Choosing the Best Self Service BI Tool for Your Team

Nicholas Samuel
22 min readApr 4, 2024

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Which is the best self-service BI tool for my business users?

Image by author

Tables of Contents:

  1. Introduction
  2. Best Self-Service BI Tools

3. Final Thoughts

Introduction

Self-service business intelligence (BI) enables business users to uncover insights from their data on their own. Unlike traditional BI which requires business users to rely on IT or business intelligence specialists, self-service BI empowers all users in an organization to turn data into actions. The BI market offers some options when choosing a self-service BI tool. In this article, we have picked the best self-service BI tools that you should consider for your team.

Best Self-Service BI Tools

Knowi

Knowi logo (image- www.knowi.com)

Knowi is a unified business intelligence tool that delivers the power of self-service analytics into the hands of your team. It comes with a search-based analytics feature powered by Natural Language Processing to enable non-technical users to understand their data using natural language. They can type their questions in plain English and get immediate results even in the form of graphs and tables. You can embed this feature into your external applications and deliver the power of self-service analytics into the hands of your business customers. Knowi also comes with a simple drag & drop interface, making it easy for users to interact with their data to derive insights and share them with others. Knowi users have access to over 40 different types of visualizations to make sense of their data. Knowi users can also drill into arrays and nested objects and perform analysis on them.

Knowi Features

Choosing Knowi gives your team access to the following features:

  1. Self-Service Analytics

Knowi offers various capabilities for self-service analytics. It has an intuitive drag-and-drop interface for business users, making it easy for them to uncover insights from their data and share them with others. They can easily create dashboards and visualizations from their analysis. Knowi users can apply analysis on any widget on a dashboard, or during report/query creation. They can visually drill into arrays and nested objects and perform analysis on them. Every widget has a self-service analytics option to open it in an ad hoc mode with a data grid at the bottom.

Knowi visualization opened in ad hoc mode (image- www.knowi.com)

Knowi users can easily generate an embed code for an individual widget rather than an entire dashboard and use it to embed the widget into HTML pages or their own portals.

2. Ask Questions of your Data

Knowi has Natural Language capabilities to enable search based analytics to non-technical users. They can ask data questions in plain English to quickly derive insights and generate visualizations. This empowers any individual and member with the ability to make better and data-driven decisions quickly, anytime.

Knowi’s Natural Language capabilities are available across all datasets and widgets within a dashboard. It generates auto-complete suggestions for you based on your input and the available data sources.

You can also embed Knowi’s Search Based Analytics in your application through Single Sign-On.

The BI tool has also added its Search Based Analytics feature in Slack and Microsoft Teams, hence, you can ask questions about your data directly from these apps and get answers back instantly.

3. Visualizations

Knowi is shipped with over 30 visualization types to help users uncover insights from their data. It automatically generates visualizations from your query results. Knowi’s search-based analytics feature can automatically generate charts and tables from your plain English questions.

A Knowi dashboard (image- www.knowi.com)

Each visualization comes with unique settings to help you customize or improve its look and feel.

Knowi users with JavaScript/CSS skills can create custom visualizations to meet their unique needs.

4. Data-as-a-Service

Knowi comes with a data-as-a-service solution to deliver the self-service capabilities that modern companies need from a data platform that powers the future of their business. It enables Knowi to integrate with a wide range of data sources including SQL, NoSQL, REST APIs, and files to provide business users and data engineers secure access to any data instantly. It can work with any type of data, whether structured or unstructured, small or big data. Knowi saves your team from taking data through complex, time-consuming ETL steps or having to put data in a relational structure when connecting to NoSQL data sources.

Knowi users can blend their data across multiple sources, on the fly, and even merge structured and unstructured data.

5. Multi Data Source Joins

Knowi enables business users to perform join operations across multiple data sources simply on the user interface, provided there is a common field among the data sources involved. It supports inner join, right outer join, left outer join, full outer join, and loop join. Knowi was architecturally designed to support large-scale join operations involving millions of records across multiple data sources. You can optimize the join operations to get better performance.

6. Embedded Analytics

Knowi has made it easy for users to create and embed visualizations and analytics into their own applications or cloud applications. The embedded content can be customized in terms of appearance and functionality to improve the user experience. Knowi users can generate a simple embed URL and use it for embedding purposes. They can also choose secure URL embed to securely embed dashboards by filtering data with encrypted parameters. You can also choose Single Sign-On embedding to save users signed into your application from signing again into Knowi to view the embedded content.

