Businesses and market all around the world have seen tremendous growth over the years which has enhanced the competition between different markets and has initiated a race to grow more. To win this race, a business must go to all lengths and accommodate all the required tools that ensure maximum productivity. One such tool is a data analysis tool that helps business increase their productivity by processing, analyzing, and interpreting complex forms of data. To run a successful business, informed decisions are really important instead of guesswork or intuition. You can easily make strategic decisions by looking at the market trends, patterns, and correlation which is made easy by the data analysis tools and their ability to accurately and fastly analyze the large volume of data. They also help you save time by taking care of many time-consuming tasks such as data transformation, data cleaning, and data visualization. Employees and management can spend time on more value-adding activities instead of these activities that eventually contribute to the productivity of the business. You can incorporate data analytics software to explore potential growth markets or identify areas of weakness within the company by micro-analyzing the data. You can enhance your profitability by optimizing the processes, reducing extra and unnecessary expenses, and eliminating bottlenecks by analyzing operational data. Another great benefit of this is the personalization and high customer understanding that aid you in choosing the right customer for your business and help you reach the new skies for your business. You can also save your business from fraud and unexpected loss by analyzing past data and identifying the potential risk factors, and future challenges.

In short, data analysis tools empower you to take advantage of data to expand the business, help you make strategic decisions, keep you ahead of the competition, and help your business to grow aggressively. To make help you out in selecting the best data analysis tool, we have penned down a list of 6 free and open-source applications available in the market.

The R Project

This is open-source and free software used for statistical analysis, graphics, and data manipulation. This software is developed in the early 1990s by Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka. To streamline your data analysis needs, R provides you with a wide range of amazing features such as comprehensive graphical and statistical techniques, time series analysis, clustering, hypothesis analysis, and linear and non-linear modeling. R has a very large active user community and supports many statistical packages and libraries. Apart from multiple built-in features for data manipulation, R also lets users write scripts and custom-create tasks. To provide users with interactive visualization, this tool has plenty of packages and plotting functions. For a detailed, visually pleasing, and high-quality graphical representation of data, users are provided with fine-tuning and high customization options. Powerful features, extensive statistical capabilities, vibrant and active community, user-friendly interface, and enhanced package ecosystem make it a favorable option amongst users.

Get it now from https://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/fedora

KNIME

Konstanz Information Miner is another amazing free and open-source platform that enables users to create data workflows for data analysis, modeling, and manipulation. It was created in 2004 for researchers and scientists to aid them in complex analytical tasks but eventually reformed and gained popularity as a comprehensive data analysis tool. KNIME enables users to create workflow data by representing each analytical step at a node and connecting different nodes to create a correlation that can easily be presented on the canvas. It has plenty of features to offer including the provision of support for different file formats, aggregation, joining, filtration, and data transformation. Users can also assess model performance, perform feature selection, and evaluate predictive models. It also empowers users to incorporate ad-ons and external tools that can enhance the functionality of the tool. Industries like healthcare, manufacturing, data science, and finance make use of this tool because of its flexibility, extensibility, and friendly user interface.

Get it now from https://www.knime.com/downloads

Orange

Orange is a powerful data mining and analyzing tool that enables users with a visual programming interface. It was majorly aimed at the teaching purposes of the non-experts in the late 1990s, but its remarkable features grew the popularity of the tool and it emerged as a comprehensive tool for the users. This tool represents data in the form of widgets and these widgets combine to create the data workflow enabling users to manipulate, visualize, and analyze the data. Orange provides a lot of visually interactive features that allow users to create a relation and patterns within data using histograms, scatter plots, box plates, and bar charts. This platform empowers new bees to learn by providing extensive documentation and educational resources. Also, users can enhance the functionality by adding extensions or creating their own. Orange has a strong and active user base in the research, education, machine learning, and academic field.

Get it now from https://orangedatamining.com/download/#linux

WEKA

Waikato Environmental for Knowledge Analysis is a free and open-source data-analyzing tool that aids its users with data mining and prediction by providing them with a remarkable collection of tools and powerful features. It is written in Java, developed in 1990s for the research and educational purposes, and now has become a worldwide used comprehensive tool. Its graphical user interface empowers users to preprocess data, visualize the results, apply different algorithms, evaluate various models, and load datasets. Before analyzing the data, it preprocesses it by using different techniques including cleaning, discretization, normalization, handling missing values, and selection. This tool is perfect for a newbie to an expert user and is the favorite because of its simplicity and versatility.

Get it now from https://snapcraft.io/weka

GNU Octave

GNU is a heavy-duty tool aimed at expert users and aids in scientific computing and numerical computations. If you are a MATLAB user then your transition between the two software would be quite easy since they share the same code, syntax, and a lot of major functionalities. It helps you solve eigenvalue decomposition, singular value decomposition, optimization, linear system, and numerical integration by providing support for matrix and vector operations. It enables users to visualize and plot data by incorporating features like 2D and 3D graphical representation, histograms, scatter plots, bar charts, and many more. Also, it let users edit the plot as per their liking, add titles, labels, and annotations, and save them in multiple formats.

Get it now from https://octave.org/download

Apache Hadoop

If you require software to analyze the data across clustered computers, distributed storage, or large dataset the Hadoop is the solution you need. To ensure high reliability and efficiency, Hadoop replicates data blocks in different nodes and provides users with fault tolerance. It also offers multiple data processing frameworks apart from MapReduce so that a large amount of data can be processed without causing any havoc. It has truly changed the game by providing a cost-effective, scalable, and distributed platform to analyze huge data.

Get it now from https://downloads.apache.org/hadoop/common/

Closing Remarks

In today’s business landscape, data-analyzing tools are a necessity that enables us to explore the full potential of data and gain a competitive advantage. They help you out in making informed decisions, predictive models for future strategic decision-making, and correlating trends and patterns. In this discussion, we have explored the top 6 free and open-source data-analyzing tools that will surely help you unlock the potential of your data.