BI Vendors Sliced and Diced on G2’s Grid

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If you’re on the hunt for better business intelligence software – and really, who isn’t these days? – you likely are reading some analyst reports on the topic. But all too often, those reports don’t reflect the experiences of real-world users. One analyst firm looking to fill that niche is G2 Crowd, which recently released a crowdsourced Grid of the top BI products.

G2 Crowd launched five years ago with an audacious plan: short circuit the business models of analyst groups like Forrester, Gartner, and IDC by crowdsourcing product reviews directly from users. The hope was that going directly to the users would provide a wider base of experience to draw from, while simultaneously opening the competition to a broader swath of vendors (i.e. those who don’t want to pay the analyst groups to participate in their product and vendor reviews and reports).

Now G2 Crowd‘s business plan appears to be gaining traction. Thanks to a connection to LinkedIn that allow members of that business social media site to review the products they use, G2 Crowd has caught on. The company surpassed the 50,000 verified-user product review mark in 2015, and reached 100,000 reviews one year later. Today the company, which raised $30 million in a 2017 Series B that LinkedIn participated in, claims to have more than 400,000 independent reviews that are read by 1.5 million buyers per month.

G2 Crowd’s Spring 2018 Grid report for BI platforms (Source: G2 Crowd)

That brings us to Spring 2018 Grid report for BI platforms. The company rates BI products and vendors based on reviews gathered from its user community, as well as data aggregated from online sources and social networks. Then it applies a “unique algorithm” to the data to calculate “satisfaction” and “market presence,” the two main scores used to rank products and vendors.

According to G2 Crowd, SAP‘s BusinessObjects had the highest market presence out of 34 BI products and vendors ranked on the grid, followed by Tableau, Microsoft PowerBI, Domo, and Oracle BI. Others with high rankings on the market presence spectrum include QlikView, MicroStrategy, looker, Information Builders, SAS Business Intelligence, and Sisense.

However, a high market presence doesn’t necessarily correlate with high customer satisfaction. The BI product with the highest customer satisfaction rating was InsightSquared, followed by Sisense, looker, Domo, Tableau, PowerBI, Phocas, and Chartio.

Those vendors who combine high scores across both metrics – market presence and customer satisfaction – are welcomed into the Leaders quadrant on the Grid (which does bear a passing resemblance to Gartner’s famous Magic Quadrant). BI vendors who landed in G2 Crowd’s Leaders quadrant include Tableau, PowerBI, Domo, looker, Sisense, InsightSquared, QlikView, SAP, Microstrategy, GoodData, Mode Analytics, Phocas, and BOARD.

G2 Crowd isn’t yet sharing its 2018 Spring BI Grid with the public (it only has an older version of report on its website), but you can get a copy of the 2018 Spring Grid from  looker at looker.com/learn/g2crowd-grid-report.

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