
Niche Player
|
|
5
|
Logi Analytics
|
Challenger
|
Below are the strengths and weakness based on
which I have ranked these tools:-
Tableau
It has been a benchmark in business intelligence software’s for
many of its competitors as it is very highly rated by the consumers. It started
as a basic tool for data analysts but now has captured the Enterprise market as
well.
Strengths
1. Development
Interface for the Tableau is extremely user-friendly as it is intuitive and
everything to the user needs is just a click away. It’s easy enough that people
with basic knowledge of MS Excel can understand it.
2. Visualization of the
dashboard requires almost negligible formatting as it is designed based on a
lot of scientific research.
3. Enterprise-ready and
easy to manage and administer. It is easy to install and gives the user the
ability to create interactive and analytical dashboards right from the word go.
Weaknesses
1. Object Management is
not offered by Tableau: Versioning of documents is not a feature in Tableau,
the user needs to take the backups by themselves, as there is no concept of
development and production.
2. Average Sales
Experience during the entire sales life cycle: Several customers have
categorized Tableau as inflexible and find the 25 percent annual maintenance
fee higher than competitor offerings in the market.
Microstrategy
Strengths
1. SQL
engine of Microstrategy is very robust and the users just have to submit the
dimensional model and the reports can be easily built using drag & drop
options. This is one of the biggest strength of Microstrategy and also
one of the reasons for its popularity.
2. Mobile Business
Intelligence, the most premium version offered by Microstrategy is a leader in
this domain.
Weaknesses
1. Development interface for
Microstrategy is complex and time consuming. Its traditional and
resource-intensive environment makes it less user-friendly
2. Development speed is slower as
lot of front development is required even for generating the smallest reports.
3. Although the answers
provided by this tool are much appreciated, Visualizations of Microstrategy are
not too usable. They require external formatting.
Qlikview
Strengths
1. Excellent online support: It
has excellent training material, demos and tutorials that attract new
customers.
2. Performance of
Qlikview is high as it has in-memory processing of data.
Weaknesses
1. Development
interface is not logically organized i.e. it has too many tabs in the menu
which makes it less user-friendly as compared to its competitors.
2. Although, the Development
environment is good but can be problematic for a team working together on the
data set. There is no check-in and check-out functionality to handle code
versioning and simultaneous development.
GoodData
Strengths
1. End to end solution is
provided as platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for Data Warehousing, Data Integration
and Analytics.
2. GoodData regularly updates its
customer service and reacts to security threats immediately. Their responsive
behavior and excellent cloud experience makes it a secure tool.
Weaknesses
1. GoodData BI is
mostly used in traditional BI reporting and simpler dashboards. It is not as
good as its competitors for performing advanced analytics. Since, they are
pretty responsive, they must soon find a solution to tackle this weakness.
Logi Analytics
Strengths
1. Development Interface is
intuitive making it very easy for the business users and the developers alike
giving an amazing experience.
2. Ease of use and shorter
learning curve results in the shortest report development times as compared to
its competitors.
Weaknesses
1. It
competes with the open-source vendors and has resource limitations due to its
relatively smaller size.
2. Global
presence and support available for Logi Analytics is limited as compared to its
competitors.
Below is the list of criteria that I have chosen
to form the comparison matrix:-
1. Customer
Experience
The first criteria I have chosen to assess the 5
chosen vendors is customer experience. This includes the ease of use of the
tool as well as how easy it is for the users to be start the analysis. Also,
how well the help and support documentation of the tools is made available by
the vendors can be considered as an attribute to the overall customer
experience.
Tableau is easiest to use out of all the other
above-mentioned vendors. It is very intuitive and everything seems a click
away: Changing chart types, drilling down, exporting, filtering, and overall
navigation are all incredibly straightforward. Microstrategy and Qlikview
can be considered at the same level in terms of ease of use and overall
experience while GoodData, Logi Analytics can be ranked a little better than
aforementioned.
