You’re not far off the mark if you’re considering free BI software. They’re flexibly deployable and user-friendly, and some are even full-featured. What’s not to like?
By free, we mean at no cost, though people sometimes use it for programs that aren’t entirely free. So what’s free and what isn’t? Worry not. This article breaks down related terms and showcases the best free BI tools on the market.
What This Article Covers
Free software is an introduction to fully functional paid versions. Vendors hope you’ll like the product enough to upgrade. It helps them establish their brand identity and innovate with gathered usage data.
Free-of-cost programs, free software and freeware aren’t the same, as we’ll discuss ahead.
Best Free BI Tools
This section showcases the best free business intelligence tools based on our analyst research. The table below compares them based on company size, deployment and pricing.
Tableau Public
Tableau has a web-based Public edition that’s free to use. It’s a great entry point for exploring data, learning visualization and building a portfolio.
The platform saves all files to the Tableau Server. The vendor provides 10 GB storage and 15 million rows per workbook. For users concerned with data security, you can keep data confidential while making visualizations public.
Tableau Public is a free BI tool that democratizes data by allowing public access to visualizations. Source
Top Benefits
- Get Hired: Create a portfolio by displaying your data skills online. Build your digital skills by downloading Tableau Public. Learn from how-to videos, user forums, podcasts and sample metrics.
- Improve Decisions: Use data in daily decisions with elegant graphics and handy dashboards on a low-code interface.
- Analyze Data: Organize information into a standard format. Remove headers and footers from reports before analysis with a few clicks.
- Innovate: Explore new ideas using simple menus and screen options. It’s an excellent tool for freelancers, consultants and small organizations.
- Increase Engagement: Capture and hold people’s attention with beautiful graphics and high performance. Use visuals to tell data stories. Large enterprises find the free version useful for internal communications and storytelling.
Primary Features
- Data Interpreter: Organize data for analysis by removing headers, footers, notes and titles.
- VizQL: Query data without coding. Tableau has its own language, VizQL, that interprets your actions into queries at the backend.
- Reporting: Create dashboards with multiple interactive worksheets, each serving as a report page. Add context by including text boxes, images and tables.
- Show Me: View which charts are available and get recommendations with the Show Me option. Change colors, sizes and labels as desired and get help from tooltips.
- Data Pane: Choose dimensions, measures, calculated fields and parameters from a pane beside the workspace.
Limitations
- Doesn’t allow saving work locally.
- Doesn’t connect to databases.
- Not available on mobile. However, you can visit the Tableau public website using a mobile browser.
Our take: Choose Tableau Public if you’re on a budget or starting with analysis and want to share your work publicly. Ideal for data enthusiasts and students.
Choose Tableau Desktop if you need high-end analysis, forecasting, custom calculations and collaboration. It’s also a great option if you work with large datasets or require private data storage. But there may be a learning curve.
Platform:
Company Size Suitability: S M L
Zoho Analytics
It has a free tier for data analytics that sources data from on-premises and cloud databases, drives, files, feeds, and business apps.
Charts, widgets, pivot tables and tabular views present your data in an easy-to-understand format. Get answers to plain-text questions and set up the system for predictive analytics.
It lets you add location data to reports, perform calculations and keep everyone in the loop. The Always Free plan allows up to two users and 10K rows. The platform is available on mobile devices.
Free BI tools convey the desired information with customizable dashboards. Source
Top Benefits
- Stay Competitive: Make crucial decisions using live data from databases and business systems.
- Secure Data: Safely share information, knowing encryption and passwords protect your data. Label personally identifiable information (PII) and manage what users can see with role-based access control.
- Anticipate Trends: Use data to predict trends, set up alerts and chat with an AI assistant with a single click. Determine how changes in variables will impact business.
- Streamline Operations: Collaborate with people without them logging in to Zoho. Share reports and leave comments to conduct meaningful discussions.
Primary Features
- Workspaces: Keep your work private — work in an exclusive workspace while controlling who sees what. Manage your content in folders. Prepare data using Zoho DataPrep.
