10 Data Visualization Tools to See Actionable Insights at a Glance

Big Data is only as valuable as the insights you can derive from it. That’s why visualization is now an essential practice. It helps businesses make sense of the petabytes of data each department generates. Using tools to visualize data, specialists can interact with the data, analyze it, present it, and make data-driven decisions based on it. Basically, they bring data to life and put it into use.

Multiple visualization tools are available to help you make the best of your data. The main task is to pick the one that works best for your business. ‍‍

What Are The Benefits of Good Data Visualization?

Data visualization goes a long way in improving your data analysis. In doing so, you can enhance the effectiveness of your campaigns. Here are some of the key benefits data visualization offers.

Data visualization speeds up data interpretation and processing

Unlike text and plain numbers, good data visualization tools speed up your data processing. Research shows that people generally interpret data 60,000 times faster in a visual format than they do text.

So, with good data visualization within your processes, your team can analyze and derive insights from data much faster. When the information is presented in an understandable way, companies tend to access data more frequently and make decisions based on it.

In turn, you can make decisions more quickly, thereby improving the efficiency and effectiveness of your operations.

It shows relevant patterns that are otherwise hard to identify

Good data visualization enables you to identify patterns you might otherwise miss. Visuals generally do a better job at magnifying details. So, by using the tools, your team is less likely to miss insights that could be crucial to the business.

Visualization helps interpret large amounts of data

What better way to simplify large chunks of data than through visualization? Rather than reading through flat data, good data visualization software helps you make sense of voluminous information in a short time.

You can identify the relevant trends, patterns, and relationships without necessarily reading every detail. This, in turn, also speeds up decision-making.

Furthermore, it can be difficult to identify complex relationships within data without visualization. Yet, with graphs, pie charts, or other visualization techniques, these can be easily portrayed and identified.

Improves communication

With good data visualization, team communication becomes much simpler. Visuals are easy for different teams to understand, regardless of their specialization. They are also more impactful, getting the message across in a concise way.

As a result, information can be shared quickly across the company, thereby minimizing delays. Faster data transfer will thus improve your team’s efficiency and productivity, as well as foster cross-team alignment.

Top 10 Data Visualization Tools You Should be Using

To help you in your search, we’ve put together a list of the 10 best data visualization software solutions available.

Improvado

A must-try on this list, Improvado is a software that helps your sales and marketing teams automatically pull all data from hundreds of data sources to your data visualization software or BI tool without the help of developers. With this software, you can automate your data aggregation and metrics unification and feed your data directly into a visualization tool of your choice.

Improvado’s data harmonization feature safeguards from misleading data visualization and data duplicates. No matter how complex or large your data is, Improvado expertly handles and prepares it for further analysis.

Since every business has unique needs, Improvado offers a large number of data sources and provides custom integrations on demand. Suppose you struggle with data aggregation, data transformation, or you come across an issue in any other phase of the data visualization process. In that case, Improvado offers professional services that will help you address any challenges you’re facing.

Improvado provides custom pricing that is tailored to your needs and use cases. So, be sure to contact their team for an accurate quote.

Pros

Seamless integration with 500+ visualization tools and data sources.
Ease of use: Improvado is a no-code tool, so teams with zero technical expertise can still derive value from its implementation.
Any issue that comes up in the data visualization process can be addressed by professional services.
All-in-one custom dashboard and templates.
Custom approach to pricing.

Cons

The tool is focused on marketing and sales needs, so it has limited functionality for other departments within a company.

Looker

Looker is a browser-based data visualization tool that offers a unique modeling language. Provided by Google, it capitalizes on the newest, fastest analytic databases to get accurate results in real time.

Looker makes it relatively easy to choose, customize, and create a variety of interactive visualizations. Plus, you also have several graphs and charts to choose from. The platform’s biggest draw is the ability to create customized visualizations and models, even with limited SQL knowledge.

Pros:

Great customization: Looker offers custom install options along with their hosted solutions.
Intuitive UI: setting up and navigating Looker is easy and straightforward, including custom queries.
Integrates with Big Data platforms and databases.
The platform offers customized pricing.

Cons:

With simplicity comes a lack of platform flexibility.
The platform may lag during high-traffic hours.

Tableau

Tableau is a BI analysis and data visualization tool that helps companies create interactive dashboards with advanced visual analytics. You can create charts, maps, graphs, and other graphics with Tableau. The platform further allows you to install the software on your own devices or use cloud hosting directly on Tableau’s server.

Unlike Looker, it offers a defined set of prices for its tools.

Pros:

Tableau provides access to files using cloud and data warehouses.
The data visualization tool is intuitive and user-friendly.
Tableau is a feature-rich tool.

Cons:

A steep learning curve makes it difficult to scale Tableau adoption within the company.
Tableau supports a low number of third-party data connectors.

Google Data Studio

Data Studio is Google’s free data visualization tool. Thus, it connects with all other Google properties and data sources, and even third parties.

Furthermore, the tool’s dynamic capabilities help marketers maintain and share updated reports. If there is a change to a source, it automatically updates your reports. These include customized and shareable graphs, charts, and tables.