7. Alerts/Anomaly Detection

Knowi generates and sends alerts to keep users updated of important changes that happen to their businesses and take action. The alerts are sent in real-time when data meets certain conditions or when anomalies are detected in your data. The alerts can be sent via email, slack, Webhook, or Microsoft Teams.

Benefits of Knowi

Choosing Knowi comes with the following benefits:

  1. Fit for self-service analytics

Knowi comes with several features to deliver the power of self-service analytics into the hands of business users and customers. They can easily create visualizations from their data and perform self-service analytics on individual widgets on a dashboard.

2. Intuitive business user interface

Knowi offers business users an intuitive drag-and-drop interface to help them extract insights from their data and share them with others.

3. Easy to perform integrations

Knowi’s data-as-a-service solution helps it deliver the power of self-service analytics to businesses. Knowi users can easily connect to any data source without installing any driver or connector. This has been made possible by its data virtualization feature. They also don’t have to take their data through ETL steps or put it in a relational form for Knowi to query against.

4. Suitable for non-technical users

Knowi has Natural Language capabilities to enable non-technical users to extract insights from their data using plain English.

5. Visualizations can be customized

Knowi allows users to customize their visualizations to get the desired look and feel. They can also create custom visualizations to meet their unique needs.

Limitations of Knowi

Knowi has the following limitations:

  1. Visualizations are not very beautiful

Knowi doesn’t offer the prettiest out-of-the-box visualizations. However, users can customize them using CSS/JavaScript.

2. Complex user interface for data engineers

Although Knowi has a simple user interface for business users, its user interface for data engineers is a bit complex and it may take you some time to get used to.

3. Not open source

Knowi is a commercial tool.

Tableau

Tableau logo (image- www.tableau.com)

Tableau is a powerful data visualization and analytics tool that is fit for self-service analytics. It provides a drag-and-drop interface to help users create visualizations from their data with ease. They only have to drag fields from the Data pane for Tableau to generate visualizations. It is easy for Tableau users to switch from one visualization to another, or edit their visualizations after adding them to a worksheet. Tableau is shipped with the Ask Data feature to let non-technical users type their questions in a common language and get instant answers in Tableau. The answers are in the form of automatic visualizations, without the need to drag-and-drop fields or understand the underlying data structure. Tableau recently introduced the Tableau Pulse feature, which is expected to retire the Ask Data feature in Tableau Cloud and Tableau Server. Tableau Pulse will enable organizations to create a single source of truth by defining metrics and KPIs that can be used across an organization. It will then extract insights about the defined metrics and summarize them for users in a natural language.

Tableau Features

Tableau has the following features for its users:

  1. Visualizations

Tableau is popular in the BI industry for its ability to generate beautiful and powerful visualizations from user data. It supports pie charts, area charts, treemaps, stack marks, maps, and other types of visualizations. Tableau users can easily create visualizations from their data by dragging fields from the Data pane. They can also type their questions in natural language and Tableau will automatically generate visualizations from their data.

A Tableau dashboard (image- www.tableau.com)

Tableau allows users to edit their visualizations after adding them to their worksheets.

2. Search-based analytics

Tableau has the Ask Data feature to help non-technical users extract insights from their data through conversational analytics. They can type their data questions in natural language and Tableau returns immediate answers in the form of visualizations. The visualizations are generated automatically without requiring users to drag and drop fields or understand the structure of their data.

3. Integrations

Tableau is shipped with native connectors to SQL databases, spreadsheets, files, big data, and cloud data sources such as Salesforce, Google Analytics, Amazon Redshift, and Snowflake. Tableau requires users to install the connector for the data source they want to connect to. You can then follow on-screen instructions to establish the connection to your data source.

Tableau integrations (image- www.tableau.com)

However, Tableau doesn’t come with connectors to NoSQL data sources such as MongoDB and ElasticSearch. In such cases, users must depend on third-party connectors that can translate into SQL, but they come with performance limitations.

4. Cross-database joins

Tableau supports cross-database joins, allowing you to join data across disparate sources with just drag and drop. It supports inner join, left outer join, right outer join, and full outer join operations. The data sources involved must have a common field. Tableau uses inner join as the default join operation.

Performing a Tableau join operation (image- www.tableau.com)

Performing a Tableau join operation (image- help.tableau.com)

5. Embedded Analytics

Tableau users can embed the self-service analytics that their customers want into their products. They can embed data, visualizations, dashboards, and Tableau’s search-based analytics feature to empower employees to make data-driven decisions through AI-powered insights. You can ask data questions and edit visualizations directly from your applications. Tableau users can generate a simple HTML code or use its JavaScript API to embed content into external applications.

