The Best Cloud Analytics Tools – Updated

Based on our independent research, selection requirements, and rating methodologies, below are the best cloud analytics tools on the market today.

Here is our list of the best cloud analytics tools: 

1. Zoho Analytics (FREE TRIAL) This platform provides business intelligence by gathering, formatting, and presenting your business activity data. Available for installation on Windows, Windows Server, and Linux or as a SaaS package. Start a 30-day free trial.
2. IBM Cognos Analytics Uses AI techniques to uncover and identify patterns combined with great visuals. Has plans to suit businesses at any scale.
3. Microsoft Power BI Great data visualization, create dashboards and easily share and collaborate with colleagues. Integrates machine learning.
4. Board Decades of business performance management distilled into a cloud-based offering, with powerful pre-configured automated predictive modeling.
5. Spotfire AI-powered advanced analytics tool designed for enterprise users with strong search capabilities.
6. Domo Pulls data from external service providers such as Microsoft Excel, Xero, Facebook, Salesforce, AWS, MySQL, and more.

If you need to know more, explore our vendor highlight section just below, or skip to our detailed vendor reviews. 

Cloud analytics tools have emerged as a new model of enterprise analytics. Now, companies are using analytics solutions in the cloud to visualize key business metrics remotely. Specifically, these tools can solve the following pain points in organizations.

• Fragmented data across multiple cloud environments.
• Inability to gather data from legacy systems.
• Data errors and duplication, and the resulting impact on analysis.
• Limited visibility into the health and performance of your cloud infrastructure.
• Manual processes that cost time and effort, along with a higher chance of errors.
• Delayed insights.
• Limited collaboration among teams

What is a Cloud Analytics Tool?

A cloud analytics tool is a platform based in the cloud that allows the user to view analytics data. Through one pane of glass, you can monitor data sources, data models, processing applications, computing resources, analytics models, and storage resources. Companies use these tools for everything from network monitoring to business intelligence.

The core benefit of cloud analytics tools is that you can monitor lots of disparate services and datasets from one location. For example, you can view a range of business intelligence metrics and real-time insights before converting them into a report to send over to other stakeholders. Having this information readily available helps to make more informed business decisions and operate more efficiently.

Cloud analytics tools highlights

Key points to consider before choosing a cloud analytics tool

Selecting the right cloud analytics tool is not easy, as it can impact the way you perceive data and the resulting decisions based on it. More importantly, it must fit well with your organization’s infrastructure and support all the applications that are used. It helps to meet your compliance requirements as well. Some aspects to consider are:

• Data Integration: One of the most important aspects to consider is the integration with existing cloud services and data sources. Look for platforms that have connectors for all the leading service providers and applications.
• Scalability: The tool you select must scale well to meet the growing data volumes in your organization. Check how well the tool manages high-frequency data streams and real-time analytics workloads.
• Security: Another significant aspect is security. Make sure that the cloud analytics tools come with features like role-based access controls, data encryption, audit logs, and more. All these features keep your data secure. More importantly, these features ensure you meet compliance requirements.
• Advanced Analytics: Prioritize tools that offer advanced analytics, which go beyond the basic metrics. Make sure they connect different data sources and provide unified insights that can improve your operations.
• AI Capabilities: It helps to have AI tools that come with machine learning and predictive analytics, as these features detect anomalies quickly and provide insights into trends. AI assistants can also improve your understanding of data and analytics.

In addition to the above factors, consider the cost and reputation of the vendor.

To dive deeper into how we incorporate these into our research and review methodology, skip to our detailed methodology section.

The best cloud analytics tools

1. Zoho Analytics (FREE TRIAL)

Best for: Self-service cloud BI

Relevant for: Cloud operations teams, business analysts, data engineers, and SaaS product managers.

Price: Zoho Analytics offers four plans: Basic – $25, Standard – $50, Premium – $125, Enterprise – $495

All prices are per month. The price of the first two plans is for two users only and increases as you add more users. The Premium plan pricing is for 15 users, while the price of the Enterprise plan can include up to 50 users.

