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Decisions are critical to driving business growth. To build a reliable foundation for decision-making, it’s essential to have marketing reports grounded in accurate and timely data analysis. The sooner you uncover insights, the greater their value to your strategy.
Today’s marketing landscape demands not just any reporting tools, but those enhanced by machine learning to sift through massive datasets, offering embedded analytics for real-time decision-making
Reliable data can unlock valuable insights about your business—but how do you uncover them? Automated reporting tools can streamline and simplify the process of data exploration, offering various levels of detail and complexity. Choosing the right tool tailored with up-to-date data and your specific business needs will help you gain actionable insights quickly and efficiently.
Note: The original version of this article was released in December 2021 and was updated in January 2025 to ensure that the content remains accurate and comprehensive.
Reporting software or reporting tools help you to organize your data from different sources and help you analyze data by structuring it, compiling it, and arranging it in tables or charts to visualize data.
This is how you can make information easier to parse and clearly understand your business operations and processes. Good data reporting tools provide you with the ability to get information in the necessary form as quickly as possible, since the value of an insight decreases with time.
However, most of the data reporting tools are designed for organizing and visualizing information.
To ensure the quality of reports, you need to collect, normalize, merge, attribute, and prepare the reporting datasets before using a web reporting software tool.
To do this, you’ll need a marketing analytics tool, like OWOX BI.
Reporting tools can be divided into the following types of business reports:
To determine the right reporting tool for your needs, start by identifying your business goals and pinpointing the areas of your marketing strategy that require data-driven insights through your reporting and analytics tools.
Reporting tools or software primarily focus on organizing and compiling information into structured reports. They are designed for business users who need to quickly access insights and relevant data, often without advanced data visualization features.
In comparison, business intelligence tools offer a broader range of capabilities. These include data analytics, visualization, and integration, enabling them to gather data from various sources, process it, and automatically generate reports and charts that simplify the analysis of complex datasets, helping users uncover actionable insights effortlessly.
In today's fast-paced world, automation, and specialized tools are essential. Manually generating reports can be a time-consuming and labor-intensive task, often yielding results that don't justify the significant effort involved.
Automated reporting tools are software applications that automatically generate and distribute reports based on predefined parameters. These advanced reporting tools can perform data analysis, transform it into a visual format, and send it to designated recipients. These tools help organizations save time, reduce errors, and improve decisions.
With the right tools, creating comprehensive reports and dashboards becomes streamlined, allowing businesses to visualize complex data through machine learning-powered insights.
Let’s take a look at the main benefits of reporting tools.
A robust reporting tool is essential for any organization looking to make data-driven decisions. Here are some key features to look for:
Excellent customer support and training are critical for maximizing the benefits of a reporting tool. Here’s what to look for:
When selecting a reporting tool, pricing and scalability are key considerations. Here’s what to keep in mind:
By considering these factors, you can select a reporting tool that not only fits your budget but also grows with your organization, providing long-term value and support.
To select the best fit for your business, you can compare the following criteria:
Consider whether a tool offers embedded analytics capabilities, enabling users to directly access and interact with reports and dashboards within their daily software environments.
Let's perform a short report platform comparison among ten of the best reporting systems and other cloud-based business intelligence tools using the criteria above.
You can use this list to find a simple reporting tool for project management, project planning, or other business needs you have.
Choosing the right reporting and BI tool helps turn data into clear insights. With so many options, it’s important to find one that fits your needs- whether it’s ease of use, integrations, or advanced analytics. Here’s a quick comparison of the top 13 tools, their key features, and who they’re best for.
Google Analytics 4 stands as one of the most dominant free reporting tools. It captures data on users' web requests, cookies, and device details using a Google Analytics Tracking Code and transfers this data to Google's servers using various parameters.
Once processed, typically within 24 to 48 hours, the data becomes available for report generation within your account. It allows for seamless integration with other Google services, such as Google Ads or Search Ads 360. However, it does not automatically pull in data from non-Google advertising platforms or your CRM; this data must be imported either manually or via an external tool.
For example, you can enrich your GA 4 property with non-google advertising costs.