6. Alerts/Anomaly Detection

Tableau users can configure alerts to be notified when data reaches important thresholds for their business. The alerts can be set on views and dashboards, but not on story points. They can be sent as an email or as a notification within Tableau, or in a connected Slack workspace through Tableau for Slack application.

Benefits of Tableau

Tableau offers its users the following benefits:

  1. User-friendliness

Tableau is a user-friendly BI tool, enabling its users to create visualizations with ease. They can generate visualizations by dragging and dropping fields, or by typing questions in common language.

2. Fit for non-technical users

Tableau’s search-based analytics feature makes it fit for use by non-technical users. They can interact with their data and uncover insights using natural language.

3. Beautiful visualizations

Tableau is shipped with beautiful and powerful visualizations for presenting user data visually.

Limitations of Tableau

Tableau comes with the following limitations:

  1. Complex Integrations

Tableau requires users to download and install connectors to pull data from their data sources. This can be challenging for business users.

2. Doesn’t have connectors to NoSQL data sources

Tableau doesn’t come with connectors to NoSQL data sources. Users have to rely on JDBC or ODBC drivers to pull data from such sources, which comes with performance limitations.

3. Limited data support

Tableau only works with structured data. Its architecture doesn’t allow it to work with unstructured data.

4. Legacy Architecture

Tableau’s architecture is a bit legacy. Users must use Tableau Desktop to publish their workbooks to the cloud or server. Although it offers good data exploratory features, it requires the data to be structured and ready for analysis.

ThoughtSpot

ThoughtSpot logo (image-www.thoughtspot.com)

ThoughtSpot is an analytics platform that enables anyone to self-serve insights by searching for answers to their business questions and getting immediate answers to make evidence-based decisions. ThoughtSpot search-based analytics feature, ThoughtSpot Sage, provides an AI-powered search experience that applies Large Language models (LLMs) to your business data. Users can ask questions in natural language to uncover insights and create charts and visualizations. ThoughtSpot recently acquired Mode to help users perform complex, ad hoc analysis through AI-assisted code writing and empower simple self-service reporting.

ThoughtSpot Features

ThoughtSpot comes with the following features for its users:

  1. Search-based Analytics

ThoughtSpot has a search-based analytics feature that combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with the accuracy of its patent search technology to enable anyone to uncover AI generated insights in natural language. Users can ask business questions in natural language to search for content across their analytics catalog, create new charts and visualizations, and more.

2. Visualizations

ThoughtSpot allows you to visualize your data with automatic visualizations. It has dozens of chart types for presenting data visually. You can configure them by adding labels, grouping axis, etc. to get the exact data story that you want. ThoughtSpot provides a drag-and-drop functionality for pinning, rearranging, and sharing charts.

A ThoughtSpot dashboard (image- docs.thoughtspot.com)

3. Integrations

ThoughtSpot supports integration with cloud data warehouses, CSVs, spreadsheets, and more. It lets you connect to the leading cloud data platforms with ease. Examples include Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, Amazon aurora, and others. ThoughtSpot also comes with connectors to SQL databases such as PostgreSQL and MySQL.

ThoughtSpot data sources (image- www.thoughtspot.com)

However, ThoughtSpot doesn’t support integration with NoSQL data sources such as MongoDB.

4. Embedded Analytics

ThoughtSpot supports embedded analytics, allowing you to embed the analytics experience fit for your customers. You can embed its search-based analytics feature into your own applications and let users ask their own data questions. You can also embed charts, tables, and liveboards into your applications. ThoughtSpot also lets you embed its full app to give your application users the full ThoughtSpot experience.

5. Multi-Source Joins

ThoughtSpot users can create joins across data sources to be searched together. It supports inner join, right outer join, left outer join, and full outer join, with the inner join being its default join operation. The data sources involved in the joins operation must have a common field.

6. Alerts

ThoughtSpot lets you receive proactive alerts when key liveboard metrics and trends change. The alert feature can help you monitor important KPIs for your data. You can receive the alert notifications on Slack, email, or mobile.

Benefits of ThoughtSpot

ThoughtSpot offers its users the following benefits:

  1. Simple user interface

ThoughtSpot provides its users with an intuitive user interface where they can search their data and generate visualizations on their own.

2. Fit for non-technical users

ThoughtSpot has a search-based analytics feature that enables non-technical users to extract insights from their data by typing questions in natural language.

