The most nutritious meal in the world won’t nourish you unless it’s digested. The best data collected won’t nurture a business — unless it’s digested.
In a nutshell, business intelligence is the science of and tools around collecting and processing data to turn it into usable insights for companies. Business intelligence extends to sales, marketing, operations and even HR functions.
The companies included here offer business intelligence of all kinds to a variety of customers, multinational organizations to small e-commerce retailers to healthcare providers, commercial real-estate brokers, restaurant owners and even urban planners.
23 Business Intelligence Tools to Know
- Adswerve
- Akasa
- Affinity
- Alation
- Alteryx
- Because Intelligence
- ClearView CRM
- ClicData
- Closed
- Crunchbase
- Domo
- G2
- Grow
- Gtmhub
- IBM Cognos Analytics
- Insight Software
- NavigatorCRE
- Rivery.io
- SAP
- Sisense
- Tableau
- Toast
- Urban Footprint
All BI companies, be they startups or global organizations, are making analytics easily accessible and understandable by employees across an organization. Why? They’re realizing that more and more, it’s not just c-suite executives and IT personnel accessing data. Everyone, including front-line employees, can use data and analytics to make on-the-spot, profit-enhancing, efficient business decisions.
Keep reading to appreciate the fact that in the business-intelligence world, there’s a company that can help make a business run smarter.
24 Business Intelligence Tools
Founded: 2011
Headquarters: Fully Remote
Enigma uses AI and machine learning to analyze vast data sets, combing for insights on small and medium sized businesses. Serving companies like payment processors and credit card issuers, Enigma’s gives its clients comprehensive intelligence regarding businesses’ identity, financial wellbeing and behavior, which is useful in contexts ranging from risk monitoring to sales and marketing.
Founded: 2009
Headquarters: Denver, Colorado
Digital media consulting company Adswerve serves agencies, analysts, publishers and marketers. It offers business intelligence within the Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics ecosystems, including campaign management and optimization, data and media audits, data governance, BigQuery machine learning services and data collection and reporting. Adswerve has worked with major names like Gannett, Food Lion, GoFundMe, TOMS and Whole Foods.
Founded: 2018
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Akasa’s offerings are tailored to the healthcare sector, and help hospitals, physicians’ groups and other providers “increase revenue and team efficiency,” according to its website. Business-office products help manage and keep track of claims and claim status as well as prior authorizations.
Founded: 2014
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Affinity says its platform helps solve one of the most difficult parts of the sales call: Finding the way to the right person at the organization. It promises customer relationship management (CRM) without the “data drudgery,” and says its tools can automatically create contact profiles as well as a custom, team-pleasing CRM platform.
Founded: 2012
Headquarters: Redwood City, California
A data catalog, for those who do not know, is an inventory of all of an organization’s data assets. Alation says it pioneered the data catalog market, and its tools make it easy for users to search data catalogs and enhance their company’s data culture. The company says its products save users dozens of work days and millions of dollars in productivity due to quicker data-discovery times.
Founded: 2011
Headquarters: Irvine, California
This woman-founded company’s products empower everyone at an organization to use data to arrive at “transformational” outcomes, according to its website. Its lineup includes an analytics cloud; an APA platform; Alteryx Designer, which enables efficient data prepping, blending and analytics; and an automatic machine-learning tool.
Founded: 2020
Headquarters: Tampa, Florida
Because Intelligence gives e-commerce stores with high SKU counts a no-code option for updating product pages to keep them current with customer reviews, delivery times, promotions and shipping, according to the company website. Such enhancements help boost the add-to-cart rate and grow their businesses. This woman-founded company was launched in Boston.
Founded: 1987
Headquarters: Saratoga, California
ClearView CRM helps foundations, advocacy organizations, arts and culture institutions and other types of nonprofits raise money and manage donors more effectively. Nonprofit professionals can find and court prospective donors, keep track of major gifts and perform other necessary tasks. A mobile app helps with on-site fundraising events and also delivers donor info to development people in the field, its website says.
Founded: 2012
U.S. Headquarters: Scottsdale, Arizona
ClicData pulls data from 200-plus sources, including social-media sites, Salesforce and Amazon, funnels it into an “intelligent data warehouse” and from there creates live dashboards and alerts, according to its website. The company said its product “empowers teams to make data-driven decisions based on reliable, automated and interactive data analytics.”
Founded: 2017
Headquarters: Lehi, Utah
Clozd aims to help sales teams figure out why they win some business and don’t win other business, and then rack up more wins based on the data. Clozd’s win-loss analysis uses feedback from customers, tracks sales win rates over time and analyzes those rates by segment, competitor and other factors, according to Clozd’s website. The platform also invites sales prospects to give feedback and then evaluates that feedback. It recently raised a $52 million Series A funding round.
Founded: 2007
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Crunchbase gathers all sorts of data, including funding amount and rounds, investors, number of employees, launch date and news items on public and private companies, both startups and established. It is a go-to site for discovering intel on competitors. It was founded as a branch of TechCrunch and became its own company in 2015.
