11 Best Big Data Analytics Tools In 2020

Shibani Sharma
Code Like A Girl
Published in
10 min readOct 8, 2020

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Fundamentals of marketing are consistent, everyone loves insights as these numerical patterns can deliver the most fail-safe way to ensure that companies make the right move for operating more efficiently and where to utilize their resources. Data has become the stronghold of strategy.

95% of the businesses’ data is unstructured.”- Forbes. This unstructured data is the biggest hurdle. To utilize this data and for removing the stumbling block, Big Data tools could be a handy way-out. At our current pace, we generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily, so why don’t convert this raw data into useful business insights!

The Big Data market is forecasted to grow $1.3 Billion by the end of 2027. As there are multiple productive uses of data analytics for business ventures, every business or industry vertical is making most of it somehow. Some marvellous benefits are:

  • Analyse & Predict Consumer Behaviour
  • Plan New Products, Services, and Experiences
  • Determine Product & Offer Launches
  • Improve Working Process
  • Analyse Customer Demand Fluctuations
  • Boost Sales or Influence Customer Behaviour

Amid all these business benefits, the real question is that “What are the best Big Data tools?” to embrace this 3Vs technology for the welfare of humans and to gain a competitive edge.

Whether it is Operational Big Data or Analytical Big Data, there are four crucial technologies to focus on; Storage, Analytics, Mining, and Visualization. Each of these plays a vital role to analyze the vast amount of datasets.

For finding the best Big Data tools, I’ve taken some measures like platform compatibility, cost-efficiency, time-management for analytical tasks, required knowledge set, analysis capability, and visualization.

Without wasting more time, let’s go through the trending tools that can help you to manage and analyze large datasets for generating useful insights. Also i have added some of the Top Custom Software Development Company provide Big Data Analytics Services.

Best Big Data Analytics Tools for Business Ventures

HADOOP

It is the most popular software framework that provides low-cost distributed computing for big datasets. The element that makes Hadoop one of the vigorous Big Data Tools is its distributed file system that lets the users hold all kinds of data like JSON, XML, Video, Images, and Text over the very same file system.

Written-In: Java

Current Stable Version: Hadoop 3.2.1

Pricing: Open-Source & License-Free

Key Features:

  • Highly Scalable to process large amounts of data by letting you store and distribute a large number of data sets.
  • Good for Research & Development because of its comprehensive analytical tools like Hive and Pig.
  • Quick Access to the Data across the highly scalable Hadoop clusters using Hadoop Distributed File System(HDFS).
  • Ecosystem Approach to acquire, arrange, process, analyze, and visualize the data.
  • Fault-Tolerant in unfavourable conditions by dividing data into Multiple blocks and then having various copies of it on different nodes.

CASSANDRA

Cassandra is a NoSQL database management system developed by Facebook. Apache Cassandra is a great OS independent open-source Big Data software that provides high-quality availability to manage the big amount of data stored over various commodity servers. For making the interaction between the database and its users easier, it offers CQL(Cassandra Structure Language).

Written-In: Java

Current Stable Version: Cassandra 3.11

Pricing: Open-Source & License-Free

Key Features:

  • Continues Up-Time by having a ‘ring’ design and master-less architecture that gives no single point of failure.
  • Automated Replication of data over multiple cloud data replication centres that let you manipulate data from anywhere on the globe.
  • Optimal Language Support of language drivers (like Java, C++, Python, Ruby, C#, etc.) provides the optimum performance of the application.
  • Linear Scalability allows you to increase the number of nodes in the cluster as per the business application’s need to increase performance.

ZOHO ANALYTICS

It is a self-service Big Data analytics software that allows you to visually analyze your data and also let you create insightful report dashboards. This Big Data software analyzes the data sets and provides key business insights. You can take data from any big data sources like NoSQL, relational, and cloud databases or even from your business apps.