Zoho Analytics is a BI package and it competes in a crowded market. The strength of this system is its library of connectors to third-party systems. Often the difficulty of using a BI system lies in getting data into it, so the connector library saves a lot of time. As a fallback position, you can use a log forwarder.

Zoho Analytics’s key features

• A Data Analyzer: Ingests data into a standard format
• Blends Data: Correlates different data sources
• Identifies Duplication: Spots the same data coming in from different sources
• AI-Based Data Analysis: A business intelligence (BI) service

Unique buying proposition

Zoho Analytics combines 500 connectors on a single BI platform. With its cloud-native deployment, it can support data lakes and business applications. All these features provide unified analytics across your infrastructure and applications. You can further use this as the base for predictive modeling and decision-making.

Feature-in-focus: Pipeline Automation

A key feature of Zoho Analytics is its support for automated pipelines. It also comes with a drag-and-drop interface for building workflows. No coding is required, and you don’t even have to maintain a central metrics layer to standardize the KPIs, as this is handled automatically by Zoho Analytics.

Why do we recommend it?

Zoho Analytics provides an engine for defining data sets to spot ways in which different sources can work together. This process shifts a lot of the analytical work backwards into the data acquisition phase and can reveal insights into the data that might otherwise be missed.

Drawing data from many sources can create duplication and incompatibilities. The Zoho system suggests connections between data sets. These might not always be accurate because coincidences are common in data. So, the dashboard will present these possible links for approval by the user.

Once the treatment of data has been set up into a model, you can channel new data from the same sources either for offline processing or working on a sliding window of live data. So the tool can also be used for near-live automated analysis, although, typically, BI tools are intended for use for historical analysis.

Who is it recommended for?

Like most BI tools, this system can be used for any data analysis task and so would be suitable for any team within a business. Its main market probably lies in budgeting, trend analysis, and marketing insights. The graphics that can be generated with this tool are great for business presentations to illuminate assessments.

Zoho Analytics is a SaaS platform but you can opt to get it as a software package for Windows, Windows Server, or Linux. The software can also be run on Docker and it is available as a service on AWS and Azure. The price structure is different for the SaaS and on-premises services. There is a free edition for the on-premises version, which is called the Personal plan. You can get a 30-day free trial of the on-premises package or a 15-day free trial for the SaaS option.

Zoho Analytics Start 30-day Free Trial

2. IBM Cognos Analytics

Best for: Enterprise-grade BI

Relevant for: Large organizations, cloud operations teams, and executives who need cloud analytics for making decisions.

Price: There are two plans: Standard – $10.60, Premium – $42.40. All prices are per authorized user.

IBM Cognos Analytics is a cloud analytics tool focused on business intelligence that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to pull insights from data sets. The platform is web-based and allows you to create dashboards and reports to monitor your environment. Reports can be scheduled and shared to deliver regular updates on the latest data. Both dashboards and reports come with AI recommendations to help you configure the best settings for monitoring your environment.

IBM Cognos Analytics’s key features

• Multidimensional Data Cubes: Clickable tables of data
• AI-Based Analytics: Can provide insights and recommendations
• Choice of Representation Methods: Offers graphical widgets for data representation

Unique buying proposition

IBM Cognos offers a complete BI suite capable of analyzing data, converting it into visual charts and dashboards, and generating reports. It enables organizations to gather data from diverse sources and analyze them for comprehensive insights. It can be deployed on private cloud, public cloud, and on-premises.

Feature-in-focus: AI-driven Assistant

A notable capability is the AI-driven assistant. With this tool, users can ask questions in natural language and get answers or even summaries. This flexibility allows teams to get more insights from their data. Since IBM Cognos scales well, you can add as many sources as required.

Why do we recommend it?

IBM Cognos Analytics is a useful offline analysis system. You don’t look through live data with Cognos. Instead, you import data into it and so it is a data store as well as a data analysis package. The tool also has AI features but most users will appreciate the choice of data visualizations.

