Decisions are the turning points in business development. To ensure a trustworthy basis for decision-making, you need marketing reports based on high-quality data as soon as possible — the earlier you find an insight, the more valuable it is.

Trustworthy data indeed can reveal valuable insights about your business. But how can you find them? To facilitate and automate the process of finding insights in your data, you can use reporting tools of different types, with different levels of detail, and with varying degrees of complexity. Make sure you select the right tool for your business that satisfies your exact needs to see results as soon as possible.

Note: This post was originally published in December 2021 and was completely updated in February 2024 for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

What are Marketing Reporting Tools?

Reporting software or reporting tools help you to organize your data from different sources and help you analyze data by structuring it, arranging it in tables or charts, and visualizing it.

This is how you can make information easier to parse and clearly understand your business processes. Good data reporting software provides you with the ability to get information in the necessary form as quickly as possible since the value of an insight decreases with time.

However, most of the data reporting tools are designed for organizing and visualizing information.

To ensure the quality of reports, you need to collect, normalize, merge, attribute, and prepare the reporting datasets before using a web reporting software tool.​

To do this, you’ll need a marketing analytics tool, like OWOX BI.

6 Types of Reporting Tools and Software

Reporting tools can be divided into the following types:

• Self-service. These tools allow you to build your own reports based on internal information.
• Visualization. Data visualization tools represent information graphically by using elements such as maps and charts to make information comprehensible and improve report design.
• Business intelligence or BI. Business intelligence tools help you discover actionable insights, frequently by using visual and interactive elements.
• Application performance. These tools display data on how an application performs, how many users it has, how much revenue it brings, in which ways it brings that revenue, and other parameters applicable to a specific application.
• Enterprise. These tools are aimed at preserving high levels of security and flexibility. They allow for custom structuring of company information into organized tables, charts, and dashboards.
• Finance-related. These tools organize and find insights by analyzing financial documents such as cash flow statements, balance sheets, and income statements.

To identify the type of tool you need, figure out your business goals to see which aspects of your marketing strategy you need to cover using reporting tools.

Reporting vs Business Intelligence Tools

Reporting tools or reporting software are generally limited to compiling reports and structuring information. They’re aimed at finding insights fast, even without sophisticated visualization.

Business intelligence tools, in contrast, handle a wider variety of tasks, including analyzing and visualizing information. They collect information from different business sources, transform it, and create charts to help you easily find insights.

What are the Benefits of Reporting Tools?

To keep up with the pace of the modern world, automating as many processes as possible and using specialized tools is a must. Compiling reports manually is a durable and tiresome procedure, and the result frequently isn’t worth the titanic effort.

Let’s take a look at the main benefits of reporting tools.

• Speed up the reporting process. With report automation tools , you significantly reduce the amount of time required to organize your data.
• Create reports with the exact parameters you need. Some of the bestreport-building tools allow you to customize reports: select the parameters you need to measure and compare them to adjust the reporting process to your business.
• Find insights in raw data. Organizing raw data allows you to quickly discover valuable insights and act on them to achieve your business goals.
• Visualize reports or integrate with visualization tools. Visualization software allows you to go one step further than regular table-based reporting: create charts and interactive dashboards.
• Improve decision-making: Get reports based on necessary information, share them with your team members, and prove your decisions based on exact figures.

How to Select a Reporting Tool: Comparison Criteria

To select the best fit for your business, you can compare the following criteria:

• How data is processed. A good tool monitors data quality, can directly connect with sources, and automatically imports data.
• Integrations. Find out how easily you can integrate a tool with visualization, business intelligence, or other services and how many data integrations a tool has to offer.
• Report templates. Check if a tool has a library of ready-to-use templates; otherwise, see how easy it is to build a report from scratch.
• Data preparation capabilities. A good tool to automate your marketing reporting allows you to keep the data preparation under your control.
• Limitations. Investigate how many rows and parameters a tool allows you to include in a report, what the volume limits are, and how much time it takes for a tool to collect, transfer, and process information.
• Pricing. Compare prices of different services and make sure the cost is reasonable for the features you get.

Let’s perform a short reporting platforms comparison among ten of the best reporting and business intelligence tools based on the criteria above.

You can use this list to find a simple reporting tool for project management, project planning, or other business needs you have.