Regarding data limitations, Google Analytics allows you to collect up to 10M events per month before you experience the data sampling, 25 event parameters per event, and your data would be stored for up to 14 months.
If you need to extend the data retention period - you should upgrade to a paid version of Google Analytics - GA360 or set up on-site real-time data collection into BigQuery with OWOX BI Streaming.
Looker Studio, previously known as Google Data Studio, ranks among the top-tier free tools for building reports. This platform provides the functionality to establish connectors that collect and compare your data, manage reports, tailor interactive dashboards through intuitive drag-and-drop features, and design your data visualizations within Explorer - a dedicated environment for diving into your aggregated data.
You can build your advertising reports using Looker Studio templates from the marketing dashboard template gallery.
You should keep in mind that Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) has limits on collected data, as well as limits on the number of visual elements per page, and has no official Google support.
Looker Studio blends all collected results. It performs slower if you have more than two data sources (compared to its processing speed with one or two diverse data sources).
One option to overcome this issue is to collect all information in a single dataset in Google BigQuery and integrate it with Looker Studio (Formerly Google Data Studio) as a single data source.
To collect your marketing and sales data into Google BigQuery, you can use OWOX BI Pipelines.
OWOX BI is an all-in-one marketing analytics platform that helps you collect unlimited amounts of unsampled raw data from various online and offline sources in one place (Google BigQuery).
OWOX BI also monitors the data quality and supports dynamic UTM parameters.
OWOX BI then helps you normalize, clean, merge, and attribute cost data from ad services, website tracking tools, Google Analytics 4, revenue data from the CRM, and other marketing and sales data sources in real time with no coding.
Start using OWOX BI for free, build the reports, start optimizing your campaigns, get your value, and then upgrade to one of the paid plans if you want to grow faster.
Funnel is an ETL (extract, transform, load) data analytics platform designed to gather, transform, and organize your data, making it ready for creating reports and interactive dashboards with essential metrics. The processed data is stored in the Funnel data warehouse.
However, it’s important to note that Funnel does not collect website user behavior data, monitor data quality, or support dynamic UTM parameters.
Pricing for Funnel plans starts at $399 per month.
Another ETL platform you can use as automated report-writing software is Supermetrics. This tool collects and processes your data with the help of APIs, then sends it to another tool you select from the available Supermetrics integrations (including Google Sheets and Looker Studio).
As for Supermetrics' limitations, keep in mind that this tool doesn't monitor data quality, doesn't make your data report-ready, and has no option to export data to create attribution-based reports, so you would have to use another tool for these purposes.
Pricing for Supermetrics starts at $39 a month.
Improvado is another cloud-based ETL platform that uses a REST API to extract data from multiple sources, clean and organize it. It transforms the data by merging tables, performing data modeling, and adjusting the structure as needed. The transformed data can then be loaded into the Improvado database or external storage solutions like Azure or PostgreSQL. Reports can also be created directly within the Improvado interface.
It’s worth noting that Improvado does not offer a free trial, so its performance cannot be tested prior to purchase. Additionally, it lacks the capability to collect user behavior data or perform cohort analysis.
Pricing is not available on the website.
An AI-powered data science and analytics platform, Datorama excels in data mining, analysis, and report writing. It allows users to consolidate and unify multiple data sources in one platform, analyze it, generate reports, and extract meaningful insights. Notable features include automated reporting, goal completion predictions, and cross-platform campaign management, enabling real-time adjustments across tools like Google and Facebook.
That said, Datorama is best suited for enterprises and B2B marketers, with pricing positioned at the higher end of the spectrum.
Pricing for Datorama starts at $36,000 per year.
Datapine is one of the most powerful report automation tools among other players in the market. One of its primary strengths lies in its seamless data integration capabilities, effortlessly consolidating and integrating data from various data sources.
Datapine also shines in the realm of predictive analytics, allowing users to build predictive models and forecast future trends based on historical data. Customizability is another hallmark of Datapine. Users can design tailor-made, interactive dashboards that align with their specific requirements using a simple drag-and-drop interface.
These key features simplify data-gathering automatic reporting, setting the stage for one of the best report-building software with predictive and advanced analytics features.
