Customer intelligence software lets businesses fully understand their customer preferences and behaviors that drive purchase decisions. It has various tools for storing, managing, and analyzing customer data such as purchase history, demographics, and engagement activity. Through customer intelligence, business users can improve their product or service offerings and marketing strategies—ultimately driving up revenue. We evaluated dozens of products to identify the best customer intelligence platform options:
- Best overall: HubSpot Service Hub
- Best for complete marketing analytics: Salesforce Interaction Studio
- Most affordable and scalable: Microsoft Power BI
- Best marketing planning features: SAS Customer Intelligence
- Great for customer experience management: Qualtrics XM (formerly Clarabridge)
- Excellent platform for personalizing customer journeys: NGDATA
- Best sales analytics tools: Tableau CRM Analytics by Salesforce
- Solid choice for those seeking analytics services: DataForce
- Best Customer Intelligence Software Compared
- HubSpot Service Hub: Best Customer Intelligence Platform Overall
- HubSpot Service Hub Pricing Plan & Overview*
- Salesforce Interaction Studio: Best for Comprehensive Marketing Analytics
- Salesforce Interaction Studio Pricing Plan & Overview*
- Microsoft Power BI: Most Affordable
- Microsoft Power BI Pricing Plan & Overview*
- SAS Customer Intelligence: Best for Marketing Planning
- SAS Customer Intelligence Overview
- Qualtrics XM (formerly Clarabridge): Best Customer Experience Product
- Qualtrics XM Overview
- NGDATA: Best for Personalizing Customer Engagements
- NGDATA Overview
- Tableau CRM Analytics by Salesforce: Best for Sales Analytics
- Tableau CRM Analytics Pricing Plan & Overview*
- DataForce by TransPerfect: Best for Finding Analytics Experts
- DataForce Overview
- How We Evaluated the Best Customer Analytics Software
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
- Bottom Line
Best Customer Intelligence Software Compared
| Provider | Paid Plan Starting Monthly Price per User* | Free Plan? | Product Type |
|---|---|---|---|
 | $45 (two users) | ✓ | CRM and Customer Support Platform |
| Visit HubSpot Service Hub | |||
 | Varies by product | ✕ | Marketing Cloud Add-on |
| Visit Salesforce Interaction Studio | |||
 | $13.70 | ✕ | Customer Data Analytics Platform |
| Visit Microsoft Power BI | |||
 | Contact for pricing | ✕ | Customer Data Analytics Platform |
| Visit SAS Customer Intelligence | |||
 | Contact for pricing | ✕ | Customer Data Analytics Platform |
| Visit Qualtrics | |||
 | Contact for pricing | ✕ | Customer Data Analytics Platform |
| Visit NGDATA | |||
 | $75 | ✕ | Sales Cloud Add-on |
| Visit Tableau CRM Analytics | |||
 | Contact for pricing | ✕ | Service Provider |
| Visit DataForce | |||
*Based on annual billing; monthly billing is also available for slightly higher rates.
HubSpot Service Hub: Best Customer Intelligence Platform Overall
HubSpot Service Hub Pricing Plan & Overview*
Cost:
- $0 for unlimited users
Key Features:
- Email response and reply tracking
- Ability to collect, store, and manage customer event data, including from external sources, to track engagements with marketing and outreach campaigns
- HubSpot mobile app
- Up to three reporting dashboards
- Up to 10 unique customer activity reports per dashboard
- Customer list segmentation
*Pricing based on annual billing on a per month breakdown; monthly billing is also available for a higher cost. HubSpot offers a 14-day free trial on paid plans.
HubSpot dashboard analytics (Source: HubSpot)
Our Expert Opinion
HubSpot is a great simple option to better understand your customers and campaigns. Its free option adds tremendous value with multiple reporting dashboards, unlimited users, and data storage capabilities at no cost. Its intuitive system design allows any business, including those with users who’ve never conducted customer intelligence, to gain insights for improving customer service and marketing outreach initiatives.
Need an intuitive, robust customer service tool? Check out our HubSpot Service Hub review to see if it meets your operational needs.
