Choosing Business intelligence tool for an e-commerce store running on Magento

Kirill Kost
Aug 26, 2017 · 2 min read

Gartner, Inc. has positioned Microsoft with their BI offerings as a Leader in its February 2017 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence.

Any BI vendor presented on the graph may deliver BI reporting on top of Magento data. But the BI solutions you see on the picture differ a lot by their target auditory.

There is no best solution for Magento since every company has its own requirements, budget, strategy of BI implementation and existing state of data governance.

For example,

  • SAP might be more cost efficient for those who are already using SAP products in their company;
  • some solutions such as Qlik Sense or Sisense are based on in-memory technologies and may better deliver low-latency results;
  • Tableau might be good for those who are looking for a leader in data visualization;
  • Pentaho and Tibco might be preferred by those who are looking for open source solutions;
  • some solutions might seem better suited for those who are going to process Big Data or already have structured DWH.

When you think about choosing BI solution, you should think about your own requirements first. But there is something that might be common for most of the Magento stores:

  • small amount of data (1–10 GB);
  • need to integrate with other CRM, Product Management, Analytics systems, etc;
  • small to medium budget.

These requirements might be satisfied by Power BI. Microsoft has quite wide range of technologies for BI (and I would also include here Excel). But there is something special about Power BI:

  • It is targeting tasks with small amounts of data (1–10 GB)
  • It has already integration with lot of systems
  • it has FREE (up to 1 GB) accounts or Pro accounts with $9.99 per user/month.

Of course, answer will not be full if I will not mention Magento Business Intelligence Essentials. For competitive price merchants may get out of the box BI solution integrated with their store.

There is also an extension for Magento store, Power BI Integration to integrate with Power BI Service. Out of the box it will allow to deliver data of Magento report to Power BI Online and create dashboards and reports accessible from Power BI Mobile App.

Disclaimer: I am working on BI solutions for Magento several years and I am the author of Power BI Integration extension. I have also developed a solution based on R language, BIM to allow tight integration of Magento with R language for advanced analytics, data mining and deep learning tasks.

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