9 Best Narrative BI Alternatives & Competitors in 2024

Cem Ruso
Cem Ruso
September 6, 2024
September 6, 2024

Narrative BI helps you receive AI-generated insights from your sales, marketing, and advertising data automatically. 

The primary function of the software is to connect all your data sources in one place with zero coding and help you track KPIs via data visualization.

However, the tool has some drawbacks, which made me explore Narrative BI alternatives. In this article, I will discuss the best Narrative BI alternatives on the market.

What are the Best Narrative BI Alternatives and Competitors?

Some of the best alternatives to Narrative BI are:

  • Datapad: Track all your essential business metrics with stunning dashboards.
  • Baremetrics: A subscription analytics software designed for SaaS companies
  • Amplitude: AI-powered self-service data analytics platform.
  • Datawrapper: Data visualization tool providing highly-responsive charts, maps, and visualization elements.
  • Zoho Reports: Helps document, analyze, and monitor business health.
  • Sisense: AI-powered BI and analytics platform.
  • Pendo: An easy-to-use product analytics app that uses AI and machine learning to deliver insights into product experiences.
  • Mixpanel: Helps you gather insights into how users interact with your product.
  • Heap: The most complete data analytics platform uses data science and AI to gather and present user behavioral data as actionable insights.

1. Datapad

Datapad helps you track all essential metrics from stunning dashboards.

The beauty of Datapad lies in its simplicity and ease of use. With our tool, anyone in your team with zero technical knowledge can start building reports in mere seconds.

As a go-to solution for Agencies, Datapad makes it easy to onboard new customers with 1-click templates and share performance reports with read-only links.

Datapad also makes it easy to collaborate as a team with the ability to drop comments on KPI cards.

The AI insights tool lets anyone detect anomalies in their data and provides actionable to-do items to increase performance.

Key Feature #1. Templates

Creating reports for your business is no easy task. You start by making a list of all potential metrics you track, analyze them, and then shortlist the ones that will go into the report.

If you are an agency and want to create the same reports for multiple clients, then this hassle becomes even more burdensome.

Guess what? Datapad lets you do all this with just a few clicks.

With Datapad's templating features, you can:

  • Choose from a gallery of pre-designed templates and apply them with 1-click
  • Build a custom dashboard and re-use it as a template by changing its sources
  • Share all connected data sources in the workspace with your teammates

‍Key Feature #2. Team Collaboration

It’s no secret that you need a team to track KPIs when your business is substantially big and has dozens of KPIs to keep an eye on. 

But not all KPI dashboard tools let you bring your team on board. 

Guess what? Datapad lets you do it quickly and easily. 

Moreover, you can assign individual team members tasks to handle, goals to achieve, and metrics to measure.

With Datapad's team collaboration feature, you can:

  • Get notified whenever there’s an update for any metrics and KPIs you track
  • Communicate around your metrics and KPIs with your team members
  • Get push notifications on your phone to stay updated with all your KPIs

Key Feature #3. Automated Reports & Scorecards

Wouldn't it be great if you could check your business KPIs first thing in the morning, straight from your inbox?

With our dashboard software, you can subscribe to any dashboard and receive daily email updates.

All you have to do is build a dashboard, click the subscribe button, and set your email preferences.

The best part is you can share reports with anyone, even emails outside of your organization or workspace.

Step 1: Subscribe to a dashboard
Step 2: Check your inbox

With Datapad’s report and scorecard automation, you can:

  • Subscribe to any dashboard
  • Receive daily highlights around all KPIs
  • Send reports to users in and outside of your organization
  • Customize the date range, calculation, and styling of KPIs

Pricing

Datapad has a free tier that includes 1 dashboard. If you want more, you can upgrade to the $30 Standard Plan, which includes 3 dashboards and scales with your usage. Datapad also offers a Business Plan tailored for agencies and includes dedicated customer support.

We are now offering an early bird discount to all users, so it's a great time to sign up and give Datapad a spin.

Pros and Cons

✅ Let’s you import KPIs from unlimited data sources in the free plan.

✅ Lets you subscribe to dashboards to get daily highlights.

❌ Variety of charts and graphs selection can be widened.

2. Baremetrics

Baremetrics is a subscription analytics software designed for SaaS companies that helps centralize product data. It provides built-in tools to track, analyze, and improve SaaS metrics. Growing SaaS businesses like Product Hunt, ConvertKit, Todoist, and more trust the platform.

Features

  • Baremetrics tracks over 28 subscription metrics, including monthly recurring revenue (MRR), annual run rate (ARR), churn rate, upgrades, and more.
  • It offers smart, customizable dashboards to visualize data, with options to create custom segments and set up daily/weekly reports. 
  • Use features like Trial Insights to identify customer journeys during product trials, Predictive analysis to improve strategic planning, and industry-verified Benchmarks to tie up performance with goals.
  • Send important updates about MRR, LTV, churn, new customers, cancellations and more to your team's Slack channel in real-time.
  • Integrates with popular payment processors, accounting tools, e-commerce, and subscription apps.