Salesforce Interaction Studio: Best for Comprehensive Marketing Analytics
Salesforce Interaction Studio Pricing Plan & Overview*
Salesforce Interaction Studio is a set of multiple software add-ons for the Marketing Cloud product. It offers various customer intelligence capabilities depending on your priorities, including optimizing loyalty programs, advertisements, account management activities, and personalized customer journeys. Each add-on offers data storage and tracking, customer analytics tools, and visualization capabilities to easily convert intelligence into action for a business.
Marketing Cloud Intelligence
- Starter: $3,000 monthly for up to 10 users and a centralized data source that integrates all marketing and customer management applications into one system. Provides data governance tools that organize and enrich stored information plus visualization features like dashboard reporting and artificial intelligence (AI) insights for optimizing campaigns and interactions.
- Growth: $10,000 monthly for everything on the Starter plan, 20 users, plus more data and user capacity.
- Plus: Contact for pricing, allows up to 80 users.
Marketing Cloud Personalization
- Growth: $100,000 monthly for the data collection on website traffic and email engagement plus A/B/N testing and reporting on content. Also includes the Einstein machine learning (ML) tool to make content recommendations to customers based on their unique customer profiles and history.
- Premium: $300,000 per month for everything in Growth. Plus, it offers AI insights on next-best action recommendations and suggestions on promotional or product offerings to customers depending on their behaviors and demographics. Also includes AI personalization for customer mobile interactions.
Marketing Cloud Advertising
- Professional: $2,000 monthly for building ad audiences using customer relationship management (CRM) data and personalized journey building for online ads based on profiles and interactions.
Data Cloud for Marketing
- Data Cloud Starter: $108,000 annually for real-time data streaming on customer events and activities and data centralization from various sources. Also includes calculated customer metrics like customer lifetime value, affinity scores, and recently, frequency, and monetary (RFM) values to help enrich profiles and personalize customer journeys.
Loyalty Management
- Starter: $20,000 monthly for aggregating customer and loyalty member program data into one system. Also includes rewards management features based on automated rule-based triggers like purchases or campaign engagements.
- Growth: $35,000 monthly for everything in Starter plus full benefits management for administering vouchers or service entitlements. Also includes time-based promotions and the ability to oversee loyalty programs run through cross-industry partnerships.
- Advanced: $45,000 monthly for everything in Growth plus expanded capacity for programs, users, and data capacity.
*Pricing based on annual billing
Salesforce Interaction Studio cloud personalization activity dashboard (Source: Salesforce)
Our Expert Opinion
Though an expensive option, Salesforce Interaction Studio is a powerful solution for obtaining thorough customer analytics and insights across various marketing channels. We especially like its multi-range selection, allowing businesses to optimize marketing and customer experience regardless of the types of outreach and promotional campaigns run. As an add-on of Salesforce, users can easily pull, visualize, and analyze information in the same interface they store their customer data.
Visit Salesforce Interaction Studio
Microsoft Power BI: Most Affordable
Microsoft Power BI Pricing Plan & Overview*
Cost:
- $13.70
Key Features:
- Mobile app for on-the-go business intelligence and customer analytics
- Publishable and shareable reports, including paginated and printable options with collaboration tools like commenting
- Ability to connect over 100 data sources from sales, marketing, and customer service platforms and other data management tools for complete system centralization
- Data visualization and graphics tools for simple decision-making
- Data governance features including metrics for published, consumed, and created data reports
*Pricing is based on annual billing on a per-user monthly breakdown. Microsoft BI comes with a 60-day free trial.
Microsoft Power BI forecast report (Source: Microsoft)
Our Expert Opinion
The versatility of Microsoft Power BI makes it a premium option for organizations to better understand their customers as well as their sales, marketing, product lines, and all-around operation. Once connected to the desired data sources, Power BI becomes a one-stop shop for all things analysis and forecasting for a decision-maker to make optimal decisions. We also cannot overlook the cost-friendliness of the platform and scalability to grow with business needs.
