Most companies downplay the importance of customer satisfaction. However, research by McKinsey shows that a positive customer experience can boost your sales revenue by 2-7%.
The good news is that modern dashboards can help you track important KPIs, address customer pain points, personalize their journeys, and sharpen your own game to capture market share. Investing in these dashboarding softwares will help you create a compelling data story so every business user can understand complex datasets and make data-driven decisions.
But there are so many options—how do you know which dashboard tool is right for your business? In this post, we highlight the leaders in the data visualization industry and offer strategies to help you identify the right dashboarding software for your business.
Table of contents:
1. Intuitive interface
One of the reasons why business users are still obsessed with dashboards is that they can be built quickly—without requiring any technical expertise. Choose a dashboard software with a drag-and-drop interface that is easy to navigate and has pre-built templates to help your team instantaneously spin up real-time visualizations. An intuitive interface boosts user engagement and empowers everyone to explore and understand data, leading to deeper insights.
2. Customization
The best dashboard tools are those that can be customized to meet your business needs. Consider features that offer multiple visualization options and layout designs so users can explore data freely. With customization capabilities, you can highlight critical data points, identify trends, spot anomalies, and share these insights with your team for faster decision-making.
3. Integration
When data is timely, it helps you make decisions more efficiently, as you can access the most up-to-date information without any delays. Look for a solution that can connect your sources, including data from spreadsheets, cloud data warehouses, and emails, directly to the BI solution. This helps you search for relevant information to build interactive dashboards and stay on top of trends.
For instance, ThoughtSpot’s seamless integration with Excel and Google Sheets allows you to find answers directly from your data and present your data story meaningfully.
4. Performance
If you are experiencing longer search times in performing ad-hoc analysis, you can miss many growth opportunities. It can also cause errors in decision-making. Ensure your dashboard tool can visualize large datasets without compromising speed and responsiveness. Opting for a scalable solution that can quickly filter and visualize data allows your team to focus on insights rather than waiting for data to load.
5. Mobile accessibility
During BI tool selection, most companies often overlook mobile accessibility. It refers to how easily users can access data from their mobile devices and how quickly they can gain insights from it. When data is accessible to users on-the-go, it helps them keep a pulse on operations, driving better outcomes for the business. Ensure that your data dashboard software offers mobile accessibility to get instant answers whenever you want.
Before diving into the rest, we’d be remiss if we didn’t talk about the best data dashboard software in 2024. While we may seem a bit biased, we assure you that our customers and even Gartner MQ 2024 for Analytics and BI think it too.
ThoughtSpot’s Liveboards offer dozens of interactive data visualizations to help users gain personalized, real-time insights to curate powerful data stories. And with Spotter, as your AI Analyst, users can ask complex questions about their data and gain instant visualizations.
Leveraging AI-powered analytics features like SpotIQ, business users can perform one-click analysis to uncover driving factors and anomalies behind key metrics and visualizations. You can even drill into data, share insights, or set automated alerts on KPI changes, ensuring that you are always capitalizing on emerging growth opportunities.
And let’s not forget your data team. They can also use ThoughtSpot’s AI-powered data modeling features to gain deeper insights into their data and even predict future outcomes for your business.
Look at what Bill Lynch, Sr. Director of Data Science & Analytics at NeuroFlow, a leading software company dedicated to improving mental health outcomes, has to say about ThoughtSpot’s self-serve visualization capabilities:
“We needed a tool that was personalized and fostered data literacy. We knew ThoughtSpot would allow us to make business users partners and co-create alongside the data team.”
Core features:
AI-powered search: Spotter empowers all users to ask questions about their data and gain instant insights and visualizations.
Real-time data visualizations: Liveboards offer a real-time view of what’s happening in your business, allowing you to easily identify trends, patterns, and anomalies.
Personalized visualizations: Select, pin, rearrange, and share charts and tables with drag-and-drop ease to create compelling data stories with Liveboards. You can also add notes, text summaries, or highlight specific data points for better clarity.
Seamless connectivity: Easy integration with multiple cloud data sources and databases allows users to bring all their data together in a single dashboard. This powerful integration helps you stay on top of all your KPIs changes.
Augmented analytics: Features like SpotIQ and ‘AI Highlights’ leverage advanced machine learning algorithms to give you deeper insights into specific business problems.
AI-assisted data modeling: Utilize AI and large language models to make data modeling easier and faster by automatically generating synonyms for all data columns.
Mobile accessibility: Gain insights on the go with ThoughtSpot Mobile. You can track KPIs on your Liveboards and even share insights with your team, no matter where you are.
Empower your teams to gain better context from datasets and drive better outcomes with ThoughtSpot’s free trial.