- Data Visualization: Show data the way you want — create pivot, summary or tabular views. Add numbers and visuals and capture data changes as snapshots to use in dashboards.
- Data Analysis: Map datasets by applying joins and filters or splitting columns. Add query results into tables and feed them into the model.
- Formula Engine: Derive information from the available data using its rich library of functions and formulae.
Limitations
- Doesn’t allow over three users.
- Doesn’t allow over three scheduled data imports.
- Doesn’t provide over five workspaces in one user account.
Our take: Choose the free plan for small dataset analysis and simple reporting.
Choose a paid plan for unlimited imports, frequent refreshes and AI analytics. You get advanced data prep, alerts and collaboration. Plans start at $25 per user monthly. The vendor offers a 15-day free trial and connections to over 50 business apps.
Platform:
Company Size Suitability: S M L
Power BI
Microsoft Power BI Desktop is free to download and allows storing up to 10 GB of content per user. The platform connects to local and online databases and services. Microsoft provides seamless connectivity to Azure Services and the Power Platform.
It’s Microsoft’s formula language for working with data models. Readymade, quick measures are also available. There’s a mobile app for Windows, Android and iOS. You can create content but need at least a Pro license to share it.
Free BI tools have dashboards even on mobile devices, but they may lack advanced functionality. Source
Top Benefits
- Stay Competitive: Make data easy to use without coding and DAX, its formula language. Empower non-technical users to perform data tasks while controlling who sees what.
- Improve Decisions: Put your data to work — analyze what happened and make decisions about what to do next. Get the latest information by connecting to sources in real time and understand it faster with visual dashboards.
- Save Time: Clean and transform data without breaking into a sweat with the Query Editor and DAX. Analyze data at the source with Direct Query and schedule data updates.
- Gain AI: Learn what users say about your brand with sentiment analysis using Azure Cognitive Services and AI. Q&A and Quick Insights make it easy to use the software.
- Stay Connected: Keep in touch with your KPIs via desktop and mobile. Never miss an update with alerts.
Primary Features
- Query Editor: Clean and shape your data on an easy-to-use interface with visual tools. Filter and combine columns to prepare data for analysis.
- Calculated Columns: Get readymade measures by specifying the data to the system. Or create your own using DAX.
- Q&A: Explore data using plain text and view it as graphics. Gain contextual suggestions using its autocomplete feature.
- Security: Define guardrails by assigning user and group roles and business rules. Restrict access to data and models with object-level security.
- Bookmarks: Get to report pages quicker using bookmarks. Capture report pages with applied filters, slicers, sort order and highlights.
Limitations
- Doesn’t allow dashboard building.
- Isn’t available for Mac users.
- Doesn’t provide report sharing.
Our Take: Power BI Desktop is great for personal use but doesn’t allow content sharing.
Choose Power BI Pro for simple reporting needs and internal collaboration at $10 monthly.
Choose Power BI Premium for large datasets and complex analysis. Create and share paginated reports within your team and externally. Get more storage, frequent data refreshes and AI tools for data modeling.
Read our Power BI Pro vs Premium article to understand the difference.
Platform:
Company Size Suitability: S M L
QlikView
The Personal Edition of QlikView is free to download. It has all the features of the paid version, so switching up is easy. You don’t need to download any other program. Sign up for the license key, and that’s it.
It’s an excellent data tool for individual users, students and small startups. You can produce dynamic reports by combining data from many sources. Linking summaries and multimedia to data is possible.
Phone and email support isn’t available, though an active user community is a plus.
QlikView is a full-featured free BI tool ready to install on your local machine. Source
Top Benefits
- Analyze Data: Combine big data with data stored in memory. Connect to web services, social media sites and online services using an API-based connector.
- Dig Deep: Add to what you know by searching within data. Remix and arrange data as desired, filter on columns and get details with a few clicks.
- Scale: Support more users at a time by distributing workloads across clusters. Maintain high performance while working with multiple nodes.
