Top 11 Business Analytics Tools to Know About In 2024

Introduction

Today, every business needs to keep a track of its strategies and performance to grow, which is why there are plenty of effective business analysis tools and techniques available to achieve the same objective. And if you are taking the role of a Business analyst, it's integral for you to be familiar with several analytical tools and relevant technologies. The essence of a Business Analyst's role revolves around mastering a set of fundamental technical skills, spanning from project management and diagramming to requirements handling. Each of these responsibilities requires specific tools, often with multiple options available for execution. Here, we will list the most popular tools for business analysts along with their features, importance, and download links. Then, we will discuss business analysis techniques that should be followed by BA for effective business outcomes.

Top reasons why Business Analysts require Business Analytics Tools:

So, what does a business analyst do? And why do they need the business analytic software? One of the most common needs for which Business Analysts require some tools is to understand needs and business requirements. Along with that, Business Analysts also use these tools for effective project management, planning and prioritizing work, and for some business processes. But what tools are used in business analytics? Let’s get started with the details explained in the article below.

There are multiple industry-leading business analyst tools for BA catering to various business requirements. Here are some reasons or let’s say tasks for which specified BA tools are effectively used for:

1. Customer requirements management
2. Project management
3. Enterprise resource planning (ERP)
4. Collaboration and communication
5. Wireframing
6. Modeling and diagramming
7. Customer relationship management (CRM)
8. Data visualization
9. Inbound marketing
10. Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) / Extract, Load, Transform (ELT)
    • BA use Business Analytics tools to track customer requirements
    • BA use Business Analytics tools to manage the customer requirements
    • BA use Business Analytics tools  to describe the needs in detail
    • They use a Business process diagram that helps them to model all customers requirement diagrammatically
    • BA use Business Analytics tools to collaborate with various technical teams and the respective stakeholders

Business Analyst Training & Certification

• No cost for a Demo Class
• Industry Expert as your Trainer
• Available as per your schedule
• Customer Support Available

Enrol For a Free Demo Class

Types of Business Analysis Tools used by BA

Whether you're interpreting requirements, excelling in customer relationships, maximizing resources, or visualizing data, there's a tool crafted to enhance your skills and advance your career. Let’s uncover those types of business Analytics tools that is a must-have in your toolkit if you are a BA professional:

1. Business requirements assessment tools - 

Every BA who is working on business requirements and derivation needs specific tools to analyze these requirements for better output. However, there are certain areas of analysis such as SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats), identifying business, document analysis, and much more.

One of the best BA tools for business requirements management is Confluence (Atlassian), a platform for collaboration that documents and organizes project requirements, promoting team communication. 

2. Analysis tools for Business modeling - 

There are BA tools targeted and specially designed for modeling and diagrammatic representation. As a business analyst, it's your responsibility to translate user requirements into use cases and diagrams for solution design and business model development. Additionally, popular business analyst tools are readily available to assist you in creating user stories effectively, building multiple entity-relationship diagrams, creating feature models, and more, thus strengthening your business analyst skills.

One popular example of a BA tool used for modeling and designing is Draw.io. It is basically a web-based tool used for generating diagrams, flowcharts, and process models.

3. Collaboration Tools - 

If you desire to be a business analyst, you should be aware of the critical roles of a Business Analyst in collaboration and stakeholder management. Remember, every business analyst requires to use some best tools to ensure effective collaboration for meeting business and project goals. These tools help them in communicating and connecting with development and project management.

A popular Business Analyst tool used for communication and collaboration is Microsoft Teams.

4. Customer Relationship Management Tools-

CRM tools enable businesses to oversee and analyze their engagements with customers and potential clients. For Business Analysts, these tools offer insights into customer behaviors and preferences, ensuring that the solutions developed deliver maximum value.

One of the most widely used CRM tool is Salesforce, a popular CRM platform that helps sales, service, and marketing teams gain deeper insights into their customers.

5. Enterprise Resource Planning or ERP Tools-

ERP software integrates diverse business processes and functions, underscoring the importance for Business Analysts to grasp the interplay of various systems. When assessing risk, optimizing operations, and evaluating impacts on different teams, this software aids BAs in visualizing these interconnections effectively.