Mode’s code-free visualization and exploration capabilities turn raw data into interactive visualizations to help your team explore insights and create a shared understanding. You can perform and execute multiple queries with a drag-and-drop SQL editor. Then use the query results to create real-time visualizations to identify relevant trends and insights. This modern data stack streamlines SQL querying and improves data quality and storytelling so that every business user can make independent data-driven decisions.
And this is what Education Perfect (EP) did with their reporting. EP was manually drafting reports that contextualized their customer’s platform usage metrics. This process was time-consuming and limiting. Mode’s real-time reporting capabilities allowed EP to generate 30X more reports, helping teams gain better context.
Here’s what Joel Labes, Head of Data & Insights at EP, has to say about Mode:
“The API configuration saves time and reduces errors from teams copying and pasting charts into slide decks. It also lets individuals queue up a bunch of reports in one go and review the results later, instead of having to interrupt their flow every 10 minutes to kick off the next job."
Core features:
Intuitive visual explorer: Build custom dashboards and reports using intuitive interfaces and user-friendly features that don’t require any extensive training or technical expertise.
SQL editor: Query all your connected cloud warehouse data using a user-friendly interface and build as many visualizations as you’d like.
R and Python notebooks: Pull SQL query results into your notebook and share the whole notebook with just a few clicks. This powerful capability allows you to build advanced predictive models, without extensive coding.
Interactive dashboards: Customize visualizations and explore data in-depth with limitless filters and parameters.
AI-assisted data modeling: Streamline tedious data processing and analysis tasks with AI Assist, enabling your team to extract valuable insights from their data.
Ready to put insights into action? Sign up for a free Mode trial to turn unused data from your warehouses into growth opportunities for your business.
Tableau is a dashboarding software best known for offering a vast library of pixel-perfect data visualizations. Its core mission is expressed as "Helping people see and understand data." It has been a favorite tool among technical users as it helps them extract data from various sources, prep it, and visualize it. However, for business users with limited technical expertise, navigating through the platform and creating visualizations is practically impossible.
Core features:
Advanced visualization: Create complex charts, graphs, tables, and dashboards with drag-and-drop functionality
Tableau’s Ask Data: Engage with data using the ‘Ask Data’ feature that allows users to ask questions in natural language and receive answers in the form of automatic data visualizations
Connects multiple data sources: Connect to various data sources like databases, spreadsheets, and cloud services
Predictive analytics: Build predictive models and identify trends with advanced modeling techniques
💡Must-read: Top Tableau competitors and alternatives to consider
Power BI is Microsoft’s AI-powered data analytics platform that lets users interact with data with engaging dashboards and reports. The scalable platform centralizes data in a secure hub, allowing you to explore charts, tables, and graphs to uncover hidden insights and create a better context for business users. Power BI extracts data from multiple sources, including Excel spreadsheets, SQL databases, and Microsoft's cloud platform Azure.
Core features:
Drag-and-drop interface: Create dashboards and reports using a drag-and-drop graphical interface
Interactive visualization: Use filters, parameters, and dimensions to discover specific data points or areas of interest
Predictive analytics: Analyze data and build predictive analytics models to anticipate future outcomes for your business
Integration with Microsoft product suite: Combine data from multiple sources, including the Microsoft product suite for better analysis
💡Must read: 10 Power BI alternatives and competitors to consider
Qlik Sense is one of the best dashboard softwares that lets users perform complex calculations and build dashboards to help users understand data more effectively. This low-code dashboard software connects data from cloud warehouses and other sources to create a single source of truth. With AI assistance, users can prep data and build and share dashboards that enable intelligent decisions across organizations.
Core features:
A wide variety of visualizations: Refine your dashboards with various visualization options
AI assistance for data preparation: Clean, enrich, and transform datasets with AI-powered features
Advanced analytics: Ask questions, use AutoML, and build predictive data models
Real-time data monitoring: Access real-time insights and quickly respond to emerging patterns in data
AWS QuickSight is Amazon’s business intelligence platform that helps users in data preparation, exploration, and building dashboards and paginated reports. QuickSight has a serverless architecture with AI capabilities that allows users to ask natural language queries and get relevant suggestions.
Core features:
Data preparation and management: Connect to diverse data sources, cleanse and transform data, define relationships, and create calculated fields
Intuitive interface: Create charts, graphs, and dashboards using a user-friendly, drag-and-drop interface
QuickSight Q: Ask data-related questions in natural language and gain automated visualizations and insights
Paginated reports: Build, schedule, and share multi-page reports like invoices, statements, and operational summaries
Klipfolio is a dashboard tool that helps business users and data teams combine data from different sources and explore it using filters, dimensions, and segments. The platform’s data modeling capabilities allow users to build interactive dashboards, track critical KPIs, and add contextual information to help them stay on top of changes in your data. From having a pre-built library of visualizations to offering personalization options, Klipfolio helps non-technical users leverage data from multiple sources.
