Business Intelligence Market

BI tools classification, Gartner quadrant, certifications, open-source vs commercial.

The tool is not important

What matters is the value that the tool, and you, can deliver.

BI tools come and go, and most of them can build the same charts. Employers pay for the analyst who knows which question to answer and how to turn the answer into a decision.

BI tools classification

BI tools visualize and analyze business metrics through reports and dashboards. There are many of them, and they can be grouped by three criteria:

Criterion	Type	What it means
Cost	Open source	Free to use and modify
	Commercial	Paid, usually with vendor support and extra features
Usage model	Enterprise	Built for large companies. Needs a BI development team to install, configure and maintain
	Self-service	Easy to use. Non-technical users build reports and dashboards on their own
Deployment model	Client/server, self-hosted	Run by the company’s own IT department
	Client/server, managed	Infrastructure run by the vendor
	Cloud (SaaS)	Fully cloud-based, flexible and easy to start with

Use these three axes to compare any tool you meet in a job description: what it costs, who builds the reports, and where it runs.

BI market in 2020

Two analyst reports were the usual reference for the market:

• Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and BI Platforms (February 2020): the leaders were Microsoft, Tableau, Qlik and ThoughtSpot, with Microsoft far ahead.
• Forrester Wave: Enterprise BI Platforms, vendor-managed (Q3 2019): Microsoft was again at the top, with Oracle, Tableau and Salesforce also among the leaders.

Gartner plots vendors by ability to execute (vertical axis) and completeness of vision (horizontal axis). The top-right “Leaders” corner is where the tools with the most job openings usually are.

BI market in 2024

The Gartner Magic Quadrant, June 2024:

Quadrant	Vendors
Leaders	Microsoft (Power BI), Salesforce (Tableau), Google (Looker), Qlik, Oracle, ThoughtSpot
Challengers	Amazon Web Services (QuickSight), Alibaba Cloud, Domo, MicroStrategy
Visionaries	SAP, Pyramid Analytics, IBM, Spotfire, SAS, Tellius
Niche players	Incorta, Zoho, Sisense, GoodData

Between 2020 and 2024 the big cloud vendors moved in: Tableau now belongs to Salesforce, Looker to Google, and AWS appeared with QuickSight. Microsoft Power BI stayed the clear leader.

Open source BI

Popular free alternatives:

• Apache Superset: a full-featured BI platform, originally built at Airbnb
• Metabase: simple self-service BI, quick to set up
• Redash: SQL-first dashboards
• TIBCO Jaspersoft: reporting and embedded analytics
• Pentaho Business Analytics: a BI suite with its own data integration tool
• Evidence: BI as code, reports written in SQL and Markdown
• Plotly Dash: dashboards written in Python

Open source tools cost nothing to license, but someone has to install, host and maintain them. They are a great way to practice BI and a common choice at startups.

Certification

The main BI certifications:

• Tableau: Desktop Specialist, Certified Associate, Certified Professional
• Microsoft Power BI Data Analyst Associate: exam PL-300, which replaced the older DA-100 (Analyzing Data with Microsoft Power BI)

Vendors rename and reorganize their exams from time to time, so check the current list on the vendor’s site before you start preparing.

Are certificates worth it?

The author has a long list of certificates: DAMA CDMP, Tableau Server and Tableau Desktop Qualified Associate, Splunk, IBM, Pentaho, SAS, SAP BusinessObjects and Teradata.

The verdict: “Cool, but I have no use from it in my situation. Still plays a role for the consulting.” A certificate helps you pass a consulting tender or an HR filter. For an analyst job, real projects and a portfolio matter more.

Let’s check some tools

In the video we look at several tools:

• Tableau
• Sigma
• Metabase
• Apache Superset
• AWS QuickSight
• Looker

Try at least one commercial and one open source tool. Once you know two, picking up a third takes days, not months.