Current Stable Version: Zoho Analytics 4.0

Pricing: $25/month (2 users, 500,000 rows & unlimited Workspace) to $495 (50 users, 50 million rows & unlimited reporting databases)

Key Features:

  • Extensible & Scalable BI Platform to create and implement reporting and analytical capabilities into business applications.
  • Ad Hoc Report creation for answering business questions using real-time dynamic data reports.
  • Cloud Deployment for high security, scalability, flexibility, and availability of the data.
  • Wide Variety of Reporting Elements like charts, pivot tables, widgets, and tabular views for insightful reports and dashboards.

MICROSOFT POWER BI

Microsoft Power BI is an efficient way to gather, analyze, and visualize data for forming actionable insights. It helps startups and enterprises to create insightful dashboards by manipulating real-time data sources. These dashboards offer real-time insights for knowing the overall performance of processes going on in the organization. You can even outsource PowerBI consulting and development for getting the best possible outcomes.

Current Stable Version: Power BI 2.82

Pricing: Pro plan costs $9.99 per user per month, and the Premium plan starts at $4,995 a month per dedicated cloud compute and storage resource

Key Features:

  • DAX Data Analysis Functions, 200+ predefined codes to perform analytics specific functionalities on data.
  • Informative Reports as a structured representation of data in multiple ways and revealing useful insights from the data.

Get Data from Different Data Source like structured to unstructured, and cloud-based to on-premise systems.

  • Ease of Integration by Power Query and Power Map that can be easily infused with Big Data analytics using Office 365 suite.

CLOUDERA

Cloudera distribution system for Hadoop is the most popular and trusted distribution. CDH is the best enterprise-class deployment due to its scalable storage and distributed computing, along with a Web-based UI and vital enterprise capabilities. It offers an open-source platform distribution with Apache Hadoop, Spark, Impala, Kite, Hive, Pig Mapreduce, and many others.

Current Stable Version: CDH 6

Pricing: Open-Source & 1000$ — 2000$ for each Terabyte

Key Features:

  • Enterprise-Class Distribution due to its vital enterprise-capabilities.
  • Easy Implementation & Administration to administer and manage Hadoop clusters easily.
  • Highly Secure & Safe for processing and controlling sensible data.
  • Flexibility to store any type of data & offer Scalability to extend a broad range of applications to suit your requirements.

DATAWRAPPER

Datawrapper is one of those great Big Data tools that mine raw data from a source and convert that information into responsive, interactive, and embeddable form. The best part is its compatibility with mobile, desktop, and tablet that makes the availability of visualization at ease. And if you are not into coding or designing then also you can use this big data software.

Pricing: Free as a trial and $21 — $599 per month subscription

Key Features:

  • Fully Responsive to make the maps, tables, and charts readable on all your devices.
  • No Code Needed to analyze or visualize the data from different sources.
  • OS Independent; works on Web, so no need to worry about OS, updates, or installation.
  • Great Design By Default, so you don’t need to have designing skills to visualize your data.

MONGODB

MongoDB is a NoSQL, document-oriented database that is one of open-source big data tools. It is supported by various operating systems like Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris. The NoSQL provides high-performance and agile processing of data on a big scale. It stores the raw or unstructured data over multiple processing nodes and servers.

Written-In: C, C++, and JavaScript

Current Stable Version: MongoDB 4.2

Pricing: On request

Key Features:

  • Aggregation Operation in MongoDB processes grouped data to provide a single computed result.
  • Ad Hoc-Queries provide faster execution on large data sets to increase performance.
  • Replication helps the database to provide redundancy for a fail-proof mechanism.
  • Faster Query Response due to indexing and replication features of MongoDB.

SPLUNK HUNK

Hunk is an on-premise Big Data platform to explore, analyze and visualize the data in Hadoop and NoSQL data stores. It gives a quick way of data set exploration without coding. You don’t need to be a coder or designer for using Hunk, because the intuitive and straightforward design of Hunk provides full visualization at ease.

Written-In: C++, Python

Current Stable Version: Hunk 6.4.11

Pricing: 60-day free trial, after that $207 per month, per node.

