Top 5 Embedded BI Tools for SaaS | Must Know SaaS Business Intelligence Software

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Rishabh Rathi

Apr 7, 2021 — 8 min read

Users today are expected to be data-driven. But when asked, they don't want to use another BI tool — another login and another interface to learn — they want easily accessible answers. As a software developer or product manager, you know that a streamlined user interface leads to wider product adoption and increased value.

Business Intelligence (BI tools) software is designed to make enterprise data more accessible to those who care about it most, and embedded business intelligence software integrates with the host application so that users can do their data entry and analysis all in one place.

What is Embedded BI (Business Intelligence)?
Sisense
BOARD
Domo
Cloudera
Exago BI

What is Embedded BI (Business Intelligence)?

Embedded BI or Embedded Business Intelligence is the integration of reports, dashboards, and data visualizations inside an application. The information is typically displayed and managed by a BI platform and is placed directly within the application's user interface to improve data usability and decision-making.

The upfront investment in purchasing and deploying a BI solution will not only save you money in the long run, but it will also improve customers’ product experience and give you a competitive edge, driving sales and generating new revenue.

BI typically includes some combination of the following features:

Canned reports: These are reports you build once so that your users can run them again and again.
Ad hoc reports: Users build these from scratch as per their own specifications.
Visualizations: Charts, graphs, gauges, KPIs, maps, etc.
Dashboards: Lots of reports and visualizations all displayed at once.
Scheduling: A program that will run and/or email reports at specific times.

Best Embedded Business Intelligence (BI) Software

There are hundreds of business intelligence (BI) solutions on the market, but not all of them are well suited to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) environment. As a SaaS provider, wading through these options is a matter of knowing what key characteristics to look for and why.

Sisense

The Sisense data & analytics platform makes it incredibly easy to mashup data from across your entire data landscape and transform it into powerful, actionable analytics applications that can be embedded anywhere. From innovative startups to global brands like GE, Wix, Nasdaq, and Philips, thousands of organizations worldwide use Sisense to accelerate innovation and drive digital transformation by embedding Sisense into their businesses.

Whether you are trying to increase analytic maturity of the internal operations of an organization or trying to improve an organization’s products and services by infusing them with analytics, the Sisense Single-Stack approach gives you everything you need to move from complex data to branded, embedded analytics that your users will love.

Features of Sisense Business Intelligence (BI) Tool

Sisense helps you go beyond the dashboard from web portals to custom applications — even chatbots and Alexa — all while delivering industry-leading customer service and the lowest TCO at scale.
Embed analytics anywhere with full customizations and white labeling that are secure and scalable.
Mash up a combination of live or cached data models to optimize performance and manage resource utilization.
Analyze data from across your entire data landscape and transform it into powerful visualizations and actionable application components.
Impact business decisions and drive change with deep insights and answers to complicated questions.

BOARD

BOARD is a fully-featured data discovery platform, offering users BI, business analytics and enterprise performance management under the hood. Customizable and interactive dashboards give users the ability to see a high-level overview of their business, as well as drill down into their KPIs to assess business performance goals.

Serves mid to large companies across various industries. The platform offers unique, customizable dashboards, which allow the user to dig down to the lowest level of detail, while also giving users a comprehensive view of their complete business.

Features of BOARD Business Intelligence (BI) Tool

All-in-One Platform: The platform combines the best of business intelligence, enterprise performance management, predictive and business analytics, and data discovery.
Server Clustering: Due to BOARD’s in-memory processing, the software can serve workloads to a nearly unlimited number of virtual nodes, ensuring full scalability with read and write support.
Cloud or On-premise: This software provides on-premises or cloud-based solutions.
Real-time Modeling: Modeling capabilities are built into BOARD’s core. They give users the ability to change data models on the fly without impacting users.
User Self-sufficiency: Its programming-free approach makes understanding and analyzing data easier for non-technical users.