Pricing

Baremetrics core suite of metrics tools is available at $189 per month if your current MMR is less than or equal to $15k.

👀 Note: Baremetrics pricing increases as your MMR increases. 

For a brand new brand with MRR 0, it has four plans to choose from:

  • Metrics: $129 per month
  • Recover: $69 per month
  • Cancellation insights: $129 per month
  • Forecast+: Included with Metrics plan

Pros and Cons

✅ Baremetrics is easy to implement and integrate with your existing tech stack.

✅ Offers advanced analysis features like churn analysis and trial insights.

❌ Only meant for SaaS businesses.

3. Amplitude

Amplitude is an AI-powered self-service data analytics platform. It’s trusted by Dropbox, Adidas, Doordash, PayPal, and more for product and web analytics, event tracking, and on-demand experiments for understanding user behavior across channels.

Features

  • Get detailed overviews of your app or website analytics with industry-specific templates and automated reports with preset metrics and KPIs.
  • Correlate user behavior across sessions and metrics to identify the features and behaviors that drive growth or churn.
  • Visualize where and how users convert using session replays, charts, cohorts, tables, and conversion funnels.
  • Set up feature experiments to gain immediate feedback from every release, with insights about feature adoption and engagement.
  • Use Amplitude AI to harmonize data collection, ask questions around it, get recommendations, generate visuals, and predict user behavior.
  • Integrates with leading data and marketing platforms like Google Ads, HubSpot, Mailchimp, and more.

Pricing

Amplitude offers a generous free plan with starter templates, foundation analytics, and unlimited data sources. Other than that, it has two paid plans:

  • Plus: $61 per month
  • Growth: Custom pricing

Pros and Cons

✅ Comes with integrated AI capabilities.

✅ Connects well with your existing tech stack.

❌ It's hard to attain real-time results from feature experiments.

4. Datawrapper

Datawrapper is a data visualization tool providing highly-responsive charts, maps, and visualization elements readable on desktop devices, tablets, or smartphones.

Features

  • Choose from over 20 interactive chart types, maps, and tables with options to customize, style, and annotate them for readability. 
  • Create custom dashboard themes with hundreds of customizable specifications and touch-points such as colors, fonts, modes, and more to make visuals on-brand.
  • Use in-app localization to automatically adjust visuals, number formats, and dates in over 50 languages.
  • Collaborate with your team in real-time via live editing, view as changes happen, use versioning to track past changes and set up folders and workspaces for centralized documentation.
  • With Datawrapper API, create charts and maps using live data by writing a few lines of code.

Pricing

Datawrapper is free to get started. However, the free plan comes with Datawrapper attribution for all visuals. To use the professional solution with custom white-label branding and other perks, you can choose from the below plans:

  • Custom: $599 per month
  • Enterprise: Custom pricing

Pros and Cons

✅ Extensive data visualization and customization options.

✅ Offers dedicated marketplace 'River' for extended visualization support.

❌ Not a preferable tool for data analysis.

5. Zoho Reports

Zoho Reports helps you document, analyze, and monitor your business health. It's powered by Zoho Analytics, which allows you to plug in data from any source and create powerful reports and dashboards.

Features

  • Drag and drop charts, widgets, tables, and more elements to build insightful & interactive reports and dashboards.
  • Choose from 40+ pre-built reporting templates or create customized reports and dashboards using the visual drag-and-drop builder.
  • Has a gallery of data visualization elements, including columns, donuts, pies, bars, lines, tables, funnels, areas, and heat maps at the click of a button.
  • It offers preset models and custom fields for collecting data and allows users to slice, dice, and mix modules, datasets, and reports for a comprehensive analysis. 
  • Use Zoho's AI assistant, Zia, to answer questions about data, identify anomalies, and predict future trends based on past performance and data in Zoho CRM.
  • Zoho marketplace provides 900+ plug-and-play third-party extensions to popular CRMs, data warehouses, advertising, and marketing platforms. 

Pricing

Zoho Reports offers 5 paid plans to choose from:

  • Basic: $30 per month
  • Standard: $60 per month
  • Premium: $145 per month
  • Enterprise: $575 per month
  • Custom: Tailored plan

Pros and Cons

✅ Offers pre-built templates and dashboard-building elements for pixel-perfect data visualization.

✅ Well-integrated with the Zoho app ecosystem and third-party apps.

❌ Zoho Reports advanced functions require some learning curve.

6. Sisense

Sisense is an AI-powered BI and analytics platform. It features three modes of embedding analytics into your product: no-code embedded analytics, pro-code developer analytics, and cloud-agnostic analytics.