Founded: 2010
Headquarters: American Fork, Utah
Domo’s cloud-based platform enables access to data and analytics from anywhere and by any employee, from a front-line worker to the CEO, according to the company’s website. The platform can integrate data from a variety of sources, including AWS, Salesforce, Facebook and Oracle; customers can create custom dashboards and also safely share analytics with stakeholders.
Founded: 2012
Headquarters: Chicago, Illinois
G2 offers user reviews of business software, enabling users to make informed choices about which software they will purchase. G2’s website has more than 1.7 million reviews of popular business software, and website visitors looking for intel on software can sort reviews by company size, purpose, user function and other factors to arrive at the most germane reviews. Reviews appear in both written and video formats.
Founded: 2014
Headquarters: Lehi, Utah
Business intelligence isn’t just for big business: Grow’s technology aims to help small- to medium-size businesses with BI needs. The company says its technology makes it easy to “prepare, cleanse and transform data across multiple data sources.” Its technology connects with Airtable, Asana, Google Ads and other data sources. In 2022 Grow was acquired by Epicor, a business-software company based in Austin, Texas.
Founded: 2015
Headquarters: Denver, Colorado
A company knows what it wants to do and needs a path to get there: That’s where Gtmhub comes in. The company says its “sophisticated” OKR platform helps organizations make decisions in real time, which in turn leads to faster growth. The company’s website has a function that helps customers find Gtmhub-certified partners who can help with OKR adoption.
Founded: 1969
Headquarters: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
This Watson-fueled business-intelligence suite from tech giant IBM offers analytics for sales, marketing and operations. The AI-enhanced product helps companies clean and prepare data from a number of sources, create dashboards to easily locate, read and share analyses, find patterns, and create personalized reports, according to IBM’s website. A mobile app helps managers access data from anywhere. IBM acquired Cognos in 2008.
Founded: 2000
Headquarters: Raleigh, North Carolina
Insight Software (the company acquired Logi Analytics in April of 2021) promises to fix “disjointed user experience,” “roadmap disruption” and “painful connectivity” often associated with analytics, according to the company’s website. Solutions include financial reporting and analysis and equity management as well as business intelligence for a variety of industries, among them education, government, healthcare and retail.
Founded: 2015
Headquarters: Seattle, Washington
NavigatorCRE, a startup founded by seasoned commercial real-estate professionals, offers a platform that condenses and simplifies data needs for managers and owners, tenants, real-estate brokerages and corporate services, and developers and construction companies, according to the company’s website. Users can tap data to assess their portfolios, keep tabs on monthly rent collection, check tenant expiration dates, and review details on acquisitions, the website says.
Founded: 2018
Headquarters: New York, New York
Rivery’s cloud-based, no-code platform “connects, unifies and transforms” all of a company’s data sources in just a few clicks, according to the Rivery website. Tools included connecting to more than 180 data sources (plus the ability to add custom sources); data orchestration; data models; and data governance and security, according to the website. The company recently raised $30 million in Series B funding.
Founded: 1972
U.S. Headquarters: Newtown Square, Pennslyvannia
Global, multi-billion-dollar SAP offers business solutions for CRM and customer experience, supply-chain management, financial management, spend management and human-resources management for companies of all sizes. It is a player in industries ranging from consumer products to energy and natural resources, and recently announced a partnership with investment company Dediq to form SAP Fioneer to expand its presence in the financial services sector.
Founded: 2004
Headquarters: New York, New York
Sisense’s code or no-code platform lets users customize and personalize their data experience for both internal and external analytics, according to its website. It offers three solutions from one platform: Sisense Fusion, to embed custom analytics into applications; Sisense Infusion Apps, which allows sharing of data in Google products, Slack and other apps; and Sisense Fusion Analytics, which “empowers everyone to make intelligence-driven decisions,” according to the company.
Founded: 2003
Headquarters: Seattle, Washington
Tableau, which was acquired by Salesforce in 2019, touts its easy-to-use, code-free products that anyone in an organization can see. Users can connect to data with “fully integrated” artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities and also “see and understand” data via vibrant visuals.
Founded: 2011
Headquarters: Boston, Massachusetts
Toast makes point-of-sale software for restaurants and is used in tens of thousands of restaurant locations across the country. Its main product is a point-of-sale system that enables servers to take orders and payments table side as well as collect feedback from guests. Toast’s payroll and team management products help managers schedule for highest efficiency, and customer data captured can help determine the success of email marketing campaigns. Toast went public in 2021.
Founded: 2014
Headquarters: Berkeley, California
Urban Footprint helps government officials, real estate developers and urban planners use data to create “more sustainable, resilient communities,” according to its website. For instance, government officials can use SNAP data to find out which households are food insecure and devise plans to reach those households. In May of 2022 the company raised $25 million in Series B funding