Core features:
Data integration: Combine data from a vast range of data sources, including cloud services, on-premise databases, spreadsheets, and APIs for dashboard creation
Data preparation: Retrieve and cleanse your data through a data feed editor and create calculated fields for data transformation
Dashboard and reporting: Build interactive dashboards that visualize KPIs and metrics with a variety of chart types, tables, and maps
Collaboration and sharing: Set permissions, schedule reports, and collaborate with other teams
Domo makes data analytics accessible for everyone with interactive, customizable dashboards. The platform boasts AI models such as ChatGPT and Bard, allowing users to get fast answers to complex questions, create automated alerts, and make future predictions. Through live analysis, you can get actionable insights that help you gain a real-time view of your operations.
Core features:
Real-time dashboards: Use different charts and custom maps for dashboard creation and bring real-time KPIs to life
Connectivity with multiple data sources: Import data from spreadsheets, cloud databases, and online applications
AI data modeling: Deploy models on a serverless architect or integrate them with existing machine learning (ML) infrastructures
Easy report sharing: Distribute dashboards and reports via email, links, or through Domo’s mobile app
Cognos Analytics is IBM’s dashboard tool for reporting, analytics, and data visualization. The platform features a drag-and-drop interface with natural language processing for dashboard creation. Users can build ML models, receive automated insights, and leverage GenAI features to uncover hidden relationships in data.
Core features:
Dashboard creation: Users can drag and drop data elements to build interactive dashboards that display key metrics and insights.
AI assistant: Use natural language processing to build charts and dashboards and share information
Data preparation: Clean and prep data from multiple sources, add calculated fields, join data, and create new tables
Forecasting: Incorporates ML models for predictive analytics
Yellowfin is a dashboard reporting software that supports creating and managing dashboards and reports. Its user-centric approach is where Yellowfin excels in but sometimes falls short, relying more on traditional dashboard-based reporting. The workflow controls, machine learning algorithms, and drag-and-drop interface enable users to streamline tasks and make data-driven decisions.
Core features:
Data discovery: Query large datasets using subqueries, advanced functions, linked filters, and more
Automated insights: Gain automated insights and visualizations from data
Custom dashboards: Personalize visualizations to monitor KPIs and track performance metrics
Collaboration: Share insights, comment on reports, and collaborate with other teams in real-time
Oracle Analytics Cloud is a business intelligence suite with a drag-and-drop interface that allows users to create interactive dashboards to gain insights. The platform integrates with multiple data sources, allowing you a high-level view of critical KPIs. However, navigating Oracle Analytics Cloud can be difficult for business users as the platform is designed for organizations with complex data environments.
Core features:
Customization tools: Provides capabilities for creating and customizing dashboards and reports
Data integration: Connects with Oracle cloud suite and other data sources
Data exploration: Offers tools for detailed data analysis
Machine Learning insights: Incorporates ML models for advanced data analysis
Polymer is another business dashboard software that helps users and data teams combine data from different sources and explore it using dashboards, visualizations, and filters. With Polymer, users can build custom dashboards and reports, get AI-assisted answers, add notes, and share insights with users across the organization.
Core features:
Custom dashboards: Create and refine dashboards and reports
AI-assisted answers: Uncover insights, auto-generate dashboards, and perform ad-hoc analysis
Connectivity with multiple databases: Integrates with multiple cloud warehouses and databases
Data modeling: Supports in-depth data analysis and advanced data modeling
While it can be challenging for a business to keep pace with customer expectations, it also opens up many ways to develop long-term relationships with them. Having the right dashboard software can help you reduce the time it takes to realize value from data and create engaging touchpoints that drive business value.
Don’t leave your data sitting in a lifeless dashboard—join our weekly demo to understand how you can leverage our AI-powered dashboards to gain instant insights into your operations.
1. What is a dashboarding tool?
A dashboarding tool is an information management system that tracks, analyzes, and visualizes KPIs and critical data points of an organization's performance. They are designed to help users quickly assess and analyze complex information in a visually appealing and interactive way.
2. Which dashboard software is best?
According to the 2024 Gartner MQ for Analytics and BI Platforms, ThoughtSpot shines as the best dashboarding software. With its powerful AI-powered features and an unwavering commitment to customer success, ThoughtSpot empowers users to interact and engage with data in ways that were never possible before.
3. What is digital dashboard software?
A digital dashboard software transforms raw data into interactive visuals. It features an intuitive interface for designing digital dashboards that offer a clear, at-a-glance overview of your organization’s performance. This software enables you to track and analyze key metrics, data points, and performance indicators in a consolidated, easy-to-understand format.