- Gain Mobile BI: View your data at any time with a mobile app. Use QlikView functions freely for calculations and reporting. Switch between mouse, pen and touch input with ease.
- Upgrade: Switch to Qlik Sense without burning a hole in your pocket.
Primary Features
- Report editor: Create, edit and modify reports, design their layout, and add pages and images.
- Data Indexing: Records data relationships, so there’s no need to clean or model data beforehand.
- Selections: Filter the desired data using the selections option. Watch as the platform responds by highlighting linked values.
- External Connections: Add information to reports and dashboards from other sources.
- Secure Data: Works with the security settings and permissions of the host OS. You can hide sensitive files and display sections to different users based on their role.
Limitations
- Doesn’t provide timely updates.
- Doesn’t work with external documents.
- Doesn’t allow the sharing of QlikView documents with unregistered users.
Our Take: Choose the free tool for individual use. You can access local files and data sources published earlier as it doesn’t connect to the server in real time.
Choose the paid edition for mobile support, advanced analytics, direct discovery and dynamic updates. Plus, you can develop custom applications. The vendor offers a 30-day free trial.
Platform:
Company Size Suitability: S M L
Looker Studio
Formerly Google Data Studio, Looker is free software for business intelligence. It’s available via the web and gathers data from many sources, including Search Console, Google Analytics and Google Ads, into reports.
You can view and share data with others via a mobile app. Computer software, retail, marketing and advertising industries use Looker reports.
Make informed decisions with free BI tools. Source
Top Benefits
- Plan: Speed up your regular workflows by embedding Looker into business systems. Fetch data, filter results and schedule reports with APIs. The free plan offers limited APIs.
- Convey Insights: Share performance and market data with senior management and teams. Understand the metrics with dashboards and reports. Add videos, linked content and images.
- Empower Users: Go beyond the surface by interacting with reports and filtering content. Work together using comments in reports. Use custom colors and styles to highlight interesting content.
- View on Mobile: Stay informed about your KPIs when away from the office. Collaborate with your team via shared reports on mobile devices.
Primary Features
- Source Connectivity: Analyze data from Google BigQuery, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Google Sheets. Pull your website metrics from Google Search Console, Google Ads and Google Analytics.
- Functions: Dig deep. Perform calculations on your data using many types of functions.
- Reports: Generate new reports or use templates. Embed content into your systems. Drag and drop datasets to view the desired information.
- Parameters: Allow users to see custom views by making reports interactive. Pass input values to connectors and calculated fields.
- Looker Studio API: Improve efficiency by reducing manual work. Set up the system to create, update and delete content and sources.
Limitations
- Doesn’t allow custom integrations.
- Doesn’t provide flexible layout and formatting options.
- Lacks options for data joining/merge and calculations.
Our Take: Choose the free edition if you have a small to mid-sized setup. It’s a bonus if you already use the Google ecosystem.
Choose the paid version for complex data needs and large teams that must collaborate. You can create test reports and dashboards in a sandbox environment without affecting the actual data.
Shared workspaces, custom reporting, mobile insights and dedicated support are available.
Platform:
Company Size Suitability: S M L
Is Free Software the Right Choice?
The free BI tools discussed above are freemium solutions — the basic features are available at no cost, with additional features behind a paywall.
Free BI software may offer a low-cost entry point but have limited integrations, bare-bones security and minimal support. Documentation is scanty, and vendor training is non-existent, making adoption an uphill task.
Plus, data management issues, storage limitations, and a lack of collaborative features can frustrate your team mid-way.
Why take the risk?
Next Steps
When considering free BI tools, evaluate the features of paid versions as well. Investing in a suitable platform today can help you expand your business tomorrow without spending a fortune.
Get our free comparison report to compare your preferred platforms and view detailed feature descriptions for each product. Our analyst scores on a scale of zero to 100 can help you rank the products in a comparison table to arrive at an informed decision.
Have you used free BI tools, or are you considering one? Which problems are you looking to solve? Let us know in the comments.
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