3. Easy integrations

ThoughtSpot users can easily establish connections to the supported data sources. Its pre-built connectors only require users to specify the details of the data source without performing any downloads or installations.

Limitations of Thoughtspot

ThoughtSpot users face the following limitations:

  1. Poor engineering layer

ThoughtSpot users have to lift and shift data from its storage into ThoughtSpot, which is a cumbersome and time-consuming process. They have to store everything in memory, driving the costs up.

2. Doesn’t integrate with NoSQL data sources

ThoughtSpot doesn’t have native connectors for connecting and pulling data from NoSQL data sources. To pull data from such sources, users must rely on third-party connectors or take the data through complex, time-consuming ETL steps.

3. Users cannot create custom visualizations

ThoughtSpot doesn’t allow users to create custom visualizations to meet their specific needs.

Qlik Sense

Qlik Sense logo (image- www.qlik.com)

Qlik Sense is a BI platform that can help you empower people at all skill levels in your organization with AI-powered insights and predictions that inform intelligent actions. It offers self-service visualizations, enabling users to easily load, combine, visualize, and explore their data. You can select, search, zoom out, or drill down the visualizations to find specific answers. Each table, chart, and object is interactive and updates instantly to the current context with each action. Qlik Sense users can create, share, and distribute dashboards to support business leaders, executives, and anyone else who needs to stay updated with what is happening with the business. ThoughtSpot has a search-based analytics feature to help users generate powerful insights by typing their questions in natural language.

Qlik Sense Features

Qlik Sense has the following features for its users:

  1. Self-Service Visualizations

Qlik Sense allows users to create visualizations by double-clicking or dragging them from an assets panel. It offers bar charts, scatter plots, pie charts, line charts, map charts, tables, and other visualizations. Qlik Sense allows users to edit and refine their visualizations after adding them to the sheet. Qlik Sense users can create custom visualizations in Qlik Sense Dev Hub to help them meet their unique needs.

2. Search-based Analytics

Qlik Sense comes with Insight Advisor, a suite of Qlik Sense features to help you build data models, create visualizations, and analyze data. With Insight Advisor, you can generate visualizations from your data using natural language searches or by selecting fields and master items. It also has the Insight Advisor Chat that facilitates conversational analytics by helping you perform natural language searches from the hub to the applications you’ve access to. It returns results in the form of relevant visualizations.

3. Integrations

Qlik Sense has a connector factory with hundreds of connectors to various applications and data sources to help you meet the data integration needs of your organization. It has connectors to cloud data warehouses such as Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, Google BigQuery, and others. Qlik Sense can also connect to SQL databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL and NoSQL databases such as Apache Cassandra, ElasticSearch, and MongoDB. Qlik Sense can also be integrated with applications in areas such as CRM, healthcare, communication, and others.

Qlik Sense connectors (image- www.qlik.com)

The Qlik Sense community boasts of its ability to rapidly build new data connectors.

4. Embedded Analytics

Qlik Sense supports embedded analytics, allowing you to integrate data analysis and reporting into popular business apps. It provides no-code to pro-code options for embedded analytics. You can embed Qlik Sense visualizations, dashboards, and analytics capabilities into your applications or cloud applications such as Salesforce, Marketo, JIRA, NetSuite, and others. You can use its pre-built connectors and blocks to enable process automation or embed specific, low-overhead visualizations using JavaScript with robust APIs and libraries.

5. Multi-Source Joins

Qlik Sense allows users to join data across disparate sources. It supports inner join, left join, outer join, right join, and cross join operations. The joins are performed by writing SQL statements.

6. Alerts

Qlik Sense users can configure alerts to monitor changes in their data and take action quickly. Qlik Sense alerts are a good way of detecting anomalies and outliers in your data. The alert notifications can be sent via mobile or email.

Benefits of Qlik Sense

Qlik Sense offers its users the following benefits:

  1. Easy to create visualizations

Qlik Sense allows users to easily create visualizations by double-clicking or dragging and dropping them into their worksheets.

2. Interactive and customizable visualizations

Qlik Sense visualizations are interactive, allowing users to drill down to extract fine-grain details from their data. The visualizations can also be edited to improve their appearance.

3. Fit for business users

Qlik Sense has a search-based analytics feature to help business users understand their data by asking questions in natural language.

Qlik Sense Limitations

Qlik Sense has the following limitations:

  1. Can be costly

Qlik Sense has different pricing plans for data ingestion, analytics, and machine learning. It can be costly for an organization that wants to use all its features starting from data ingestion to advanced analytics.