The platform is also easy to access, even from other Google products, like Google Analytics. Simply sign in with the same logins and you are good to go.

Pros:

Google Data Studio is among just a few free-to-use data visualization solutions.
Simple branded visuals are easy to build and customize.
New features are released regularly.
Since Google Data Studio is a free tool, its implementation doesn’t include a lengthy procurement and deployment process.

Cons:

Some third-party connectors often “disconnect,” and the data shows as missing.
There is a steep learning curve with using some data sources.
There’s no professional services or customer support. Data Studio users have to consult with fellow users.

Datawrapper

Datawrapper is a data visualization software developed for journalists, developers, and designers working in fast-paced newsrooms.

It’s a no-code data visualization tool, and users can easily upload data to create and publish charts, graphs, and maps. Custom layouts let you integrate your visualizations with your website, and access to local area maps is also available.

This data visualization software transforms numerical data from PDFs, Excel, Google Sheets, CSVs, and web sources into charts and graphs.

Pros:

There is a variety of charts and graphs to choose from.
Datawrapper is a no-code tool, which means no engineering or design skills are required to start visualizing data.
There is a free tier available.

Cons:

Data is stored on a Datawrapper server with the free plan. It can be complicated to store data on your server.
Customization of fonts and colors can be difficult.
Datawraper was designed to meet journalists’ needs; its use in other spheres is limited.

FusionCharts

FusionCharts boasts that it’s the most comprehensive data visualization tool for developers. It is the leading Javascript-based tool, with a library of over 100 chart types and 2000 maps.

It’s a comprehensive software for development teams to create visuals with advanced customizations. FusionCharts integrates with jQuery, React, AngularJS, PHP, and ASP.NET, which many similar tools do not support.

Pros:

FusionCharts provides a variety of charts and customization options.
The software is easy to use and has an intuitive UI.

Cons:

The visualization tool has some problems with responsiveness and speed.
FusionCharts isn’t the best option for casual users or beginners.
The utility of FusionCharts is limited as the tool is designed for development teams.

D3.js

D3.js is a JavaScript-based library for creating data visualizations in multiple formats. The platform provides a lot of creative freedom for users, as it uses web technologies like CSS, HTML, and SVG.

Since it’s pretty technical, it’s a better data visualization tool for developers. The software is powerful and can work with small and larger data sets.

Pros:

D3.js provides multiple charts and visualization options to create appealing components that will be supported by any browser.
The visualization tool offers multiple customization options.

Cons:

The tool is suited to developers only.
The tool has a steep learning curve and requires extensive product knowledge to create some charts because D3.js lacks consistency and requires additional data processing.

Qlik Sense

Qlik Sense is a business intelligence and data visualization tool that boasts multiple users across the data chain. It is an advanced platform that provides mobile analytics, reporting, interactive dashboards, and visualizations.

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It comes in three tiers: Enterprise, Business, and Team, so Qlik Sense has a solution for everyone, regardless of their business size. The platform offers data visualization and storytelling functionalities, advanced data governance features, progressive creation, and data modeling methods.

Pros:

Qlik Sense has an AI-powered insights feature that helps analyze the data and identify patterns.
The platform is suitable for users with any level of expertise and needs, both beginners and experienced data analysts.

Cons:

The tool supports sophisticated workflows and many data sources, and it processes large volumes of data, all of which come at the cost of a steep learning curve.
The tool is more expensive than its competitors.

Power BI

Power BI is a data visualization and business analytics solution provided by Microsoft. Power BI has native integration with other Microsoft services, like Azure, SQL, and Excel, which comes in handy when building data visualizations. Power BI has pre-built connectors to pull data from tools like Salesforce and Google Analytics.

Power BI is easy to use and is suitable for a non-technical audience.

Pros

Power BI has native integration with Microsoft services and can aggregate data from different resources, including marketing and sales services.
Power BI provides a free trial and has cheaper tiers compared to other data visualization tools.
The tool is suitable for non-technical users.

Cons

The free version has a limited number of features and can cause lags when processing large amounts of data.
The tool lacks enterprise features.

Yellowfin BI

This Yellowfin data visualization software supports around 50 types of charts and a diverse range of visualization customizations. The data visualization tool supports multiple data sources and integrates predictive analytics tools and Big Data processing tools like UDF and Spark.

Yellowfin supports enterprise-grade data visualization features, like interactive reports and self-service capabilities.

Pros:

Yellowfin is easy to set up and use. Yellowfin’s basic functionality doesn’t require any technical expertise.
Yellowfin has responsive customer support.

Cons:

Advanced customization requires coding.
The tool offers limited chart types compared to alternatives.

Next Step

These ten proven data visualization tools can help your team understand critical business information at a glance and ensure accurate data analysis, making teams more efficient and productive.

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While these data visualization tools are great for building charts and graphs, it can still be a tedious challenge to gather all your data from various data sources and send it all to a visualization or BI tool. As preparation for data visualization, consider a comprehensive data solution that puts all your numbers in one place, gets you the insights you need, and simplifies communication with your team. ‍