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The BI road less travelled - four alternatives to the big players

In a market dominated by Power BI, what do other players have to offer?

A look at business intelligence offerings from Zoho, Sisense, Looker and Domo

Cloud and AI/ML are driving the evolution of BI systems, which have traditionally been used by organisations to predict the future by looking at the past, but which are increasingly moving to real-time and predictive analytics.

The BI solutions market is now dominated by Microsoft with Power BI, incredible when you think it's only been around for six years. For most companies Power BI will be a known quantity as it's bundled free with Microsoft 365 Enterprise and for most businesses it probably does 80 per cent of what's needed or more without having to splash out on more specialised tools. It has the familiar Microsoft look and feel - as well as the familiar Microsoft monetisation strategy, meaning that while it is free at the basic level, when you scale up or expand its use cases it can start to get expensive.

Base: 200 UK IT leaders

We focused on the BI leaders in a previous article. This one considers some of the contenders that sit in the long tail of the graph above - Zoho, Sisense, Looker and Domo.

But first a quick look at general trends. These results are from two Computing Delta surveys more or less a year apart (March 2020 and January 2021). There has been a pretty big shift of opinion in favour of cloud either SaaS or hybrid cloud as the preferred operating environment for BI, with just 19 per cent now preferring on premises compared with 32 per cent in 2020.

Then there's AI. In a crowded market, the latest hook to pull in the punters is augmented analytics. Augmented analytics uses AI behind the scenes to help the user drill down into data to find out the factors that lie behind a particular data point, second guessing what they are looking for. It represents the latest phase of self-service, which has been the direction of travel for all BI tools for some time.

Zoho Analytics

Image source: Zoho

Now to our four contenders. The first will perhaps be the most familiar. Zoho, the Indian software firm, produces a suite of SaaS products primarily aimed at small to medium-sized companies.

Zoho is known for being cheap and cheerful, easy to use and simple to set up. It boasts lots of integrations out of the box, can run from European data centres to allay compliance concerns and has a mercifully simple pricing structure.

Many SaaS vendors used to publish representative prices online, but this practice seems to be a dying (no doubt in order to give their salespeople more of a run-up), but Zoho is refreshingly upfront.

Pricing starts at £24 per month for two users up to £460 per month (up to 50 users / 50 million rows of data). There is a 10 per cent reduction overall for annual rather than monthly subscription, and there's an additional 10 per cent off for non-profits. [Note: Prices updated following communication from Zoho].

"Quick and dirty but very easy to implement and use - the end user's choice every time" said a head of IT in education. "It works in a way that helps users and senior managers understand what is going on".

"Simple to use, great user interface, available on a range of devices, simple dashboards" said an IT manager in business services.

But there's generally a trade-off, and in this case it's the service package which is rudimentary and may not suit all needs, and also the limited configuration options: if it fits great, if not look elsewhere.

To sum up, Zoho Analytics is an easy-to-use BI platform with a wide range of integrations and a simple pricing structure aimed primarily, but not exclusively, at SMEs. The web UI and ease of setup were applauded, as was the low price point. For firms already using Zoho's tools it could be a no-brainer but for those with more bespoke use cases might want to look elsewhere.

Sisense

Image source: Sisense

Sisense's BI software is offered flexibly on-premises, on commodity hardware, on private cloud or hybrid, and it's designed for all types and sizes of organisation.

Sisense's pitch is that its API-based end-to-end BI software reduces the time required to integrate data and develop apps and dashboards. It also claims its ‘in-chip' technology is "10 times faster than processing [data] in-memory".

Pricing is not provided up front but third-party sites suggest it costs about $10,000 per year for a self-hosted solution, and $25,000 in the cloud (for five users). For comparison, Zoho's premium option is about $6,000 per year for 50 people.

Sisense was generally popular with users we interviewed.

"Running ad hoc queries and receiving answers with no special scripts to learn, no DBA and manual mashups" said a business analyst in a small business services firm. "Fast queries and good self-service".

"They innovate and support the customer, they continue meeting business executives to understand their needs," added an engineering manager at a large media company.

But while it might be impressive, is it really the new dawn the firm's marketing might suggest?

"Yet to introduce something that would palpably enhance what we currently have available with SAP and Power BI," said a mobile workforce solutions director at a large technology firm.

In summary, Sisense represents the new breed of BI, with its innovative technology, fast data processing, flexible deployment options and easy scalability to incorporate big data use cases.

But it's pricey…

Looker

Image source: Looker

Now onto Looker which made quite a splash when it launched its pure SaaS BI solution in 2014. In fact, Google was so impressed it bought the company and Looker is now part of GCP. It features an SQL-like data modelling language LookML designed to enable easier self-service and it's aimed primarily at large organisations with big data needs.

Once again pricing is on demand and they did not reply our request for information, but on its website the company says it offers Special rates for non-profits of 40% off list-price on the platform. According to third party sites comes in at about $3,000 to $5,000 per month for 10 users, so more expensive than both Sisense and Zoho.

Our respondents said Looker is strong on data governance, ETL from data warehouses and big data type operations where data is pulled from a large number of sources.

The self-service capabilities are useful, but users still need to be quite tech-savvy despite the company's claims of ease and simplicity.

And Looker is pretty focused on the data integration piece, less so on the visuals and flashy dashboards - ironic perhaps given its name. However, one user pointed out that other third party visual tools are available on GCP that will plug in if required.

Domo

Image source: Domo

Our final BI system in this series is Domo, which came out a little before Looker but with a similar idea. It is designed to be easy to use without requiring any programming knowledge of SQL skills, and the ETL tool takes care of combining data from multiple different sources, with connectors to a multitude of online stores and common enterprise tools. Like most of the new breed of BI and analytics tools, the emphasis is on the UI, and Domo's dashboards have received almost universally good reviews for being attractive and easy to create.

Once again, pricing was difficult to get hold of and they no longer publish the numbers, but in 2019 it was Professional ($175/user/month) and Enterprise ($250/user/month), so a little cheaper than Looker.

Like Looker, it was thought to be strongest on data governance, ETL from data warehouses and big data use cases.

The focus on self-service was welcomed, but users still need to be reasonably experienced, so it's not for the completely non-technical just yet.

The main complaints we heard about Domo concerned the price and also its aggressive salespeople. It was also felt that the company had sat on its laurels a bit and that other startups such as Looker and Sisense had overtaken it in the self-service stakes.

To round up, Domo is one of the new breed of SaaS BI tools that came out in the 2010s, offering easy drag and drop interfaces for integrating data. It may be a good choice for larger companies without the technical resources and infrastructure to support a traditional BI tool.

Financially, the company is still loss-making, although its share price has risen throughout 2020/21 - so it would not be too surprising if a buyout were in the offing.

There ends our journey down the BI world less travelled. Each vendor has plenty to offer in its areas of focus, but the big question remains: how much space is there for other contenders with Microsoft gobbling up the general purpose BI market?

The BI road less travelled - four alternatives to the big players

In a market dominated by Power BI, what do other players have to offer?

Zoho Analytics

Sisense

Looker

Domo

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