Comparison of the Top 13 Reporting and Business Intelligence Tools

Best Reporting Tools

1. Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics 4 is one of the most widely used free reporting tools. It collects data on users’ HTTP requests, cookies, browsers, and operating systems with a Google Analytics Tracking Code and transfers it to Google servers as a list of parameters. The servers process information within 24 to 48 hours, and then you can build the necessary reports in your account. You can integrate your Google Analytics account with other Google services, such as Google Ads or Search Ads 360. Analytics doesn’t include information from non-Google advertising platforms or your CRM (you can only import it manually or with a third-party tool).

For example, you can enrich your GA 4 property with non-google advertising costs.

When it comes to limitations, Google Analytics allows you to collect up to 10M events per month before you experience the data sampling, 25 event parameters per event, and your data would be stored for up to 14 months

If you need to extend the data retention period — you should upgrade to a paid version of Google Analytics — GA360 or set up on-site real-time data collection into BigQuery with OWOX BI Streaming.

2. Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio)

Looker Studio (Formerly Google Data Studio) is one of the best free report-building tools. With Looker Studio, you can set up connectors to collect and compare your information, configure interactive dashboards, and create visualizations in Explorer — a space to explore your collected data.

You can build your advertising reports using Looker Studio (Formerly Google Data Studio) templates from the marketing dashboard template gallery.

You should keep in mind that Looker Studio (Formerly Google Data Studio) has limits on collected data, as well as limits on the number of visual elements per page, and has no official Google support.

Looker Studio (Formerly Google Data Studio) blends all collected results. It performs slower if you have more than two data sources (in comparison to its processing speed with one or two sources).

One option to overcome this issue is to collect all information in a single dataset in Google BigQuery and integrate it with Looker Studio (Formerly Google Data Studio) as a single data source.

In order to collect your marketing and sales data into Google BigQuery, you can use OWOX BI Pipelines.

3. OWOX BI

OWOX BI is an all-in-one marketing analytics platform that helps you collect unlimited amounts of unsampled raw data from various online and offline sources in one place (Google BigQuery).

OWOX BI also monitors the data quality and supports dynamic UTM parameters.

OWOX BI then helps you normalize, clean, merge, and attribute cost data from ad services, website tracking tools, Google Analytics 4, revenue data from the CRM, and other marketing and sales data sources in real-time with no coding.

You can use the business-ready data to prepare datasets for reporting to be visualized in a BI tool like Looker Studio, Google Sheets, Tableau, Power BI, or another tool of your choice, or easily build reports with OWOX BI Smart Data.

Start using OWOX BI for free, build the reports, start optimizing your campaigns, get your value, and then upgrade to one of the paid plans if you want to grow faster.

4. Funnel

Funnel is an ETL (extract, transform, load) platform that collects your data and automatically organizes it so you can use it to create reports and dashboards with the metrics you need. The processed result then goes to the Funnel data warehouse.

However, you should take into account that Funnel doesn’t collect user behavior data from a website, doesn’t monitor data quality, and doesn’t support dynamic UTM parameters.

Pricing for Funnel plans starts at $399 per month.

5. Supermetrics

Another ETL platform you can use as automated report-writing software is Supermetrics. This tool collects and processes your data with the help of APIs, then sends it to another tool you select from the available Supermetrics integrations (including Google Sheets and Looker Studio).

As for Supermetrics’ limitations, keep in mind that this tool doesn’t monitor data quality, doesn’t make your data report-ready, and has no option to create attribution-based reports, so you would have to use another tool for these purposes.

Pricing for Supermetrics starts at $39 a month.

6. Improvado

One more cloud-based ETL platform is Improvado. This tool also uses a REST API to extract your data from various sources, clean it, and organize it. Next, it transforms data by merging tables and modifying the data structure. Finally, you can load the transformed data to the internal Improvado database or to some external storage (for example, Azure or PostgreSQL). You can build reports directly with Improvado interface.

Improvado has no free trial period, so you can’t test its performance before purchasing it. Additionally, remember that this tool doesn’t collect data about user behavior or perform cohort analysis.

Pricing is not available on the website.

7. Datorama

One of the best report-writing software is Datorama — an AI-powered analytics platform that you can use for data analysis and report writing. It collects and unifies your data in one platform, analyzes it, builds reports, and finds insights in them. Other useful functions Datorama has are automated predictions of goal completion and cross-platform management — you can adjust campaigns in Google, Facebook, and other tools connected to Datorama.