A popular business analytics software for ERP is SAP ERP. An all-encompassing solution for overseeing a wide range of business functions, such as finance, HR, and supply chain management.

6. Business Intelligence and Data Visualization Tools-

Business Analysts require tools to analyze and visualize data, enabling us to assist organizations in making informed, data-driven decisions.

Tableau is a business analytics tool that can be effectively utilized for Business Intelligence and Data Visualization. It is an impactful tool for visualizing data that transforms information into actionable insights.

7. Project Management Tools for BA-

Project management tools that enhance efficiency are indispensable for every Business Analyst. This software enables us to monitor project advancement, ensure task visibility and timely completion, maintain team alignment, and effectively communicate project and task updates.

One of the most prevalent Project Management business analytic software is JIRA. It’s an extensively used agile project management tool designed specifically for software development projects.

Top 11 Business Analysis Tools

Now let’s compile a list of top 11 business analysis tools used intensively by Business Analyst

Some Widely Used Open Source Analytics Tools

Open source analytics tools too have gained significant traction in recent years due to their flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and community-driven development. From data integration and exploration to advanced analytics and machine learning, popular open source analytics tools offer a wide range of functionalities to meet diverse analytical needs across various industries. Let’s learn about some of them.

1. Apache Spark

Apache Spark is a widely adopted open-source analytics engine for large-scale data processing. It provides an efficient and unified platform for batch processing, real-time processing, interactive queries, and machine learning. It’s extensively used across industries for tasks such as data integration, ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) processes, data exploration, predictive analytics, and real-time analytics. Its robust capabilities and community support make it a cornerstone in modern data analytics and big data processing environments.

Key Features of Apache Spark

• In-memory computation: Spark utilizes in-memory processing to accelerate data processing tasks, making it significantly faster than traditional disk-based processing systems.
• Support for multiple languages: It supports programming in Java, Scala, Python, and R making it accessible to a wide range of developers and data scientists.
• Advanced analytics: Spark includes libraries for SQL, streaming data, machine learning (MLlib), and graph processing (GraphX), enabling complex analytics workflows.
• Scalability: Spark is designed to scale from a single machine to thousands of nodes, allowing it to handle large volumes of data efficiently.
• Ease of use: It provides high-level APIs for building parallel applications with concise and expressive code.

2. Apache Storm

Apache Storm is an open-source distributed real-time computation system that processes large streams of data in real time. It is particularly designed for high-throughput, low-latency processing of continuous data streams. 

Key features of Apache Storm:

• Real-time data processing: Apache Storm enables continuous computation and processing of streaming data, making it suitable for applications requiring immediate insights and responses.
• Fault tolerance and reliability: It provides mechanisms for fault tolerance, ensuring that data processing tasks are resilient to failures and can recover automatically.
• Scalability: Storm is scalable and can handle massive amounts of data by distributing computations across a cluster of machines.
• Extensibility: It supports multiple programming languages (Java, Clojure) and allows integration with various data sources and messaging systems.
• Stream processing primitives: Storm provides primitives for defining and processing data streams, including spouts (data sources) and bolts (processing units), which can be combined to create complex data processing topologies.
• Integration with other systems: It integrates well with other Apache projects like Kafka and Hadoop, as well as with databases and message brokers.

3. R and Python

Though there are differences between R and Python, they stand out as the top programming languages in the data analytics industry. Python is known for its high-level, expressive nature with dynamic semantics and straightforward syntax. In contrast, R is an open-source language specifically designed for analytics and statistical computing purposes.

Key Features of R and Python:

• Comprehensive statistical analysis and data visualization capabilities
• Extensive libraries for data manipulation, machine learning, and AI
• Strong community support and active development
• Suitable for diverse applications including scientific computing, web development, and automation

Business Analytics vs Business Intelligence Tools: How To Differentiate

So far we have talked about different types of business analytics tools along with top 10 business analysis tools list. Now let’s enlighten you with a very critical information. Many a times Business Analytics tools are mistaken with Business Intelligence tools. Though both does pretty much the same thing, nevertheless there are some differences.