On the dashboard, you have a range of visualization options at your disposal including graphs, dials, and other unique display options that provide you with the essential data at a glance. One such display is the geospatial view which shows you a geographical map of where your services are located. For convenience, when creating a new dashboard you can copy and paste visual displays to create an even stronger monitoring experience.

To supply the platform with data, you can take information from databases on-premises or in the cloud, CSV files, and spreadsheets. The wide range of sources you can import data from is great because it enables you to bring a variety of services into one monitoring platform. You can also use machine learning to automatically discover data sources and add them to your monitoring environment.

Who is it recommended for?

This system is a good option for businesses that want to implement retrospective analysis of activity rather than live monitoring. Cognos creates layers of categorizations that users can select in the created model to see new summaries, so it should be provided to a financial director or a marketing analyst.

There is also a 30-day free trial.

3. Microsoft Power BI

Best for: Cloud-scale business intelligence

Relevant for: Cloud operations teams, business analysts, and product managers who require detailed analytics of their Microsoft ecosystem.

Price: The Pro plan starts at $14 while the Premium plan costs $24. Both plans are priced per user per month. It also offers a free plan. The Embedded plan has custom pricing.

Microsoft Power BI is a business intelligence platform with advanced analytics capabilities. Microsoft Power BI provides you with a dashboard that uses visualization to display key insights taken from your enterprise. The dashboard streams analytics in real-time so that you can make informed decisions on the fly.

Microsoft Power BI’s key features

• Creates a Data Lake: Works with structured and unstructured data collections
• Integrates with Excel: Import or export data
• Produces Attractive Presentations: Choose your data graphics representation

Unique buying proposition

This is a cloud-native analytics platform that can connect to hundreds of data sources to gather and analyze data across your applications and environments. It also integrates well with the Microsoft Azure ecosystem to provide detailed visibility into your entire infrastructure.

Feature-in-focus: Real-time Data Streams

A highlight of Power BI is its ability to handle real-time data streams. What this means is that it analyzes data as it happens and provides updated metrics. This can help with quick troubleshooting and can alert you to emerging security incidents. All this analysis is displayed in near-real-time dashboards.

Why do we recommend it?

Microsoft Power BI is a similar tool to IBM Cognos Analytics. You can use this tool in conjunction with other Microsoft tools, which gives it a big marketing edge over the Cognos system. This service can evolve over time, adjusting parameters and thresholds, which is also possible with the AI features of Cognos.

For more comprehensive analysis you can publish and share reports with other stakeholders in your company. The platform integrates with Excel so that you can connect Excel queries and other data straight to the dashboard.

One of the standout features included with Microsoft Power BI is the ability to use AI to build machine learning models. This means that you don’t have to be a data scientist or analytics expert to pull accurate insights from datasets. Models can be built to manage structured and unstructured data.

Who is it recommended for?

While Cognos includes a data storage system, this tool can work on streams of data fed into it over time. You can use this tool to fence a data collection and provide that to users for analysis or let the tool interpret a constantly changing data set.

You can download the free version.

4. Board

Best for: Unified BI and planning

Relevant for: Cloud operations teams, enterprise analytics teams, and executives who need business performance and cloud usage analytics.

Price: Negotiated pricing

Board is a cloud analytics and business intelligence platform designed with performance management in mind. The software allows the user to create custom planning and analytics applications to improve decision making.

Board’s key features

• A Planning Tool: Predictive modeling
• Fast Processing: Hosted on the cloud
• Integration for Microsoft Office: Generate reports in Office formats, such as PowerPoint

Unique buying proposition

Board combines business intelligence and predictive analysis to provide a unified view of your cloud infrastructure’s performance, costs, business outcomes, and other relevant information from the existing data. In particular, it is helpful for organizations that want to tie in cloud analytics with wider business performance and corporate planning.

Feature-in-focus: What-if Simulation

The What-if simulation feature enables organizations to load data from cloud workflows and use it to create alternative scenarios. The best part is that for each scenario, you can assess the impact on cost, performance, and business KPIs, allowing you to make decisions that will have a positive impact on your organization’s outcomes.

Why do we recommend it?