Key Features:

  • Splunk Search Processing Language (SPL), to explore, analyse and visualize data interactively.
  • Splunk Virtual Index technology that combines SPL to offer a seamless experience of BI.
  • Space Saving using archiving the index data to Hadoop.
  • Responsive Big Data Software that works streamlined on smartphone, desktop, and tablet.

TERRASTORE

TerraStore is one of the best open-source Big Data tools that are scalable, secure, and fast. It offers smooth operations without any complexity. The tool also provides partitioning of Big Data sets and offers per document consistency. To make the analysis more straightforward, it reduces querying and function processing.

Written-In: Java

Current Stable Version: TerraStore 0.8.2

Pricing: Open-source, free-to-use.

Key Features:

  • Scalable Data Layer; automatically partition and distribute documents whenever new nodes join and old nodes leave.
  • Scalable Computation that increases whenever network traffic increases.
  • Elastic by Nature; add or remove more nodes from running clusters without any down-time.
  • Distributed Document Store that supports single as well as multi-cluster deployments.

RAPIDMINER

It is a cross-platform data analytics tool that is an exceptional choice of companies for data mining, predictive analysis, and ML techniques. Apart from these applications, it is used for prototyping, research, app development, and for educational purposes as well.

Written-In: Java

Current Stable Version: RapidMiner 9.7

Pricing: $625 — $1250 per month, per user

Key Features:

  • GUI-Based platform that doesn’t need coding to perform tasks using this software.
  • Drag and Drop interface to generate great models.
  • Easy-to-Configure charts that illustrate insights through various visualization elements.
  • Stringent Modular Approach that saves pre-processing steps information from leaking during model training.

KNIME

For measuring the performance of processes, Knime(Konstanz Information Miner) is a great Big Data utility. It is an open-source platform that offers data integration and procession. Apart from integration and procession, Knime also works as a SAS alternative that provides business intelligence, enterprise reporting, CRM, data mining, data analytics, text mining, integration, etc.

Written-In: Java

Current Stable Version: Knime Analytics Platform 4.0

Pricing: Free to use

Key Features:

  • 1000+ Routines for data analysis.
  • Parallel Execution of nodes to perform intricate analysis work on massive data sets.
  • MongoDB Integration to access MongoDB’s JSON documents for manipulating data.
  • Free DataFlow Execution Engine that provides increased throughput and performance.

Key Takeaway

In this handout, we have gone through the top 11 Big Data tools that can help in analysing substantial data sets and can help you to create useful business insights. Whenever you are looking for a big data analytics platform, try to find out some of your basic needs like the size of data sets, your knowledge-set, OS compatibility, and budget. This approach can help you to find the best Data analytics software for your requirement.

Before going for any analytics or BI software, try to use its trial version. These trial versions will help you explore the software or app working and make it easy to decide whether to go for it or not.

If you are having a startup or a business, and looking for potential options to create business insights or analyze data, then go for Power BI, Zoho Analytics, or Cloudera. Or try to outsource Custom Software Development Company

for keeping yourself focused on the core of your business.

FAQs

What is Big Data?

Big Data is much like an abbreviation for a large volume of data sets. It could be structured as well as unstructured. There are two types of big data:

  1. Operational Big Data (More likely day-to-day data; Data from Ticket Booking, Social Media, Online Shopping, Organizational Data)
  2. Analytical Big Data (Advanced part of data; Data from Stock marketing, Space Missions, Weather Forecast, Medical)

What is Big Data Analytics?

Analyzing or examining a large number of data sets to find patterns, relations, or creating useful insights to make better and informed business decisions. It uses statistical and predictive modelling for analyzing the data sets.

What is Data Visualization?

Data visualization is a representation of information or data graphically. It can be done using various visualization tools that create elements like charts, graphs, 3D images, maps, pivot tables, etc. to better understand the patterns and trends.

What are the best Big Data tools for small business?

Small businesses and startups can go for these Big Data tools:

  1. SAS
  2. PowerBI
  3. Google Analytics (Web Analytics)
  4. Zoho Analytics
  5. IBM Watson Analytics

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Hi i am an independent Technical Content Strategist working with IT Companies. Gives a voice to Programming languages & Software development. Find me on Quora