Business analytics tools focus on analyzing past data to identify trends, patterns, and insights to make informed business decisions. It involves statistical analysis, predictive modeling, and data mining to uncover actionable insights.

Whereas, business intelligence (BI) tools, like Microsoft Power BI on the other hand, primarily focus on querying, reporting, and visualizing data to support decision-making. BI tools provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations, often through dashboards and KPIs. Having that said, let's now explore a list of popular business analysis techniques for a Business Analyst.

List Of Popular Business Analysis Techniques For A Business Analyst

The toolbox of a business analyst is full of dozens of business analysis techniques. These techniques can be used with almost any project and help you in moving forward even in tough conditions. So, let us see these techniques in detail below:

1. SWOT Analysis - SWOT stands for Strength, Weakness, Opportunities, and threats. This is the most necessary technology that is used by a Business Analyst. As it helps the BA to understand the different mindsets of a group of people. This guides them in reacting and changing the work environment accordingly.

It is a type of business framework in which strengths and weaknesses are internal data factors whereas opportunities and threats are considered as the external data factors.

• STRENGTH - The strength of the company can be classified as the actions that work efficiently for different problems and consult the key advantages to the company. Some examples of strengths are the company name, company location, employees, customer support, brand name, etc. 
• WEAKNESS - It includes the various activities or disadvantages which create issues in the growth or policies of the company. Here are some examples of weaknesses such as bad reputation, incomplete product, lazy employees, persistent negativity, and much more.

• OPPORTUNITIES - It includes the external facts and figures which have the potential to provide an edge above the competition. Moreover, any kind of advantage due to external facts is an opportunity for the company. For example - Opportunities are investing in the startup at an early edge to gain more profit in the future. 
• THREATS - These are also considered external facts or information that can create a disadvantage to the company. Some examples of THREATs are new technology like AI and IoT implementation in touch screen mobile phones that were perhaps a threat to keypad phones to protect it from cyber threats.

2. MOST Analysis - M.O.S.T  stands for Mission, Objective, Strategy, and Tactics. This analysis is also considered to be powerful as it always works from the top. Moreover, a Business Analyst should always ensure that it grabs the focus towards goals that are most important for the benefit of the organization. This analysis gives a better understanding of the organizations' abilities and purpose and provides answers to the organization in terms of mission and objectives M.O.S.T is used. M.O.S.T stands for:

• M stands for Mission - It is considered to be an organization's enduring process. Moreover, each department of the organization equally contributes to the mission statement. It clears an overall reason for being in business and what will be the results to complete the task. The more clear the business objectives, the more likely it will succeed.
• O for Objectives - It is the second step down after Mission, it is defined as specific aims for each department to help them achieve their goals. Objectives should be smart and specific for making a healthy, measurable, and realistic decision for the organization. 

Importance of MOST analysis

• S stands for Strategies - It is the action that should be taken in order to achieve organizational objectives. These are the long-term approaches to achieve the decided objectives of the mission. They are also considered to be the safest way to move the organization ahead of the competition.
• T stands for Tactics - These are designed to carry out strategies in the organization. They are formed in a simple manner so that they can be understood by each and every person in the organization who does not have an overview of the MOST analysis.
   

3. PESTLE Analysis - In every organization, there are several external macro-environmental factors that can impact its performance. It is also commonly referred to as the PEST analysis and is widely utilized across organizations.

• PESTLE  stands for Political, Economical, Social, Technological, Legal and Environmental. Also, remember these factors can create opportunities or threats to any organization which is why it is considered to be one of the most powerful tools or techniques of business analysis. 

