Top 10 Fastest Growing BI Software Products in 2014
An estimated $14 billion is spent on business intelligence (BI) software each year. Last year, the market grew more than 8 percent, with certain segments like Cloud BI growing much faster. It is also attracting a lot of investment capital. BI software companies Domo, Thoughtspot, Birst, GoodData, Looker and Tidemark raised over $200 million in investment capital in 2014 alone.
Business Intelligence software is also an extremely popular category on TrustRadius. Unique page views for BI software products – a measure for how many people are running evaluations – grew 16 percent from Q2 to Q3. While page views are not an absolute representation of category growth for a variety of reasons – including our own improvement in search rankings – they are a good proxy.
The most evaluated BI product on TrustRadius in Q3 by a fair margin was Tableau, followed by Qlikview. The next most evaluated products were IBM Cognos, Tibco Spotfire, and SAP Business Objects. While evaluation frequency is typically a good thing, it can also signal that you are being frequently considered for replacement.
Three of the top four most evaluated products – Tableau, Qlikview, and Tibco Spotfire – are discovery/ visualization tools. Two of the top ten most evaluated solutions – Birst and Domo are cloud BI solutions. One open source based solution, Jaspersoft – recently acquired by Tibco – also made the Top 10.
When looking at evaluation frequency growth rates among the Top 10 most evaluated products, the rankings are quite different. The fastest ascending products – in percentage growth terms – were Domo and Jaspersoft, followed by Microstrategy and Microsoft BI. When you look beyond the Top 10, there are products like Alteryx that are growing even faster.
For simplicity, we grouped all BI products together for this analysis. There are material differences between types of BI solution, however, that factor into any evaluation. In broad terms, we segment the BI product category into:
- Discovery/ Visualization
- Full Stack
- Cloud Full Stack
- Open Source Based
We consider predictive analytics and functional-specific BI as distinct categories which we did not include here.
When evaluating your options, first determine which class of product is most appropriate for your use case, then compare products within that class. We will be making this selection process easier when we publish our inaugural Buyers’ Guide to BI Software later this quarter. In the interim, visit the BI Category on TrustRadius to begin your research.