2. Limited data support

Although Qlik Sense supports integration with some NoSQL data sources, its support for unstructured data is not as strong as that of other BI tools in the market.

3. Integrations cannot be extended

Qlik Sense does not have connectors to all data sources. It doesn’t allow users to create custom connectors to pull data from sources that are not supported. They have to depend on the Qlik Sense team to build new connectors.

Power BI

Power BI logo (image- learn.microsoft.com)

Power BI is a BI tool created by Microsoft and fit for self-service analytics. It helps you turn your data into visuals using its user-friendly report creation tools. With Power BI, you can easily get started with its hundreds of report templates that you can customize to meet your needs. Power BI users can create visualizations by selecting buttons from the visualizations pane. The visualizations can be customized by changing the title, background, legends, etc. It is also shipped with a Q&A feature to help users interact and understand their data using natural language. They can type their questions in natural language and get answers in the form of graphs and charts.

Power BI Features

Power BI has the following features for its users:

  1. Visualizations

Power BI is shipped with various types of visualizations to help users understand their data. Examples include combo charts, bar charts, doughnut charts, area charts, and several others. Users only have to select the visualization button of choice from the Visualizations pane and Power BI generates the visualization. It has the drill mode feature to let users explore in-depth details by drilling up, drilling down, and expanding the features on visualizations. Power BI users can edit their visualizations or even create custom visualizations and share them with other Power BI users.

A Power BI dashboard (image- learn.microsoft.com)

2. Ask Questions of your Data

Power BI comes with the Q&A feature to facilitate self-service analytics among business users. They can explore their data using natural language capabilities and get answers in the form of visualizations. Q&A automatically picks the best visualization based on your data, or you can specify the type of visualization you want in your question.

Using Q&A in Power BI (image- learn.microsoft.com)

3. Integrations

Power BI is shipped with multiple software-as-a-service connectors to enable users to connect to various applications and data sources. It has strong support for integration with other Microsoft products like Excel, Forms, Office 365, and others. It also comes with connectors to cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake and Google BigQuery, as well as SQL databases such as PostgreSQL and MySQL. Power BI also has connectors to NoSQL databases such as MongoDB.

Power BI connectors (image- learn.microsoft.com)

Power BI users can create custom connectors and submit them to Microsoft for certification.

4. Embedded Analytics

Power BI supports embedded analytics, allowing you to embed items such as reports, tiles, and dashboards in web applications and websites. It provides multiple embed options, some requiring users to sign into Power BI to view the embedded content and others not.

5. Alerts

Power BI has an alert feature to notify you when data in your dashboards changes beyond certain limits. You can receive the alerts in Power BI’s Notification Center or via email.

Benefits of Power BI

Power BI comes with the following benefits:

  1. User-friendliness

Power BI allows users to easily create visualizations from their data by selecting or double-clicking the visualization of choice from the Visualizations pane.

2. Fit for non-technical users

Power BI has the Q&A feature to help non-technical users uncover insights from their data. They can ask questions in natural language and get answers in the form of visualizations.

3. Tight integration with Microsoft products

Power BI integrates well with other Microsoft products. Thus, your business users will enjoy an easy and seamless integration if your organization uses products such as Excel, Forms, Office 365, and others.

4. Customizable visualizations

Power BI users can edit their visualizations after adding them to their reports. They can also create custom visualizations to meet their unique needs.

Limitations of Power BI

Power BI users encounter the following challenges:

  1. Bulky user interface

Power BI has a bulky, complex user interface. Hence, business users may encounter challenges navigating from one component to another.

2. Integrations may become complex

Power BI users may have to make some downloads and installations to connect to some data sources. This can be a challenge to business users.

3. Limited integrations

Power BI doesn’t support integration with all data sources. Users may have to build custom connectors to pull data from certain sources, a process that requires technical knowledge.

4. Limited data support

Power BI doesn’t have strong support for unstructured data like other BI tools in the market. However, it works well with structured data.

Looker

Looker logo (image- cloud.google.com)

Looker is a cloud-based BI tool fit for self-service analytics. It comes with an intuitive web interface that is easy to use by business users. Looker’s report editor has simple drag-and-drop objects with fully custom property panels. Looker users have access to a robust library of templates to choose from, enabling them to visualize their data in minutes. Looker users can also connect to a wide variety of data sources using its 900+ partner connectors without writing code. It is easy to share Looker reports or embed them into web pages to tell your data story to your team or the world.

