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 we dive into the rest, we’d be remiss if we didn’t talk about the best data dashboard software in 2024. While we may be a bit biased, we assure you that our customers 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. The platform puts users in the driver’s seat with an intuitive, search-based interface that allows them to build visualizations and discover insights.
Leveraging AI-powered analytics, ThoughtSpot users can simply ask business questions in natural language. They can also drill into specific parts of the data to get the insights they want and communicate them more effectively. You can also model your data to predict future outcomes and make informed decisions about 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:
Search-based interface for building dashboards
Real-time data visualizations
Personalized, interactive Liveboard and reporting
Easy integration with multiple sources
Predictive and advanced data analytics
SpotIQ for ad-hoc reporting and AI-driven insights
Easy report sharing
Mobile accessibility
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:
Visual explorer
SQL editor
R and Python notebooks
Apply filters and parameters
Iterate with self-serve reporting
Supports multiple devices
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
Tableau Ask data feature
Connects multiple data sources
Live and in-memory data
Predictive analytics for trends
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
Interactive visualization
Predictive analytics
Integration with Microsoft product suite
Data monitoring is available on the mobile app
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
Low-code interface for dashboard building
AI assistance for data preparation and exploration
Advanced analytics
Real-time data monitoring
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
Intuitive interface for dashboard building
QuickSight Q for AI assistance
Paginated reports
Available on mobile devices
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
Data preparation
Dashboard and reporting
Goals and notifications
Collaboration and sharing
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
Reporting and self-service reporting
Connectivity with multiple data sources
Data modeling
Accessible on mobile and desktop devices
Easy report sharing
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.