Features

  • Integrates with 100+ data sources and provides dynamic data engines (live connections, elasticube, or a hybrid approach) to collect and harmonize data before it hits the dashboard. 
  • Offers a drag-and-drop dashboard building experience, with interactive visuals that allow you to filter or drill down into any insight. 
  • Sisense's online marketplace has various third-party add-ons for extended widgets, filters, and design elements.
  • Leverage Sisense AI-and-ML capabilities to prepare large datasets for analysis, forecast future values, analyze patterns, and detect anomalies proactively.
  • Using Sisense's Natural Language Query (NLQ) interface, you can ask questions in English and receive an answer as a widget.

Pricing

Sisense doesn't reveal its pricing on the official website. You can request a free trial and discuss pricing with their sales team.

Pros and Cons

✅ Offers a no-code, low-code, and pro-code experience for different user dynamics.

✅ Easy to customize and embed into your product or website.

❌ Too many functions lead to a steep learning curve.

7. Pendo

Pendo is an easy-to-use product analytics app that uses AI and machine learning to deliver insights into product experiences. It's a trusted analytics app among top companies like Salesforce, Kajabi, Coursera, Cisco, and more.

Features

  • Integrates with popular product tools, CRMs, collaboration apps, and data warehouses for seamless connectivity with your data.
  • Create dashboards with interactive widgets that display user behavior data around certain features or the entire product for better analysis.
  • Leverage Pendo AI to identify and analyze trends in data, generate personalized content, and get workflow suggestions for quicker adoption. 
  • Use Session Replay to see the behavior behind the data and make better roadmap decisions.

Pricing

Pendo provides a user-based pricing model based on monthly active users (MAU) designed to scale as customers grow. Although the company doesn't mention pricing on its official website, you can request it from the pricing page.

Pros and Cons

✅ Intuitive interface, easy to use with minimal learning curve.

✅ Pendo In-app Guides highlight the most valuable features for first-time customers.

❌ The feedback module is complicated and clunky (not well supported within Pendo).

8. Mixpanel

Mixpanel helps you gather insights into how users interact with your product. It offers interactive data analysis tools to drill-through metrics, understand the user journey and reasons behind spikes and drop-offs.

Features

  • Offers interactive dashboards that allow you to break down metrics or Zoom in on any segment to root cause points and understand hidden patterns.
  • Use charts, funnels, trendlines, and flow diagrams to visualize incoming user data and add text, images, GIFs, videos, and more to give relevant context to visuals.
  • Uses machine learning to mine user data for insights, identify anomalies, validate assumptions, and suggest adjustments to enhance user value.
  • Conduct experiments and test feature variants within Mixpanel using integrations with Optimizely, AB Tasty, and more A/B testing platforms. 
  • Integrates with hundreds of advertising, automation, designing, data warehouses, CDP, and more apps.
  • Has read-made dashboard and report templates for measuring company KPIs, cohort analysis, marketing, and web analytics.

Pricing

Mixpanel offers a generous free plan with all essential analytics, templates, and up to 20 million monthly events. Other than that, it has two paid plans:

  • Growth: $28 per month
  • Enterprise: Custom pricing

Pros and Cons

✅ Helps you with data warehousing and ingestion.

✅ Well-integrated with essential apps for A/B testing, user segmentation, and cohorts.

❌ The free plan lacks core functions and is limited to basic analytics and data management features.

9. Heap

Heap is the most complete data analytics platform using data science and AI to gather and present user behavioral data as actionable insights. The platform is trusted by 1,000+ companies, including Amway, DropBox Sign, Walmart Labs, and more.

Features

  • Create dashboards that visualize your customer journey and track events using graphs, funnels, journey maps, retention charts, and more visualization elements.
  • Leverage advanced data insight tools like heatmaps, session replays, user flow charts, and more to drill down into insights.
  • Use Heap Illuminate to identify hidden friction and opportunities within the user journey.
  • Heap's query builder lets you answer critical questions and see how key aspects of your digital experience are performing. 
  • Use AI Copilot to ask questions about data in plain text, auto-generate charts, and follow up on questions to dig deeper.
  • Integrates with 50+ third-party customer data platforms, CRMs, data warehouses, and lakes, A/B testing platforms, and more apps.

Pricing

Heap is free to get started with core analytics charts and unlimited data sources. It has three other plans: Growth, Pro, and Premier. All offer custom pricing, so you'd need to connect with their sales team and get a quote.

Pros and Cons

✅ AI and data science integration assist with accurate and in-depth data analysis.

❌ Chart customizations are available on paid plans only.

Wrapping Up

All the tools mentioned above are great alternatives to Narrative BI and take care of the drawbacks it poses.

Analyzing and visualizing data is critical for any business’s survival because, without it, you can’t make the right decisions.

Unfortunately, Narrative BI might not have all the features and integrations you need to track KPIs for your business, and that’s why exploring alternatives is a smart choice.

But how do you find out which Narrative BI alternative is right for you? 

Well, there’s no better way than signing up for free trials and judging products for yourself.

If you or your team don’t have the time to try every product on our list, sign up for Datapad, import your KPIs, and create stunning dashboards for you and your team.