2. Cost
This is one of the major parameters users
consider for finalizing any tool. The below table summarizes the price of
license in terms of dollars per user. Also, free trial versions serve as a good
practical demo for the users and also gives them look and feel familiarity as
enlisted below:
|
Vendor
|
Free Trial
|
Price per user $
|
|
Tableau
|
Yes
|
500
|
|
Microstrategy
|
Yes
|
600
|
|
Qlikview
|
No
|
1395
|
|
GoodData
|
No
|
500
|
|
Logi Analytics
|
Yes
|
950
|
3. Mobile BI
It defines how well the suite allows
customers to deliver BI to mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablet
computers. This criteria checks whether there is native platforms support for
platforms like Android and iOS. Also, it enables enterprises to deliver
analytical content and customize their mobile solution based on client
location.
Microstrategy provides an award-winning,
industry-leading interface for both iOS and Android. Hence, Microstrategy is a
clear winner in a business case where mobility is a requirement. Qlikview also
provides good support for mobile BI driving many users towards it. Tableau and
GoodData are on the same scale in this field. Logi Analytics provides very
basic mobile capabilities and is not considered a good BI tool for mobility.
4. Data
Integration
This means does the tool have native connectors
to a wide range of data sources like CSV, SQL databases, Salesforce,
Hadoop, Firebird etc.
Tableau integrates well with almost all the data
sources. Other vendors also integrate well with many of the popular vendors but
not as many as Tableau when it comes to comparison. GoodData requires all of
the data to be first moved to the cloud, which can be a limiting factor. But at
the same time, GoodData provides its own custom-developed data integration
solution by licensing Vertica. Qlikview provides scripting language for
integrating and loading the data from multiple sources in memory, it does not
provides any advanced ETL capabilities.
5. Scalability
It refers to the capability of the BI tool to be
enlarged to accommodate the growth in terms of handling large volume of data,
resource utilization, number of users etc.
Microstrategy supports and offers 64-bit
processing. Tableau has excellent rating when it comes to scalability whereas
Qlikview has the least rating because there is a RAM limitation to it. Logi
Analytics can be considered at the same level. GoodData has a clustered,
parallel architecture which makes it as scalable as Tableau.
Comparison Chart
Weight
|
Tableau
|
Microstrategy
|
Qlikview
|
GoodData
|
Logi Analytics
|
|
1.Customer
Experience
|
100%
|
10
|
8
|
8
|
9
|
9
|
2. Cost
per user
|
80%
|
10
|
9
|
6
|
9
|
8
|
3. Mobile
BI
|
70%
|
8
|
10
|
9
|
8
|
7
|
4. Data
Integration
|
90%
|
10
|
9
|
8
|
9
|
8
|
5. Scalability
|
100%
|
10
|
10
|
8
|
10
|
8
|
Points
|
100%
|
4.26
|
4.03
|
3.43
|
3.99
|
3.55
|
Rank
|
1
|
2
|
5
|
3
|
4
|
On the basis of the chosen 5 criteria, a comparison chart is drawn. To sum it up, Tableau emerges as a definite leader in BI tools. Second position goes to Microstrategy. GoodData is a niche player as portrayed by the magic quadrant. In this analysis, it secures a third position by a substantial margin and not far from shifting to the leaders quadrant. Logi Analytics is a good challenger as portrayed by the magic quadrant to the leader Qlikview. By a very close margin, Logi Analytics takes lead over Qlikview to secure the fourth position.
The above rankings are based on the 5 most
important criteria’s according to me as an end-user. There is no single
parameter which could help us in determining which vendor to use. It’s a
combination of lot of parameters, which are prioritized based on the
enterprise/business requirements. If there is a dilemma between two or more
vendors, free trial versions provided by the vendors can be used as pilot
projects to know and understand how the organization and end-users accept the
tool and what good a fit it would be for the business as a whole.
References:
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