The three dashboard platforms listed below provide free versions that access MS Access data.
Bittle supports the creation of online dashboards specifically for the SME user. The free package restricts data storage and data sources, and comes with a standard graphics library (instead of a more advanced one). Bittle also supports report creation.
ClicData is a cloud based dashboard platform that successfully delivers an easy to use, drag and drop graphical interface, while providing the tools for power users to deliver high levels of sophistication. Business users are able to produce dashboards almost immediately, and as they become more familiar with the platform, so they can deliver dashboards that incorporate a wide range of charts and graphs, conditional output, pivot tables, calculations and many other features. It is ideal for smaller businesses, but has also found enthusiastic uptake in larger firms as they become familiar with its power and flexibility. The good news for very small businesses and single users is the free version of ClicData. This essentially supports CSV and Excel data, and data refresh once a week.
Zoho Reports is an online reporting and business intelligence service that helps you easily analyze your business data, and create insightful reports & dashboards for informed decision-making. It allows you to create and share powerful reports. The free service limits users (2) and data, and has cut down functionality.
The products listed below all need licenses to operate.
Dundas BI provides dashboard and reporting capabilities with connectors to most data sources. Because it is based on HTML5 technology it is easy to use on mobile devices. It supports all the needed facilities such as filtering, grouping, sorting and drill downs.
Dynistics is a browser based dashboard platform that supports real-time reporting. A variety of templates are provided for standard business reporting tasks and it can be used within both intranets and websites. It runs on a server loaded with Microsoft IIS and .NET Framework 4.
iDashboards provides surprising flexibility in its licensing and deployment models. The on-premises Enterprise Suite is suitable for large organisations and can provide dashboards for internal consumption and for external agents such as customers and trading partners. The cloud deployment is suitable for smaller organisations, but provides pretty much the same functionality. Mobile devices are well supported with native apps.
Tableau users can start with the free Tableau Public. This supports the creation of attractive visuals specifically with web publishing in mind. The enterprise version of Tableau is called Tableau Server. This is a in-house hosted version accessed through a web browser, and supports the features usually found in a product of this nature – dashboards, graphs, charts, tables and so on. Tableau Desktop runs on PC and Mac and can process data in local memory and/or go to other remote data sources. Tableau can also be accessed as a cloud service.
Spotfire challenges the received wisdom that sophisticated technology is complex, and that easy-to-use technology is unsophisticated. For the large population of business users who simply wish to understand and analyze their data with least possible overhead, Spotfire will oblige. This is particularly true of version 7 where considerable effort has been made to automate routine tasks. However Spotfire goes well beyond routine day-to-day requirements, and as users gain confidence and skills so they can venture into other forms of analytics – statistics, predictive analytics, business rules and optimization, and real-time analytics for processing complex events.
Visual Mining NetCharts Performance Dashboards is an interactive, web-based dashboard, business intelligence and data visualization solution designed and architected to empower non-IT business users. Nearly all aspects of dashboard key performance indicator (KPI) creation and management are configurable by end users eliminating the IT bottleneck in most reporting processes. NCPD provides business analytics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).