Top Data Visualization Tools

Whenever you encounter a thorny business problem, data is your secret weapon. By deploying tools for business intelligence and data analytics, you can crunch very large datasets and get real-time insights to assist your decision-making process.

However, using basic data analysis tools such as Excel spreadsheets and CSV files isn’t going to cut it. In particular, data visualization tools are tremendously valuable assets that help you rapidly understand your business performance at a glance. By converting big data into a clean, attractive visual presentation, the best data visualization tools improve your employees’ productivity, make data-driven insights more accessible, and improve your business profitability in the long run.

The 5 best data visualization tools are:

• Tableau for advanced business intelligence, analytics, and data visualization needs.
• Microsoft Power BI for BI, analytics, and visualization across the Microsoft ecosystem.
• Google Analytics for analyzing customers’ behavior on your website.
• Sisense for cloud data modeling, analytics, and visualization.
• Datawrapper

Companies generate massive amounts of data on a day-to-day basis, from the number of website visits and purchases to customers’ social media posts and support queries. Using the right tools to visualize and understand your data can provide visibility into your customers and their behavior, as well as advice on how to improve your business performance.

With all that said, which data visualization tool should you choose for your business? Below, we’ll go over data visualization tools to consider and their key benefits.

1. Tableau

Tableau is an enterprise-grade business intelligence and analytics platform that offers many different visualization features, including interactive charts (pie charts, bar charts, etc.), dashboards, graphs, heatmaps, pie charts, infographics, and more. The company offers multiple versions of the Tableau software:

• Tableau Desktop: The “classic” version of Tableau that runs on an on-premises computer.
• Tableau Online: A fully hosted SaaS (software as a service) self-service analytics solution in the cloud.
• Tableau Public: A free version of the software that creates simple visualizations based on data sources such as a spreadsheet or file.

Beyond its data visualization capabilities, Tableau offers many more features that make it one of the top data visualization tools. These include advanced functionality for collaboration, security, accessibility for mobile devices, and even AI and machine learning to build predictive models. This makes Tableau a good choice for more technical-minded data analysts

2. Microsoft Power BI

Like Tableau, Microsoft Power BI is another major player in the field of business intelligence, analytics, and data visualization. With Power BI, you can quickly and easily spin up interactive dashboards that monitor your most important metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators), so that you can easily monitor the health of your business.

Microsoft Power BI is perhaps best for existing Microsoft customers who want to integrate their software, as well as for smaller businesses, Microsoft offers the Power BI Pro plan with a pricing of $9.99 per user per month. Organizations that need more resources can purchase Power BI Premium for $20 per user per month or $4,995 per capacity per month for advanced features such as artificial intelligence and self-service data preparation for big data.

3. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a web analytics service that helps sites better track and understand their customers’ behavior for SEO (search engine optimization) and digital marketing. By inserting a small piece of JavaScript code on your web pages, Google Analytics will automatically record information such as the number of users and sessions, the bounce rate, the number of goal completions (e.g., making a purchase or adding an item to the shopping cart), and more. Google Analytics will then display these data points using interactive visualizations that convey how customers interact with your website.

For small and medium-sized businesses, Google Analytics is a free tool; however, larger businesses with intense data-crunching needs may need to purchase Google Analytics 360, which costs an eye-popping $12,500 per month.

4. Sisense

Sisense is a cloud analytics platform that has been recognized as a “leader” in the field of cloud analytics by market researchers such as Gartner, Forrester, and G2. The Sisense website offers to help you “infuse analytics into your workstreams or products” and “build custom self-service experiences to bring AI-driven insights to you and your customers.”

In addition to features such as data modeling and embedding, Sisense comes with robust visualization capabilities that make it for visualizing your data. Users can easily build custom dashboards, widgets, and interactive visualizations with the software’s drag-and-drop interface and then share or embed them for easy access by key decision-makers.

5. Datawrapper

Datawrapper is an open-source and free online service that helps you create beautiful charts, graphs, tables, and maps. After uploading a document such as an Excel spreadsheet or a CSV file, users can select the best way to visualize the data inside the file and then publish or embed their visualizations.

Because Datawrapper is free and open-source, it will be a popular choice for small websites looking to get off the ground.

How Integrate.io Can Help with Visualizing Data

From Tableau to Microsoft Power BI and beyond, the best data visualization tools all share one thing: they make it as easy as possible for businesses to start gleaning valuable data-driven insights. To do so, however, you’ll need a robust, mature data integration platform behind the scenes that transfers fresh, up-to-date information into these tools for cutting-edge analysis.

That’s exactly where Integrate.io comes in. Integrate.io is a powerful, feature-rich solution for real-time data integration and ETL (extract, transform, load) that has been built from the ground up for the needs of businesses. With over 140 pre-built connectors and integrations—including Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, Google Analytics, and more—Integrate.io can start uniting your data sources out of the box. What’s more, Integrate.io has been designed for a gentle learning curve for users of any technical skill level, with a drag-and-drop, no-code, user-friendly visual interface.

The benefits of Integrate.io don’t stop there. The Integrate.io platform includes the FlyData CDC (change data capture) feature that automatically detects changes to a source table or dataset so that you can extract only the information that has been modified since your previous integration job. In addition, Integrate.io supports reverse ETL functionality to export information out of your centralized data warehouse and into third-party software for easier access by users across the organization.

Ready to see the benefits of Integrate.io for your website? We’re here to help. Contact our team of data experts today to discuss your business needs and objectives, or to start your 14-day trial of the Integrate.io platform.