Pricing for Datapine starts from $249 monthly, which goes up to the premium version at $799 per month.
A standout BI reporting solution, Looker is a cloud-based data analytics platform that consolidates and merges data from various sources into an automatically generated LookML model. It enables users to create visualizations, configure dynamic interactive dashboards, and use a built-in code editor to customize generated data models as needed. Looker also integrates seamlessly with tools like Salesforce, PowerPoint, Confluence, and more.
However, it’s important to note that using Looker requires an understanding of the LookML model. As a result, some time and effort may be necessary to learn the basics before fully utilizing this report-building software.
Pricing for Looker is custom and depends on how many users you have and how large the scale of your deployment is.
Sisense is a user-friendly Business Intelligence (BI) reporting tool designed to streamline data analytics and report automation processes for business users. This powerful data science platform is known for its simplicity of key performance indicators and efficiency.
It excels in extracting data from various data sources, such as Google Analytics, Salesforce, and more, making it a versatile reporting solution for businesses seeking only comprehensive reporting and data-driven insights.
One of the key features of Sisense is its in-chip technology, which enables swift data processing, outpacing many other BI tools in terms of speed and efficiency. Sisense offers the flexibility of white-label predictive analytics tools, allowing companies to tailor the tool to their specific needs.
This means you can fully customize the platform's services, integrating it seamlessly into your organization's unique branding and workflow. This report-building software is highly intuitive, with a drag-and-drop interface that simplifies creating reports and creating interactive dashboards used to design, explore data, and manipulate complex data visualizations easily.
Sisense has a no-surprise pricing policy, customized according to your needs and budget.
Microsoft Power BI is a leading business intelligence and data analytics tool designed for automated reporting. It enables the collection and visualization of marketing data, allowing users to create interactive reports and dashboards with ease. Its user-friendly interface is further enhanced by its similarities to other Microsoft products, such as Excel, making it an accessible option for many users.
You can also use Microsoft Power BI to share the results with your coworkers securely and embed interactive reports into your applications. You can also use Power BI as project management report-building software and create project reports and status reports.
Microsoft Power BI is highly regarded for its robust integration capabilities, offering over 120 free connectors and support for various data sources, including Excel, Salesforce, and Azure SQL Database.
Power BI offers a pricing plan starting at $9.99 per user per month for a shared environment, with a dedicated cloud option available from $4,995 per month.
Another solution among report-building tools is Tableau. It uses machine learning and artificial business intelligence capabilities to collect and analyze your marketing data, which you can use further to visualize your results using a simple drag-and-drop function.
Tableau is partially based on the core query language VizQL. It translates visualization and dashboard elements into queries, so you don't have to optimize them manually.
Tableau also allows you to ensure extra security for your information with the ability to integrate your own security protocols. Regarding integrations with other reporting tools, Tableau offers a list of native data connectors.
Ubiq stands out as an exceptional, business intelligence platform, data exploration, and report automation tool. Leveraging advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, Ubiq simplifies data discovery and analysis by automating data collection and preparation processes.
Its intuitive drag-and-drop interface empowers users of all skill levels to easily create visually compelling reports and interactive dashboards, eliminating the need for extensive technical expertise. Ubiq's adaptive query language adapts to user actions, intelligently translating visualization elements into queries.
One of its other key metrics and strengths lies in its emphasis on data security, allowing users to integrate their own security protocols to protect sensitive information.
With cross-platform compatibility, Ubiq as a report-building software ensures data accessibility from any device, making it a versatile range among report-building tools seeking streamlined and insightful reports, data mining, automated reporting, and data analysis.
To improve the quality of your decision-making, you should get simple, structured, and visualized answers to your questions as soon as possible.
Data reporting and business analysis tools can greatly help, but they differ in functions and pricing. Reporting is offered in virtually any SaaS solution on the market. Still, the best reporting solutions provide distinct advantages in using data integration to combine several data streams within just one interface. Create a comprehensive checklist before purchasing a new reporting solution.
Find the data visualization and intuitive interface that works well, and ask if a predictive analytics tool will help you forecast. Ensure the business data exploration tool you select can satisfy your business analytics needs and serve as reliable grounds for decision-making.