SAS Customer Intelligence: Best for Marketing Planning
SAS Customer Intelligence Overview
The SAS Customer Intelligence Platform offers customizable pricing based on business needs. It focuses its tools on marketing data management and intelligence to enhance decision-making for campaigns and customer journeys. Teams can even use SAS to manage other stakeholders like suppliers and vendors by seeing how performance and conversions in marketing campaigns could affect other parts of the supply chain.
SAS Customer Intelligence Features
- Data management to collect and store marketing and customer activity information from various sources. Allows users to create profiles, track events in real time, structure data for activation purposes, and personalize customer interactions based on profiles.
- Marketing planning tools for developing and deploying campaigns, product lines, and even entire brands. Includes analytics tools for properly timing out, budgeting, and making other key decisions around marketing initiatives.
- Customer journey activation, which takes analytics and AI insights, including A/B testing and purchase opportunities to help deliver personalized customer experiences to each unique profile.
- Extended marketing impact features, which let you manage campaigns and customer journeys while accounting for potential impact on supply chain partners and other departments within an organization.
SAS Customer Intelligence creating A/B test (Source: SAS)
Our Expert Opinion
While we aren’t fans of the interface design and secretive pricing, SAS Customer Intelligence is highly advanced for businesses to maximize marketing performance. From profile creation and activity tracking to content optimization and expanded marketing impact analysis, this intelligence platform will boost your conversion rates and total revenue. It’ll also prepare you operationally for those busy seasons with built-in analysis tools for supply chain impacts.
Visit SAS Customer Intelligence
Qualtrics XM (formerly Clarabridge): Best Customer Experience Product
Qualtrics XM Overview
Qualtrics, which acquired Clarabridge last year, combined the two intelligence product solutions to expand the Qualtrics XM Discover platform. The system lets you connect social media accounts, contact center systems, customer relationship manager (CRM) platforms, online review tools, and other databases to track interactions and see what customers are saying about your brand. There are also built-in natural language understanding (NLU) tools that use AI to discover sentiment, emotions, and buyer intent from conversations.
The addition of Clarabridge allows businesses to receive advanced recommendations on how to improve the customer experience. These capabilities can even extend to industry-specific use cases, such as having the system tell you to create an automated HubSpot email marketing campaign on how to set up a consumer product after its delivery. Finally, Qualtrics XM can take all the system’s analysis to create personalized journeys and improve product and service offerings based on feedback.
Qualtrics XM contact center conversation intelligence (Source: Qualtrics)
Our Expert Opinion
Qualtrics XM is truly one of a kind. First, we like its multi-functional use cases to help easily collect and analyze data for various business functions like human resources, product management, and marketing. These ultimately allow leaders to make better decisions using quantitative insights rather than emotion. Additionally, the end-to-end focus on optimizing the customer experience enables users to boost awareness, interest, and purchases while ensuring quality service after the fact.
NGDATA: Best for Personalizing Customer Engagements
NGDATA Overview
The NGDATA customer data platform lets you connect with sales and marketing tools to serve as a centralized database for customer and campaign information. It has audience creation tools that can auto-segment based on interactions and profile analysis. The built-in intelligence features let you create personalized campaigns and discover the next-best actions for customer journeys while viewing all information on a condensed dashboard or single customer view.
NG Data customer journey dashboard (Source: NG Data)
Our Expert Opinion
NGDATA gives teams the solutions to design and track detailed customer journeys. We especially like its simplistic design within the interface and dashboard reporting modules and the all-around ease of use of the tools. Additionally, the product’s use of AI helps users automate much of the customer profiling and segmentation process, which ultimately helps drive initiatives to personalize customer journeys on a super granular level.
Tableau CRM Analytics by Salesforce: Best for Sales Analytics
Tableau CRM Analytics Pricing Plan & Overview*
Cost:
- $75
Key Features:
- Custom predictions for Salesforce objects, including the CRM system
- Einstein Discovery tools for predictive, artificial intelligence (AI) insights on data across numerous applications for forecasting and planning purposes
- AI prescriptive insights to help gain recommendations on improving CRM processes, including customer engagement, marketing campaigns, and workflow automations
*Pricing is based on annual billing on a per user, per month breakdown. All Tableau products, including the CRM Analytics software, have a 14-day free trial.