Looker Features

Looker gives its users access to the following features:

  1. Visualizations

Looker offers various types of visualizations to help you turn your data into compelling stories. It supports sunburst charts, gauge charts, area charts, column charts, candlestick charts, and several others. Users can add charts to their reports with just a few clicks. Looker allows users to configure the properties of their charts after adding them to their reports. They can also create custom visualizations and use them in their reports or share them with the Looker community.

2. Analytics

Looker comes with Looker Blocks, which are pre-built data models for common data sources and analytical patterns that facilitate quick and flexible data modeling in Looker. With Looker blocks, you can reuse the work done by others instead of starting from scratch. You can customize the Looker blocks to your exact specifications.

3. Integrations

Looker comes with connectors to various data sources, making it easy for users to connect to their data sources. It requires you to choose the right connector for your data source and authorize it to connect to the data source. It supports integration with SQL databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL. It also comes with connectors to cloud data warehouses such as Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, and Google Analytics. Looker users can upload their data stored in CSV files. Looker Studio also has over 900 partner connectors built and supported by partners to help you pull data from sources such as WooCommerce, MailChimp, Facebook Ads, Shopify, and several others.

Looker Studio data sources (image- lookerstudio.google.com)

4. Embedded Analytics

Looker has the Looker Embedded feature to help users embed interactive dashboards and analytics capabilities into their business applications. They can simply use an HTML iframe tag to embed their visualizations and table data into external applications or websites. Looker also comes with an API that you can use to enable access to embedded content via a proxy application or a reverse proxy server.

5. Alerts

Looker users can configure alerts to be notified when their query results meet specified conditions. They can set the frequency with which Looker will be checking data for the alert condition. The alerts can be sent via email or Slack.

Benefits of Looker

Looker users enjoy the following benefits:

  1. Easy-to-use web interface

Looker has an intuitive user interface that is easy to use by users of all backgrounds.

2. Easy to create visualizations

Looker users can easily create visualizations from their data with just a few clicks.

3. Easy to perform integrations

Looker only requires users to authorize its connectors to connect to their data source. This makes it easier for users to pull data from the supported sources.

4. Customizable report templates

Looker has a robust library of report templates for its users for quick data visualization. They can also customize them to meet their unique needs.

Limitations of Looker

Looker users encounter the following challenges:

  1. Doesn’t integrate with NoSQL data sources

Looker doesn’t come with native connectors to NoSQL data sources such as MongoDB. Users have to work their way out like putting the data in an SQL table for Looker to query against.

2. Lacks Natural Language capabilities

Looker doesn’t come with natural language features to help users uncover insights from their data using natural language.

3. May require a learning curve

Looker users may have to learn LookML, its proprietary markup language to access some of its features. This may require a learning curve.

4. Limited US customer support

Looker’s acquisition by Google has created confusion even in its naming. The BI tool has also scaled down its US customer support.

Final Thoughts

Self-service BI empowers all users in an organization to turn data into actions regardless of their backgrounds. It enables business users to uncover insights from their data without relying on the help of IT professionals or BI specialists.

Knowi, Tableau, ThoughtSpot, Qlik Sense, Power BI, and Looker are some of the best options when choosing a self-service BI tool for your team.

Knowi is a self-service BI platform that makes it easy for users to connect to any data source, including NoSQL data sources, and interact with their data using a drag&drop interface to uncover insights. It also has a search-based analytics feature to let users ask data questions using natural language and get answers in the form of visualizations.

Tableau is a BI tool that lets users connect to structured data sources and generate visualizations by dragging and dropping data fields. It has the Ask Data feature that lets users extract insights from their data using a common language.

ThoughtSpot is an analytics tool popular for its search-based analytics capabilities. It lets users connect to structured data sources to extract insights and generate visualizations from their data by typing questions in natural language.

Qlik Sense is a BI tool that empowers people of all skill levels in an organization with AI-powered insights and predictions to drive actions. Users can drill down into their visualizations to extract the finest details from their data. It also lets users uncover insights from their data using natural language.

Power BI is a data visualization tool created by Microsoft. Power BI users can generate visualizations by selecting buttons from the Visualizations pane. It has a Q&A feature that enables users to understand their data using natural language.

Looker is a cloud-based BI platform that offers business users an intuitive user interface for data analysis. Its report editor features simple drag-and-drop objects and custom property panels. Looker also gives users access to a robust library of templates for quick data visualization.

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