You should take into account that Datorama is mainly suitable for enterprises and B2B marketers, and for this reason, plans are rather expensive.

Pricing for Datorama starts at $36,000 per year.

8. Datapine

Datapine is one of the most powerful report automation tools among other players in the market. One of its primary strengths lies in its seamless data integration capabilities, effortlessly consolidating data from various sources.

Datapine also shines in the realm of predictive analytics, allowing users to build predictive models and forecast future trends based on historical data.. Customizability is another hallmark of Datapine. Users can design tailor-made dashboards that align with their specific requirements.

These features simplify data-gathering, setting the stage as one of the best report-building softwares.

Pricing for Datapine starts from $249 monthly, which goes up to the premium version at $799 per month.

9. Looker

One of the best BI reporting solutions is Looker — a cloud-based data analytics platform. It collects and merges data from different sources in an automatically generated LookML model. You can configure visualizations and dynamic dashboards, and a built-in code editor allows you to modify automatically generated models if needed. You can integrate Looker with Salesforce, PowerPoint, Confluence, and other tools.

Still, you should keep in mind that using Looker Studio requires learning how the basic LookML model works, so before you start using this report-building softwares, you’ll have to dedicate some time to it.

Pricing for Looker Studio is custom and depends on how many users you have and how large the scale of your deployment is.

10. Sisense

Sisense is a user-friendly Business Intelligence (BI) reporting tool designed to streamline data analytics and report automation processes. This powerful platform is known for its simplicity and efficiency. It excels in extracting data from various sources, such as Google Analytics, Salesforce, and more, making it a versatile solution for businesses seeking comprehensive insights.

One of the features of Sisense is its in-chip technology, which enables swift data processing, outpacing many other BI tools in terms of speed and efficiency. Sisense offers the flexibility of white-label analytics, allowing companies to tailor the tool to their specific needs. This means you can fully customize the platform’s services, integrating it seamlessly into your organization’s unique branding and workflow.

This report-building software’s user interface is highly intuitive, with a drag-and-drop feature that simplifies the process of creating reports and dashboards to design and manipulate data visualizations easily.

Sisense has a no-surprise pricing policy customized according to your needs and budget.

11. Power BI

Another business intelligence and data analytics tool you can use as a report automation tool is Microsoft Power BI. It collects and visualizes your marketing data and builds reports based on it. Power BI is quite convenient to use thanks to the similarity of its features to those of other Microsoft products (for instance, Microsoft Excel). You can also use Power BI to share the results with your coworkers securely and embed interactive reports into your applications. You can also use Power BI as project management report-building software and create project reports and status reports.

In terms of integrations, Microsoft Power BI is popular among report-building tools as it offers more than 120 free connectors and cloud data sources such as Excel, Salesforce, and Azure SQL Database.

Pricing for Power BI starts at $9.99 per month per user for a shared environment and $4,995 per month for a dedicated cloud.

12. Tableau

Another solution among report-building tools is Tableau. It uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to collect and analyze your marketing data, which you can use further to visualize your results using a simple drag-and-drop function. Tableau is partially based on the core query language VizQL. It translates visualization and dashboard elements into queries, so you don’t have to optimize them manually. Tableau also allows you to ensure extra security for your information with the ability to integrate your own security protocols. Regarding integrations with other reporting tools, Tableau offers a list of native data connectors.

Pricing for Tableau starts at $70 per user per month.

13. Ubiq

Ubiq stands out as an exceptional business intelligence and report automation tool. Leveraging advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, Ubiq simplifies data analysis by automating data collection and preparation processes. Its intuitive drag-and-drop interface empowers users of all skill levels to easily create visually compelling reports and dashboards, eliminating the need for extensive technical expertise. Ubiq’s adaptive query language adapts to user actions, intelligently translating visualization elements into queries.

One of its key strengths lies in its emphasis on data security, allowing users to integrate their own security protocols to protect sensitive information. With cross-platform compatibility, Ubiq as a report building software ensures data accessibility from any device, making it a versatile range among report-building tools seeking streamlined and insightful data reporting and analysis.

Pricing for Ubiq starts from $29 per user per month.

Key Takeaways

To improve the quality of your decision-making, you should be able to get simple, structured, and visualized answers to your questions as soon as possible. Data reporting tools can be of great help, but they’re extremely different in terms of functions and pricing. Ensure the tool you select can satisfy your business needs and serve as reliable grounds for decision-making.

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