Top 5 Embedded Analytics Tools for Azure SQL Database (Plus 1 Bonus Option)
Nowadays, as data is becoming increasingly crucial to everyday business operations, businesses are increasingly shifting to data analytics to analyze their data and gain valuable insights from it.
As a result, many software vendors are also creating applications and products with embedded analytics to provide their customers with the data they need to improve their business processes. For this, they often need the capacity to store large amounts of data.
Here, one of the most popular options when it comes to data storage is Microsoft's Azure SQL Database.
What is Azure SQL Database?
Microsoft Azure SQL Database is a fully managed Platform as a Service (PaaS). It manages most of your database management functions like upgrading, patching, backups, and monitoring without needing any user involvement. As a result, you can create a highly available and high-performance data storage layer for your applications and solutions running in Azure.
It also allows you to process both relational and non-relational structures like graphs, JSON, spatial, and XML data.
The most important thing for your business, though, is that you understand the different embedded analytics tools available for the Azure SQL database. In that way, you’ll be empowered to decide on the best one for your needs.
When choosing the right embedded analytics tool, you’ll need to consider whether:
- the tool allows you to brand the interface to match yours, or so-called white-labeling.
- the tool has an API that will allow you to seamlessly integrate it with your application.
- it has all the features you’d expect from such a tool, like a core dashboard and reporting functionality.
- the tool is easy enough for your developers to implement and simple enough for your customers or end-users to adopt.
- the tool is affordable.
Considering the above, we’ll now take a look at the top five embedded analytics tools to help you gain a better understanding of the options available to you, and we’ll share a bonus option too.
Top 5 Embedded Analytics Tools for Azure SQL Database
Microsoft Power BI Embedded
With Microsoft Power BI Embedded (PBIE) you can embed fully interactive reports into your applications. In this way, you don't need to build your own data visualizations and controls from scratch.
This, in turn, allows your customers to access their business data and execute queries on this data to generate valuable insights within the application. Microsoft also recently launched Power BI Embedded Gen 2 that simplifies the management of embedded capacities.
The main benefit of using Power BI Embedded with Azure SQL Database is that they run on the same stack and are, therefore, tightly integrated. The drawback, however, is the cost of Power BI Embedded. It can quickly become prohibitive, and this disqualifies it from being used by many small vendors.
Tableau Embedded Analytics
With Tableau Embedded Analytics, you'll be able to embed and customize Tableau’s interactive and analytical capabilities into your application or products. Its platform is easy to customize, integrate, and deploy, which saves your developers time and saves you money.
As such, it allows you to deploy and integrate embedded analytics into your cloud or on-premises infrastructure and features a multitude of native connectors to various data sources. In this way, you’ll get your product to market faster. It also gives you the option to brand the interface to match yours.
Ultimately, with its features, you can create a seamless experience with your products and give your customers a way to gain meaningful insights from their data.
Sisense
With Sisense, you’ll be able to integrate embedded analytics directly into your applications and products, no matter what your tech stack. This is because its API-first platform gives you complete control, end-to-end governance, and security with its fully automatable APIs.
You’ll also be able to deploy anywhere, whether it's in the cloud or on-premises, and it allows you to ingest data from a variety of sources which, in turn, enables your customers to have real-time insights into their data which gives them a valuable understanding into their business.
Also, because it's fully white-labeled, you're able to customize the interface to match yours and provide customized experiences to your customers.
Datapine
With Datapine, you have a fast and easy way to embed professional and interactive dashboards into your applications or products. In this way, you'll be able to fill in the gaps in your own application’s analysis and reporting features and give your customers better insights into their data.
The platform also offers a wide range of customization options, so you’ll be able to provide your customers with user-specific content, several ways to interact with their data, as well as branding and white label customizations.
This provides you with the flexibility you need to deliver a truly comprehensive solution to your customers.
Stimulsoft
Stimulsoft provides you with a comprehensive and universal reporting and dashboard tool for your specific needs and requirements. With it, you have several choices depending on your current tech stack. So, for example, Stimulsoft Ultimate is a comprehensive solution for .NET, JavaScript, PHP, and Java that you can use to render reports and dashboards.
If you don't want the Ultimate product, you can opt for the different dashboard and reporting products, depending on your specific tech stack and where you’ll deploy the tool.
In this way, no matter what technology you use or how you’ll deploy, you’ll be able to provide your customers with rich, interactive, and customizable dashboards and reporting features that allow them to gain valuable insights from their data.
Bonus Option for Azure SQL Database! (Clue: Yurbi)
Of course, we cannot leave out our last option: it’s us!
We’ll leave the decision to you on who is the best BI platform for you, so we make it a point not to include ourselves in any of our Top 5 articles. But that doesn’t mean we don’t think you will come to that conclusion on your own.
Check out why we think Yurbi is the best option for Azure SQL environments looking for embedded analytics.
Yurbi is a proven BI platform that connects to many types of data sources and Azure SQL is no different.
Self Hosted. One of the key benefits of Yurbi in the embedded use case with Azure SQL is that Yurbi is self-hosted. So, if you are currently using Azure as your PaaS, Yurbi will install on a Windows instance (we recommend the F-series) within your Azure private network.
With Yurbi you can ensure the security of your data by keeping all your embedded infrastructure in your private Azure network. You won’t have to copy or replicate any of your data into another BI vendor’s cloud.
White Label. Once installed, the Yurbi interface is 100% HTML5 and JavaScript, so you have the ability to customize and brand to match your application.
API Integration. There’s a full API, so you can automate core things like single-sign-on, user provisioning, and even run in a headless BI mode if you like.
Enterprise Security. Yurbi has robust multi-tenant data security, so you can securely embed a common set of dashboards and reports but ensure all customers only see their data. And if you happen to follow a single database per-tenant model, Yurbi has you covered there as well.
Pricing. And last but not least, Yurbi is probably going to be more affordable than the tools mentioned above.
As a small, bootstrapped company, we don’t have all the overhead and bloat as our large competitors, and we pass that cost on to you.
To see us in action, feel free to book a free live demo with our team of BI experts and see it for yourself. Embrace embedded analytics with Azure SQL databases with Yurbi.