Business intelligence (BI) software empowers organizations by improving data discovery and interpreting data into useful business insights. It automates tasks and reduces human errors with data warehousing and visualization, reporting, and dashboard features. Data becomes readily available, allowing for evidence-based decision making in an instant. Compared to competitive intelligence, BI pulls internal data produced by the business. The software aggregates, standardizes, and analyzes data to better understand customers, identify market trends and purchasing patterns, protect from business pitfalls, and forecast revenue growth.

Data collection could only be done by advanced analytics experts in the past, but with BI software, anyone can do it. Reports that took months to complete can be quickly done using the software.

We evaluate two popular business intelligence software: ibi vs. Grow. We’ll consider their features, integration, and pricing details to help you choose the software that better suits your business. Use our free Product Selection Tool to receive five recommendations of products from our Technology Advisors. It’s simple and takes only five minutes.

ibi vs. Grow: An overview

Ibi is a cloud-based BI and analytics software equipped with applications, analytical tools, and reports and documents for partners and customers, line-of-business workers, analysts, and management teams. It has location intelligence, BI smart  and natural language search, data discovery, and predictive and prescriptive analytics. Users can gather data from multiple sources and create dashboards with it. Its self-service visual data discovery tools generate reports, analyze data sets, and share content. Ibi offers support through chat, email, and knowledge base.

Grow is a BI software designed for small and mid-sized businesses through an e-commerce platform or customer database such as a CRM. It has simple dashboards so businesses can focus on receiving enterprise-quality insights for strategic decision making. Grow supports data dashboards that blend scattered data from hundreds of sources such as databases, spreadsheets, and SaaS spreadsheets. Users have access to trends as they occur as the software brings real-time data into the dashboard. Use Grow on your desktop or mobile device and access the dashboard on the go.

A comparison of features

Ibi ensures businesses receive the data they need in real-time with its features:

·         Reporting:

ibi has customizable dashboards, financial reporting, report exporting, data source connectors, drag and drop, forecasting, sales reports, and scheduled and automated reports to ensure businesses have the correct insights for quick decision making.

·         Data analysis:

The software has data discovery and visualization, self-service data preparation, storytelling, natural language search, predictive analytics, and query builder. It uses histograms, 3D bar and pie charts, and data constellations for presentation.

·         Data discovery:

Use ibi for contextual search, self-service data preparation, visual analytics, and sensitive data identification.

·         Decision support:

Ibi has data analysis, application development, performance metrics, budgeting, and forecasting.

Grow ensures easy preparation, cleansing, and transforming of data across multiple sources for powerful dashboards and metrics.

·         ETL and data prep:

Grow integrates with commonly-used applications, CRMs, and databases for importing and refreshing data to give updated and reliable business metrics. The software acts as a CRM tool and has ad platforms, databases, social media, accounting and financials, and marketing analytics.

·         Executive and marketing dashboards:

This feature summarizes financial activities such as business sales, operations, marketing, and individual performance. Marketing dashboards offer data across social networks, spreadsheets, analytics apps, and CRM to give users a unified view of deal funnels. These enable users to track website traffic, campaign progress, marketing ROI, per-lead costs, marketing acquisition costs, and conversion rates.

·         Financial and operational dashboards:

Grow tracks and aligns business financial performance with company goals. It offers real-time views of opportunities and negative trends. Use these dashboards to draft balances, compare income to predicted amounts, and calculate customer lifetime values. Measure hour-per-project/process, COGS, NPS scores, and employee satisfaction and productivity.

A comparison of prices

Ibi is a subscription-based software, but it provides limited public information on pricing plans, which is a common practice among software vendors. Interested parties can contact the vendor directly to request a quote and ensure you get the features your business needs for the right price.

Grow offers a free trial to interested users. After the free trial, users can choose from a 4-tiered pricing plan: Basic, Standard, Premium, and Enterprise. The Basic plan connects to spreadsheets and allows up to 10 users, making it the perfect choice for startups. The Standard plan connects to standard connectors for an unlimited number of users, while the Premium plan has premium connectors for an unlimited number of users. The Enterprise plan has both premium and enterprise connectors for an unlimited number of users.

A comparison of integrations

Ibi integrates with SAP Business One. However, it doesn’t integrate with common business applications.

Grow helps businesses save by integrating with common business applications such as:

·         Basecamp 2

·         Asana

·         Base CRM

·         American Express

·         Amazon Cloud Watch

·         Dropbox

Takeaways: ibi vs. Grow

Choosing the best business intelligence software for your business is tough, but ibi and Grow are good options. They both offer data analysis and visualization features and ensure reporting is always up-to-date and in real time. However, it is important to consider their differences in choosing your business’s BI software.

In terms of integrations, Grow is a better choice because it connects with many commonly-used applications. Whether you run a startup or a mid-sized business, the integrations help you save money by using one software for various processes.  

If you are looking for a software that can be used for marketing, financial, and operational processes, then Grow is the better choice. Its dashboards are classified into different types, allowing you to use it either for financial or marketing purposes. It can sound complicated, but it helps businesses have better control of their operations.

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