Tableau CRM Einstein analytics in the record (Source: Salesforce Blogger)
Our Expert Opinion
The acquisition of Tableau by Salesforce took the world by storm in 2019. Even then, there’s no question that the CRM giant paired perfectly with one of the major players in data analytics and business intelligence software. Tableau CRM Analytics is powerful for its combined use cases of revenue operations intelligence and advanced features, including AI predictions and recommendations. The reporting capabilities are also an excellent method for discovering process-improving insights.
Visit Tableau CRM Analytics by Salesforce
DataForce by TransPerfect: Best for Finding Analytics Experts
DataForce Overview
DataForce by TransPerfect is a network of data management and intelligence specialists that help businesses collect and analyze their data to drive better decisions. Their main focus is leveraging AI tools to advance the customer and client intelligence process. DataForce services a wide range of industries, including automotive, cybersecurity, finance, business technology, retail, and healthcare.
DataForce Services
- Data collection through AI capabilities like natural language processing (NLP), text-to-speech, and automatic speech recognition (ASR).
- Data annotation which adds labels to data for machine learning (ML) to better process text, images, audio, and video data.
- Data relevance services that analyze content shown to customers to ensure it’s accurate, relevant, up to date, and culturally appropriate.
- Chatbot development and localization, which helps configure high-quality AI chatbots to engage with and assist customers.
- Moderation services that review content that would be used for websites or social media platforms in relation to company guidelines.
- Transcription solutions for converting speech and audio to written text.
- User studies that take AI to collect and activate data in order to build out personalized customer and user experiences.
Our Expert Opinion
There is certainly a strong but narrow use case for investing in DataForce. Many businesses, particularly those looking for advanced intelligence using large amounts of data, may find bringing on data scientists and engineering experts more beneficial than software as a service (SaaS) or prepackaged software products. Another thing we like is the modern approach DataForce employs by focusing on AI technology from its parent company TransPerfect.
How We Evaluated the Best Customer Analytics Software
To determine the best customer insights and intelligence platforms, we evaluated numerous product categories crucial in any business software. For instance, while we understand intelligence tools are expensive due to their robust capabilities, we still wanted each customer intelligence solution to offer affordable pricing. We also wanted the platforms to contain easy-to-use features and have the developers provide solid customer support or self-service resources to help with user experience.
We also took a deep dive into the data management and analytics features and their effectiveness at discovering valuable customer insights. Additionally, each provider should have a high storage capacity to gather and maintain numerous data points that could be used in decision-making activities for marketing, service, or product management. Finally, we looked at whether each provider includes advanced tools, like artificial intelligence (AI), for information discovery and a broad range of third-party data source options.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is a customer intelligence platform?
A customer intelligence platform is software that lets businesses store and analyze information to help them make better decisions. Just as “intelligence” refers to knowing or discovering something for decision-making purposes, “customer intelligence” is knowing customer information to help improve marketing campaigns, products or service offerings, sales outreach, or customer support operations.
What are the best consumer intelligence tools?
The best consumer intelligence tool varies spending on use case, budget, and feature requirements. For instance, we found HubSpot Service Hub to be the best overall intelligence software for its freemium plan and easy-to-use analytics tools. HubSpot, however, is not going to come with robust governance features or be useful for obtaining analysis of data outside of customer support operations. In that case, we recommended Microsoft Power BI for more versatile analytics tools and data management features.
What key features are essential to consider when evaluating a customer intelligence platform?
Customer intelligence is all about finding insights to make better decisions. Therefore, the key features in a customer intelligence platform should cover information storage and organization for analytics and visualization purposes. A large data capacity, options to connect various data sources through third-party integrations, and advanced analytics through artificial intelligence (AI) are all crucial features as well. You should also look for solid reporting and dashboard tools that let you easily digest information.
Bottom Line
Customer intelligence software lets you centralize data for analysis and reporting to improve various parts of your sales, marketing, and service operation. While most platforms are standalone or add-on analytics tools, businesses can invest in CRM software with intelligence capabilities or online services connecting teams with data experts. While we consider HubSpot Service Hub the best overall intelligence software, wider use cases could push users to look for other options.
