16 Free and Open Source Business Intelligence Tools

Real-time analytics is becoming increasingly important as businesses are processing more and more information about their operations and customers. In just one example, Gartner projects that in three years, the average person will interact more with bots each day than their romantic partners.

But it is not enough to collect all of this information. Companies will need to analyze it — and that is where data science and business intelligence tools come in. Open-source software is overtaking proprietary platforms, so I have compiled a comprehensive list of free and open-source BI tools in alphabetical order.

Have I left anyone out? If so, let me know below in the comments.

BIRT is open source BI software that can be used to create data visualizations and reports, which can all be embedded into web applications. The main components are a visual report designer, a runtime component for generating designs, and a charting engine. The platform has more than 12 million downloads as well as a community center at the BIRT Developer Center.

ClicData offers ClicData Personal, a free version of their dashboard software that provides 1 GB of data storage with an unlimited number of dashboards for a single user. The premium version allows for a greater number of data connectors, automated data refreshes, and multi-user with advanced sharing capabilities.

The open source ELK Stack is commonly used to centralize streams of data then visualize the information in real-time, monitoring dashboards (such as this one for Salesforce dashboards). We at Logz.io have created an AI-powered log analysis platform that offers ELK as an enterprise-grade cloud service with machine learning technology.

Helical Insight is an open source BI framework that provides e-mail scheduling, visualization, exporting, multi-tenancy, user role management along with an API-driven framework that allows users to add any additional functionality that they may need. The Instant BI feature lets people type questions in a Google-like interface and receive the relevant reports and charts.

Jedox provides powerful planning and beautiful reporting on every desktop and mobile device. The platform aims to eliminate the headaches of Excel by providing a rich, interactive experience with real-time modeling. The cloud and premium on-premise versions have 14- and 30-day trials, respectively.

JasperReports Server provides reporting and analytics that can be embedded into a web or mobile application as well as serve as a repository of information that can be delivered on a real-time or scheduled basis. This open source software can also manage Jaspersoft paid BI reporting and analytics platform.

KNIME is an open source platform for data analysis that comes with more than 1,000 modules, hundreds of ready-to-run example analyses, a set of tools that is integrated into the software, and a lengthy selection of algorithms that users can chose to incorporate. KNIME is used by data scientists and BI executives.