The IBM and Zoho systems create data models. Board is more like Microsoft Power BI because it presents data from manual searches rather than providing a specific data storage structure to enhance data access speed. This is a much simpler tool than the above three systems.

The Board BEAM feature uses automated predictive modeling to produce analytics forecasts to identify future business trends. The feature comes with preconfigured statistical functions including frequency, recency, nascency, and dormancy.

To help you find the information you need quickly, Board has a search function. The search function allows you to explore data, metadata, and applications to discover additional information. Running searches is great for locating information without having to sift through the dashboard.

The reporting capabilities of Board are also excellent. Reports can be customized with a drag-and-drop interface. There is also integration with Microsoft Office so you can import datasets directly.

Who is it recommended for?

Board produces its data analyzer in three editions to suit financial, supply chain, and retail sectors. This specialization makes the service easier for non-technical users to employ. This is because the templates and data visualization libraries don’t need to be so large and therefore are quicker to select from.

Overall, Board is a tool that is highly recommended for those looking for a user-friendly cloud analytics and business intelligence solution. In order to view the price of Board you’ll have to contact the company directly. You can also request a personalized demo.

5. Spotfire

Best for: Real-time analytics

Relevant for: Cloud operations teams, data scientists, and enterprise analytics groups that handle cloud infrastructure.

Price: Negotiated pricing

Spotfire is an AI-powered advanced analytics tool designed for enterprise users. The analytics capabilities of Spotfire range from visual analytics to predictive analytics, location analytics, and streaming analytics. For example, visual analytics provide you with interactive visual displays with graphs whereas predictive analytics forecast future business data.

Spotfire’s key features

• AI-Based Analysis: Can also calculate forecasts
• Location Identifier Option: Manage geographical data
• Customizable Display Screens: Pick your favorite data representation graphics

Unique buying proposition

Spotfire can ingest both historical and streaming data, regardless of whether it comes from cloud, on-premises, or hybrid environments. It analyzes this data to provide advanced analytics that are displayed on well-developed dashboards. Using this analysis, you can also detect anomalies and take corrective actions as needed.

Feature-in-focus: Model-driven Decision-making

The data analysis is precise and provides insights into the real-time status. It supports connectors to Kafka and enables the embedding of data-science models using Python or Spark. With these models, you can also trigger actions, send alerts, update configuration, and even scale resources as required.

Why do we recommend it?

Spotfire doesn’t require data to be imported and stored before it can be analyzed. It is able to operate on live data, which can even be in motion. The system can access existing data stores and operate on them without changing or duplicating that original data.

For further customization, Spotfire includes APIs to enable you to create customized visualizations and apps to monitor your enterprise data. There are also out-of-the-box templates to enable you to set up the program quickly. The configuration options are one of Spotfire’s greatest assets.

There are four main versions of Spotfire to purchase: TIBCO Cloud Spotfire, TIBCO Spotfire Platform, TIBCO Cloud Spotfire Entreprise, and Spotfire for Amazon Web Services.

Who is it recommended for?

Spotfire is very good at high-speed data processing. Essentially, this is more of a very sophisticated reporting tool. As such, this is a high-end tool that would be beyond the budgets of small businesses. A metered service for the analysis of AWS-hosted data is more affordable.

You can download the 30-day free trial.

6. Domo (now Progress Domo)

Best for: All-in-one cloud BI platform

Relevant for: Cloud operations teams, business analysts, and SaaS teams that require unified analytics across multiple environments.

Price: Negotiated pricing

Domo is a cloud analytics software platform designed to integrate data from external sources and visualize it in one location. Domo pulls data from external service providers such as Microsoft Excel, Xero, Facebook, Salesforce, AWS, MySQL, and more. All integrated data is automatically updated so that you see up-to-the-minute information and “one living source of truth.”

Domo’s key features

• Can Gather Data from all the Major Cloud Platforms: Continues to gather live updates
• Attach SQL or Excel Backends: Mine static data
• Combine Data Sources: Construct workflows around data analysis

Unique buying proposition

This cloud-native platform merges data integration, transformation, and visualization into a single app. This means teams can bring together data from different sources, analyze them, and display the results on intuitive dashboards for making informed decisions. It is also highly scalable and quick to deploy.

