Tableau states that they are “on a mission to help people see and understand data.” The company offers a variety of software options from on-site to online. They advertise faster analytics of any data amount, ease of use, smart dashboards, sharing, and automatic updating. A free trial is available, too, all of which places it among the best data visualization software.

Domo claims to save users thousands of hours with automated reports and visualization, easy access to 100’s of data sources, and the ability to access data anywhere and on any device. Doma made the best data visualization list for many reasons including its ability to collect data from a variety of sources in real time.

Zoho offers a variety of services including data visualization. With a drop-and-drag interface, Zoho reports being able to create a wide variety of charts, tables, reports and dashboards. The Zoho site says its creations can be embedded anywhere and shared easily. Those interested can take a tour or sign up for free. Zoho also offers help creating forms, survey collection, ad free email, social media analysis, document management and much more, winning it a spot on the best data visualization list.

GoodData goes beyond business intelligence to deliver insight and advanced analytics for organizations. This cloud analytic platform makes the best data visualization list for offering big data ready ETL/ELT, warehousing for data, innovative analysis and visualization and self-service data detection. Always available, the site offers a free trial at sign-up.

Pentaho describes itself as a “leading data integration and business analytics company” capable of taking on data of any size. They are among the best data visualization software for helping companies understand and use their data including big data and Internet of things. Data visualizations are tailor-made to meet the needs of each business.

In this post, I bring you data visualization examples which I created for an article focused on international politics published by Forbes .  I developed graphs using a data analytics software Tableau which comes with powerful visualization tools. The goal of the article was to draw a distinction between the European Union (EU) and Russia led Eurasian Customs Union (ECU) in terms of economic might, level of corruption and government effectiveness, and overall freedom. The following chart shows a series of rank ordered bars corresponding to the countries comprising the EU and the ECU in terms of economic freedom. This data visualization not only shows comparative freedom of each country, but also highlights categories where each country falls. The data source is the Index of Economic Freedom by Heritage Foundation.

The next chart represents a dual axes scatterplot with countries plotted based on the level of corruption and government effectiveness. The source for this data is Worldwide Governance Indicators by the World Bank.

The final chart is yet another example of how visualization tools provide means to plot complex information on a single viz. This graph is divided in three parts: countries, freedom status and ranking of political and civil liberties for each country. The last part is interesting as it includes several categories which had to be added to this data visualization piece without overwhelming it. I achieved this by using an array of micro pie charts. The data for this data viz came from Freedom in the World Report by Freedom House.

Data visualization became an integral part of every respectable business intelligence software. Several companies are competing on the market trying to adapt to constantly evolving market demand for streamlined analysis capabilities and slick data visualization tools.  According to Forbes , Business Intelligence platforms are expected to grow at approximately 9% annual growth rate through 2018.

Not every software is made equal. In February 2015 Gartner , a leading information technology research company, released a report assessing the state of BI software market as well as quality of competing companies. Below is a Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platform by Gartner, which displays a summary view of competing BI software and their standing in the market.

The solution which found itself ahead of the curve is Tableau which along with being very capable data crunching soft, offers powerful data visualization tools. Among leading BI software platforms which attained highest ranking on the ability to execute as well as the completeness of vision are SAS, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. Google Data did not make it to the “leader’s” club. It seems the internet search giant will need to step up its game.