Let’s understand them one by one: 

• P stands for Political - It determines how the government’s policies and regulation act influence your organization.  Along with that it is also related to the government’s intervention in the economy, which means all the factors that influence business by the government can be classified in this category like tax policies, tariffs, law, trade control etc.
• E stands for Economical - This factor has a significant impact on how organizations run its business and how profitable it is. It includes economic growth, exchange rate, inflation rate and interest rate and much more.
• S stands for social factors - This particular factor includes health consciousness, population growth rate, age distribution, cultural trends etc. These social factors help marketers to understand their customer’s requirements and serve them better.
• T stands for Technological - Technological factors include technology rate advancements, innovation, automation, research and development which might impact business growth for good.
• L stands for Legal - These factors include discrimination laws, copyright/patent laws, data privacy laws, health and insurance laws, and much more. It ensures that the organization must run within its legal boundaries.
• E stands for Environmental factors - These factors include weather, climate change, air and water pollution, and much more. Moreover, environmental factors impact multiple industries like tourism, farming, insurance, etc. 

4. System Analysis - It is a systematic problem-solving method for interpreting facts, focusing on a system's weaknesses, identifying business problems, or decomposition of the system into smaller parts. System analysis is an approach to diminish the error of multiple issues. 

It is the process of studying the company’s perspective, identifying its goals, creating a process together to make an efficient system for better future outcomes. For instance, a problem in any organization can be solved in a few hours without analyzing a system completely but sometimes it may create multiple other irrelevant issues. So, it's necessary to better understand the system as it decreases the chances for any problem to arise.

5. Business Model Analysis - It helps us to understand the company business and clears its policies, market approaches, and techniques to give a better understanding of multiple things such as revenue model, value offering to which customer’s segment, cost included in value offering, and what will be the impact of the technique on the company if the business model changes.

Being professionals, we also try to grasp the insight on the necessary factors such as cost of production, marketing, and management. With the complete study of design, production cost, marketing strategy, and effect on possible upcoming changes, A business analyst ensures the growth of company status and revenue for the betterment of the company.

6. Brainstorming - It is a useful technique that is used to generate diverse ideas, to resolve or find a solution for complex problems and to analyze business efficiently. It is also defined as “a group of problem-solving techniques that includes the unsolicited contribution of ideas from all members of the group.”
Moreover in brainstorming, each idea of an individual person is an out of the box idea which is encouraged and considered as independent brainstorming. Some business analysts might advocate for this type of brainstorming technique because it would take less time to achieve a conclusion. However, in large organizations, group brainstorming is practiced to target creative thinking about a problem in order to come up with some new set of ideas, approaches, and options for the betterment of the organization. It is considered to be a group activity having a completely different purpose of generating solutions for the problems faced in the organization.

7. Mind Mapping - It is a very useful and effective business analysis technique that gives an organization a clear and visual understanding of different problems, ideas, thoughts, etc. So that they can make a strong decision for the organization. Structure of Mind Mapping is very similar to the structure of neurons in the brain as it keeps expanding with the addition of new ideas and resources.

A Business Analyst’s role is to investigate and evaluate problems obtained by any clients or stakeholders. He/She is responsible for solving problems by using mind maps to get structured details of any ideas, thoughts, and information.

 The mind mapping technique also ensures that all the factors which are required to analyze have been considered or not to solve the problem. Moreover, there are multiple tools available to make mind maps online such as Freemind, Xmind, Mindmap, Lucidchart, Canva, etc.

8.  Process Design -  It is a crucial part of the business analysis where a Business Analyst identifies the organization’s process designs and their useful and harmful attributes on an organization. Whereas, process designs are necessary to solve the problems and exploit opportunities in order to monitor and measure the effectiveness of business to ensure harmonious value delivery to consumers effectively. 

Moreover, the Process designs can also be described as a future state of any business operation that helps a BA to analyze the existing process design and make changes if required. Also, the business analyst is responsible for understanding the wide business process improvement and maintaining them for the betterment of the organization.

Business Analyst Training & Certification

• Personalized Free Consultation
• Access to Our Learning Management System
• Access to Our Course Curriculum
• Be a Part of Our Free Demo Class

Sign Up Now

Career Options in Business Analytics

Since the turn of the 21st century, numerous new career paths have arisen that were previously nonexistent. Yet, Business Analytics career path and roles stand alone in terms of salaries and the opportunities it offers for learning and training in daily work.

