Izenda was acquired, what are the top Izenda alternatives (5 + 1 Bonus)?

Every CEO knows that in the 21st century, data is king. Employing a platform that can aggregate, make sense of and display business intelligence (BI) to help you make your case, win that bid, or secure that capital is increasingly vital. Izenda has been a top tool for senior executives in this respect. Earlier this year, Insight Software acquired Izenda, building on its suite of BI platforms and tools. They are looking to integrate these resources, having also recently bought Logi Analytics. In an increasingly competitive BI industry, the big fish gobble up the little fish. We don’t know much about Insight – they’re probably an excellent company. But M&A takeovers like this produce a lot of uncertainty for consumers. Is this the right time to bring Izenda onboard? When one company acquires another in the BI world, what happens next often follows a predictable pattern. At first, nothing happens – there’s a period of stasis while plans are drawn up. But no company acquires another without some master plan, which will often involve significant change. To maximize their ROI, the parent company will typically either: 1. Find a way to squeeze more revenue from the existing customer base OR 2. Change the way the acquired property works to integrate it with their existing offering OR 3. BOTH! When Insight bought two BI companies in close succession, you just knew there’s some serious integration in the pipeline. We’ve seen it before. Like when Tableau users began to see Salesforce making changes. Or Looker fans reacting against the alterations Google made following acquisition. Or in the worst-case scenario, your favored platform is bought and axed, such as when Atlassian snapped up rival Chartio.

Looking for an Alternative to Izenda?

Whether you’ve loved using Izenda, or you’ve been considering adopting it to provide your BI needs, you may not want to be part of the Insight family. Certainly, you should consider the alternatives. We’ve pulled together the top 5 Izenda rivals (plus one bonus alternative) and summarized their pros and cons below.

Top 5 (+1) Alternatives to Izenda

Exago BI

Exago is a mid-priced, easy-to-embed alternative to Izenda, and users love the ease with which you can create bespoke dashboards and produce on-the-spot reports. It integrates with data sources including SQL Server, DB2, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Informix, as well as ODBC, web service, and tailor-made assemblies. Drag and drop report-building functionality scores highly although some users have reported a lag in dashboard loading and some difficulty with the UI of dropdown filters. When you generate a report that doesn’t quite give you what you need, you can’t just alter parameters and go again, you must back up to the start of the process.

Yellowfin BI

Yellowfin has some of the best-looking dashboards available, is quick to set up, and easy to train staff on. It is reasonably priced (from what we hear), giving better value as you add more users. Yellowfin are proactive in their support and in working with their customers and this might be a good choice for a smaller company wanting to leverage high-volume data. However, as with Exago, there can be lags and bugs when loading charts, and, worst of all, there’s no cloud-based storage at present, meaning it’s only as efficient as your server. There’s also insufficient support for creating custom fields or formulae.

GoodData

There’s no problem with cloud-based storage with GoodData, which draws down data from multiple sources pretty seamlessly. It’s very customizable with plenty of dashboard, metric, and report design options. GoodData has a facility for automated reporting, handy when you’ve committed to regular strategic meetings and want to prepare your team in advance. Although it works on Windows and Mac OS, there’s no mobile interface at present. There have also been reports of glitches with the API and with the comparably high level of SQL competence report designers might need to get the most from the system. However, it’s a strong mid-level contender.

Dundas

Dundas’ powerful BI solution scores highly on two fronts. Firstly, their cloud-based warehousing forces you to use their hyper-secure data storage, which is great for any smaller company replying on less than stellar server security. It can create neat mobile interfaces too, ideal for executives on the go. Its complexity and customizability are both strengths and weaknesses, depending on your IT expertise. Dundas will benefit developers with JavaScript flair but may not suit companies looking for a straightforward plug-and-play approach. There have also been complaints about its project and data management system. Finally, the auto-save default location can’t be altered, so this might not suit users with messy desks (you know who you are!)

Microsoft Power BI Embedded

If your team already uses other Microsoft products, adopting Microsoft’s Power Platform might be a no-brainer. It’s typically user-friendly and has excellent data visualization capabilities. Power BI has over 74 data connectors and integrations, as you might expect. However, there’s a weird quirkiness to how it works — you use the desktop tool for data prep but the web user UI for publishing. Why not just have one interface for the whole process? It requires locally stored data as well, so it’s not ideal if you adopt a cloud-based storage model. Possibly one for Windows loyalists only.

The +1 Alternative to Izenda, Yurbi

It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that we are going to pitch our own BI platform, Yurbi, as the bonus alternative to Izenda. But don’t worry, we’re not going to give you a heavy sales pitch. We prefer for our technology to speak for itself. So we provided you with a great assortment of industry leaders above, and then modestly, we don’t want to add ourselves to the Top 5 list, we want you to do the research and decide for yourself.

Here are a few key things about Yurbi to consider:

1. Self-hosted. You install Yurbi on your private server and network and never have to worry about losing control of your data, 3rd party network access, or privacy concerns. Being self-hosted provides a big advantage in our opinion when you’re looking to embed software like a BI platform so tightly with your own. 2. Security. Yurbi includes dynamic data-level security and has out-of-the-box support for multi-tenant and single-tenant database models. Build a set of reports and dashboards once and share with all your customers securely. 3. Deployment. Everyone is a hybrid cloud app these days. You have a hosted app for the majority of your customers, but then the big ones, they want their separate environment, private just for them. Or you may even have a few customers that need the software deployed on their servers. Yurbi supports all those models, and we have a licensing model and a report deployment model that makes it easier than most. 4. Price. Never bury the lead, but we don’t like to just make the decision a price one. But honestly, there’s no need to partner with a BI firm if the cost of the solution is so astronomical that you are better off just building it yourself. Worse, you get in with a platform and grow and the next thing you know your bill from the vendor skyrockets. You won’t have those issues with Yurbi. We give you affordable, transparent pricing, and we lock you in at a top rate so you know the max cost.

Next Step, Let’s Talk

Thanks for reading this far, but let’s take it to the next step. Contact us to talk to a technical expert (not a high-pressured sales call) and let’s discuss your requirements and see how Yurbi can help solve them. If we can’t (or don’t want to), we’ll be the first to tell you and hopefully be able to suggest another BI platform that may work better. Schedule a live meeting today.