Feature-in-focus: Multi-cloud Connectors

A standout feature of Domo is its ability to ingest data from multiple cloud environments. It uses 1,000+ pre-built connectors to pull data from any cloud application or infrastructure. It can also be used to connect with legacy systems.

Why do we recommend it?

Domo is an interactive system that can access data in its present location without needing those records to be duplicated and restored within the tool. In fact, the system can read in data, process it and then save transformed data to other locations. The tool can blend data from multiple sources.

The dashboard is customizable so you can choose which part of the screen shows what data. To customize the dashboard all you need to do is drag cards into the location you want. You can also use out-of-the-box templates if you want to save time.

You have complete control over the data you see in Domo. Magic ETL allows you to sequence and combine data sourceswith a drag-and-drop interface. For example, you can join data from MySQL and Excel. Another perk of this setup is that you don’t have to learn SQL to interact with your datasets. You can also deploy custom R or Python scripts if you want to add additional analytics functions like forecasting.

Who is it recommended for?

Domo has many use cases, of which cloud data analysis is one. The tool can also be used for task automation and data orchestration. It is possible to use this tool to verify input data or process information between applications. The framework can also be used to create new applications.

Of course, there are also real-time alerts and push notifications to keep you updated on any changes. With apps available for iOS and Android you can stay in the loop no matter where you are. To view the pricing of Domo you’ll have to contact the sales team directly. You can start a 30-day free trial.

Our methodology for choosing cloud analytics tools

We reviewed many cloud analytics tools and platforms to identify the best ones that can collect and analyze data to provide meaningful insights for organizations. The idea behind this evaluation process was to provide you with reliable tools that work well across multiple cloud environments and are practical for everyday usage. To achieve this goal, we considered the following factors.

1. Support for Multi-cloud Environments

We checked how easily a tool gathers data from different cloud services. We preferred tools that could collect data from leading cloud service providers, like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, and collate them for deeper insights.

2. Data Collection and Integration

A good cloud analytics tool must gather data from logs, metrics, and events, and correlate them to identify detailed insights. Tools that supported more tools had a higher score on our rankings.

3. Analytics Features

The purpose of analytics is to present raw information in a way that can add more meaning and value to your organization. This means intuitive dashboards, trend charts, anomaly metrics, and more. It must also allow users to dig deeper into trends through a well-designed UI.

4. Reports

We gave higher priority to tools that could generate reports for easy sharing and distribution. Reports that could be exported across multiple formats and were easy to read by all users ranked higher.

5. Real-time Alerts

We looked at how well a tool tracks cloud activity in real time and sends alerts to enable teams to act quickly. Tools that had high alert accuracy were given higher importance.

6. Security and Compliance

Lastly, we evaluated the security features of each tool and how well it complied with the requirements of leading standards and frameworks. Specifically, we looked for features like role-based access controls, compliance reporting, and audit logs.

Broader B2B software selection methodology

Our broad B2B methodology covers aspects like pricing, vendor reliability, scalability, and more, to ensure that a particular tool adds value to your operations. These factors are an essential part of our overall software review methodology. We evaluate the following aspects while selecting a tool.

• Pricing transparency and the availability of flexible plans to meet your needs.
• Scalability to meet your growing needs.
• The reliability, software update frequency, and the quality of customer service offered by the vendor.
• Usability of the software.
• Reviews and experiences shared by users.

Click here to learn more about our methodology.

Choosing a Cloud Analytics Tool

Depending on your use case, there are a plethora of cloud analytics tools at your disposal. Whether you want to marshal the business intelligence capabilities of Microsoft Power BI or the performance monitoring prowess of a tool like IBM Cognos Analytics, there are plenty of choices.

When picking out a solution, decide which tool matches your use case the best. If you lack experience with AI but want to use an intelligent platform, we recommend Microsoft Power BI as you’ll be able to create machine learning models even if you’re not a data scientist.

Cloud Analytics FAQs