As businesses continue to adopt and integrate business analytics tools, numerous opportunities are emerging for skilled business analysts across various industries, such as automotive, healthcare, retail, banking, hospitality, and aviation.

Depending on your skills and interests, you can specialize in roles within business analytics, including positions like Big Data Engineer, Data Scientist, Database Administrator, Marketing Analytics Manager, or Data Visualization Specialist.

Conclusion

The essential step to launching your career as a business analyst is to develop the appropriate skill sets and good knowledge of BA tools.We have tried to cover most of the crucial and popular tools for business analyst. Though the best analysis tools mentioned above help to work with business analysts in a smarter way, however, they alone are not the single solution for an organization to succeed. To become a successful and efficient business analyst, you should gain the core business analysis skills through effective BA training programs as they design their own strategies and techniques.
However, you are strongly recommended to use the business analysis tools listed earlier to make the business outcomes more effective which could help you in maximizing the overall ROI of the business.

Also, attaining some Business Analyst Certifications provides an excellent roadmap for business analysts to learn the best business analysis practices. However, these are very vast courses that need in-depth, hands-on knowledge of the subject areas.

JanBask has tailored courses for the certification mentioned above, along with free tests to help you prepare the candidates to achieve the goal in a shorter period. Along with that, you will get exposure to practice with some of the best business analysis tools.

Share your thoughts on the effective Business Analysis Tools and Techniques in the comments below!

FAQs

Q1. What are the different types of Business Analyst tools?

A: Business analyst tools are of different types based on their functionalities. Here are the main categories:

• Business requirements assessment tools: These tools help analysts gather, document, and analyze business requirements. (e.g., Confluence, Jama Connect)
• Analysis tools for Business modeling: These tools help create visual representations of business processes and user journeys. (e.g., Draw.io, Lucidchart)
• Collaboration Tools: These tools facilitate communication and collaboration between business analysts, stakeholders, and development teams. (e.g., Microsoft Teams, Slack)
• Customer Relationship Management Tools (CRM): These tools provide insights into customer behavior and preferences, allowing BAs to design solutions that deliver value. (e.g., Salesforce, HubSpot)
• Enterprise Resource Planning or ERP Tools: These tools integrate various business processes, helping BAs understand the interplay between different systems. (e.g., SAP ERP, Oracle ERP Cloud)
• Business Intelligence and Data Visualization Tools: These tools enable data analysis and visualization, allowing BAs to present insights to decision-makers. (e.g., Tableau, Power BI)
• Project Management Tools for BA: These tools help BAs track project progress, manage tasks, and ensure team alignment. (e.g., JIRA, Asana)

Q2. What are some of the most popular Business Analyst tools?

A: Some of the most popular BA tools are listed as below:

• Confluence (Atlassian) - Requirements Management
• Draw.io - diagramming and modeling
• Microsoft Teams - Collaboration
• Salesforce - CRM
• SAP ERP - ERP
• Tableau - Business Intelligence and Data Visualization
• JIRA - Project Management

Q3. What are the benefits of using Business Analyst tools?

A: The several benefits of using business analyst tools are as follows:

• Improved understanding of customer needs and business requirements
• Effective project management and task prioritization
• Enhanced collaboration and communication
• Better data analysis and visualization
• Increased efficiency and productivity

Q4. How do Business Analyst tools differ from Business Intelligence (BI) tools?

A: While both types of tools involve data analysis, there is a key difference in focus. Business Analyst tools are designed to help analysts understand business needs and translate them into actionable insights. BI tools, on the other hand, focus on historical data, reporting, and providing insights for data-driven decision making.

Q5. What are some popular Business Analyst techniques?

A: Various Business Analyst techniques used to solve problems and improve business processes are listed below:

• SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats)
• MOST Analysis (Mission, Objectives, Strategies, and Tactics)
• PESTLE Analysis (Political, Economical, Social, Technological, Legal and Environmental)
• System Analysis
• Business Model Analysis
• Brainstorming
• Mind Mapping
• Process Design