Domo

Domo’s mission is to be the operating system for business, digitally connecting all your people, your data and your systems, empowering them to collaborate better, make better decisions and be more efficient, right from their phones. Domo works with many of the world’s leading and most progressive brands across multiple industries including retail, media and entertainment, manufacturing, finance and more.

Domo Business Intelligence (BI) combines a powerful back end that sits on top of and connects into any existing system where data lives, including those for customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, human resources and financials, as well as any data repository or current reporting system.

Features of Domo Business Intelligence (BI) Tool

It has large number of plugins which we can easily integrate with your local server or data center.
It has excellent systemic layer feature where end user can make their dashboard / report by their own.
Additionally, it has good dashboard sharing option which avoid any communication gaps or deployment gap during the implementation.
Securely connect and normalize data from over 1,000 sources.
Make disparate data assets accessible and analyzable, with sub-second response times, at scales measured in billions of rows.
Empower your organization to take action and solve tough business problems with intelligent apps that are natively connected with real-time data.
Get compliance with GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 1/2 and ISO standards.

Cloudera

Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub empowers users to utilize their business data in order to gain actionable insights. It puts data management at analysts’ fingertips, with the scalability and elasticity to manage any workload. Its suite of integrated analytics engines gives users transparency into the whole data lifecycle, and the open-source architecture enables customizations to meet business needs.

Features of Cloudera Business Intelligence (BI) Tool

Prevents Churn: This platform excels at identifying areas for improvement that can increase customer engagement, reduce churn and improve the customer experience with your business.
Draws Data from the IoT: By integrating data from the Internet of Things, the solution offers users insight into data from a huge reservoir of IoT-connected devices.
Personalizes Targeted Marketing: Using information it’s learned about customer behavior, the system offers solutions for creating highly personalized target marketing campaigns.
Promotes Growth: The solution generates a 360-degree view of customer behavior and activity, which allows users to strategize and respond appropriately. This approach promotes a better understanding of what customers want and need, which in turn drives business growth.
Provides Data-Driven Insights: Data analytics platforms like Cloudera offer the data discovery, analysis and interpretation tools necessary for businesses to make the right choices confidently.

Exago BI

Exago BI is a 100% web-based, seamlessly embedded, no plugins required, end-to-end business analytics solution for software companies looking to provide ad hoc and operational reporting, dashboards, and scheduling to their clients. It’s full-featured BI solution tightly integrates with web-based SaaS or on-premise application and allows non-technical users to create reports and dashboards without help from IT.

Exago provides advanced features such as interactive data visualizations, geo-maps, drilldowns, user-defined formulas, and data merging into predefined, pixel perfect PDF, RTF and Excel templates.

Features of Exago Business Intelligence (BI) Tool

Exago’s built-in ETL interface doesn’t require coding or the construction of cubes to combine data from different sources and writes directly to any SQL database.
Privately owned, self-funded and profitable Exago has been providing its flagship Exago BI solution to industry leading software application and service providers and their clients since 2006.
Unique US patented software ensures users are engaged and most valuable ideas are identified.
Offer consulting and technical support – from deployment to nurturing your innovation efforts –to guarantee your project’s success.

Conclusion

There are hundreds of business intelligence (BI) solutions on the market, but not all of them are well suited to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) environment. Here, I presented 5 of the best embedded BI tools for a SaaS company. So, take this article as a reference and choose the one that meets your expectations. Which embedded BI are you using? Let me know in the comments section.

Frequently Asked Questions - FAQs

What is SaaS?

Software as a service (SaaS) is a software distribution model in which a cloud provider hosts applications and makes them available to end users over the internet.

What is SaaS BI?

SaaS Embedded BI is the integration of reports, dashboards, and data visualizations inside an application. The information is typically displayed and managed by a BI platform and is placed directly within the application's user interface to improve data usability and decision-making.

What are some SaaS BI Tools?

Some embedded bi for SaaS are Sisense, BOARD, Domo, Cloudera, Exago BI to name a few.

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