Elevate Your Business Intelligence with Zoho Analytics – Full Review (2023)

Functionality

Zoho prides its analytical product on six main things: connect, prepare, analyze, visualize, collaborate, and build. So, let’s dissect.

When creating a new report, you are presented with a page filled with sources. You can pull from MongoDB, BigQuery, Azure, you name it. For the purposes of this review, I cannot pull data from the sources I use in the field, so I will be importing from CSV files.

You can also import data from a multitude of sources, from CRM to finance to project management. So that means sources like Salesforce, Quickbooks, and even social media are fair game.

Once you select the data to import, you will be asked to prepare. Here, you can view the data as a table and clean if necessary. There is a validation button that quickly runs an initial check for what I assume to be null values or anything else out of place. You can select columns to keep and transform anything of your choice.

With your newly cleaned tables, you can now begin analyzing. Zoho has implemented their AI assistant, Zia, to quickly get insights without digging through the data. There is the option for what-if analysis and the feature appears to work well with properly cleaned data.

Now, it’s time to visualize. During my first report, it asked to auto-generate reports for me, and being that the dataset I selected is only 5000 rows and cleaned to begin with, I chose the option. And I was not disappointed. The Zoho Analytics generated three dashboards and a total of 22 reports in seconds.

When the reports a finalized, you have a nice all-in-one tool that can generate slideshows for sharing.

Finally, there’s the topic of building. Big in the field is embedded business intelligence. This allows you to display those reports you (or Zia) worked so hard on in places beyond screenshots in a PowerPoint presentation. And the best part is that it is no- to low-code.

Performance

During the testing, I found some minor issues with the performance. The overall speed of the app is as expected for something with so much data to load. However, a few times, something would pop up on the screen when I hovered, and it would not go away.

User Interface

The interface is friendly. However, I believe you would need to be familiar with the data analytics space in order to intuitively understand where to go for some features. If you are using the app as someone who was simply asked to create visuals of some data, I believe your efforts would need to be on cleaning the data and then allowing the auto-generated reports to do most of the heavy lifting.

As some of you may know by now, I love a good mini-description. The app provides a ton of hover descriptions, which I believe do the trick for most users.

Zoho gives you a night mode option and a theme option, however, the theme appears to only really affect the top bar.

Innovation

I believe the company hits it out of the park with the AI insights. I don’t need to be dragged through a wizard in 2023 to gain some knowledge. The fact that the AI is chat style allows the experience to be much more pleasant. And I know I’m on record calling chat AI a lazy addon that companies upcharge, but for this segment of software, I think it is well placed.

Versus The Field

While Visme is not a huge business intelligence platform, I believe they do a lot of reporting well, so I will be using them for this comparison.

Visme probably has them beat on “prettiness”, however the delivery and interactive capabilities of Zoho Analytics rise above.

Zoho Analytics can get you a streamlined presentation if your data’s final destination is such, but Visme will be better for that. If you are planning on embedding your visualizations downstream, Zoho Analytics is the clear winner.

If you are looking for one platform that can do a little bit (and in most cases, a lot) of everything, I believe Zoho is your tool.

Ease Of Use

As I stated earlier, I believe this app is more intuitive to the individual who is familiar with working with data. This doesn’t make it unusable for a beginner, however, it will require a learning curve. On the bright side, this curve won’t be a hard one with the tutorials placed around the platform.

Likes And Dislikes

The best feature is definitely the AI. There are only so many ways to visualize data. The company markets this as a marketing tool, so for an audience with presumably less technical acumen, this feature will really allow you to breeze through business intelligence and focus on other things.

The biggest dislike is definitely the performance. I found I had to refresh some times to get the app right, and I would blame my wifi for some of it but I did not have that problem with anything else to date.

At The End Of The Day…

I believe that Zoho has put out a top competitor in the business intelligence space. When you look at the other products in their line, I believe this platform as a whole has a place in many companies. However, this review is about data visualizations. I would recommend this product for the user whose role does not revolve around data analytics and who needs to quickly visualize and share insights with limited knowledge of the field.