Alternatives
Best Hex alternatives
Hex is a notebook an analyst writes in and can publish as an app, which is a genuinely good combination. The bill has two parts: $36 an editor a month to start, $75 on Team, then advanced compute charged per minute the kernel runs. Most people looking elsewhere either do not have the analyst Hex assumes, or need the output to reach people who will never open a notebook. Here are eight alternatives, grouped by the job they suit.
How to read this
Flitch publishes this page and is one of the tools on it. Prices are the vendors’ own published figures, and every entry says what the tool costs you as well as what it is good at.
Prices checked
At a glance
| Tool | Best for | Entry price |
|---|---|---|
| Power BI | Companies already running Microsoft 365, Azure or Fabric. | Free account, then $14/user/month paid yearly |
| Tableau | Analysts who want the deepest visual exploration available. | Creator $75/user/month, billed annually |
| Looker | Teams who want every metric defined once and governed. | No public pricing |
| Sigma | Finance and operations people who work in spreadsheets. | No public pricing |
| Flitch | Teams who want dashboards, reports, apps and workflows built from a description. | Free tier, then $20/month |
| Metabase | Teams with an engineer who can run a container. | Free self-hosted, or $90/month + $6/user |
| Apache Superset | Engineering teams who want to run their own BI layer. | Free, self-hosted |
| ThoughtSpot | Teams who would rather people asked a question than opened a dashboard. | Essentials from $25/user/month, billed annually |
Enterprise BI
Power BI
Free account, then $14/user/month paid yearly- Best for.
- Companies already running Microsoft 365, Azure or Fabric.
- Where it wins.
- $14 per user per month paid yearly, the cheapest enterprise BI seat there is.
- What it costs you.
- Copilot is not in that price. It needs a Fabric capacity from $262.80 a month on top of seats, and Desktop is Windows only.
Tableau
Creator $75/user/month, billed annually- Best for.
- Analysts who want the deepest visual exploration available.
- Where it wins.
- More control over how a chart looks and behaves than anything else here.
- What it costs you.
- $75 per creator per month billed annually, and it expects someone whose job is building views.
Looker
No public pricing- Best for.
- Teams who want every metric defined once and governed.
- Where it wins.
- LookML puts definitions in version control, so a number means the same thing in every report.
- What it costs you.
- No public pricing, and LookML is an engineering job to write and then keep current.
ThoughtSpot
Essentials from $25/user/month, billed annually- Best for.
- Teams who would rather people asked a question than opened a dashboard.
- Where it wins.
- Search straight onto a live warehouse, with an agent over it.
- What it costs you.
- From $25 per user per month billed annually, and it needs a modelled warehouse first.
Spreadsheet-style
Sigma
No public pricing- Best for.
- Finance and operations people who work in spreadsheets.
- Where it wins.
- A spreadsheet over the warehouse, and it writes back.
- What it costs you.
- No public pricing, and you need a cloud warehouse before you start.
Built around AI
Flitch
Free tier, then $20/month- Best for.
- Teams who want dashboards, reports, apps and workflows built from a description.
- Where it wins.
- AI on every plan including the free one, and every chart shows the dataset, columns and calculation behind it.
- What it costs you.
- SCIM and running it in your own cloud need an Enterprise agreement, and it does not build an app with its own auth and payments.
Open source and developer-first
Metabase
Free self-hosted, or $90/month + $6/user- Best for.
- Teams with an engineer who can run a container.
- Where it wins.
- Free under AGPL v3 for unlimited users if you self-host. That is a genuine advantage.
- What it costs you.
- Someone deploys it, upgrades it and keeps it up, and AI sits on the paid tiers.
Apache Superset
Free, self-hosted- Best for.
- Engineering teams who want to run their own BI layer.
- Where it wins.
- Free, and running at scale inside large companies.
- What it costs you.
- Standing it up and keeping it current is a real job, and it assumes SQL.
When to stay with Hex
- Your team writes Python, R or SQL and wants to keep doing so.
- The work is analysis rather than reporting: forecasting, clustering, statistics.
- You want a notebook that becomes a shareable app without a rewrite.
- The free Community tier covers what you need.
Questions
What is the best Hex alternative for people who do not write code?
Flitch, which builds a dashboard, report or app from a description, and Metabase, where a question builder covers most reporting. Both put the result in front of people who would never open a notebook.
Is there a free alternative?
Hex’s own Community tier is the most generous free notebook. Outside notebooks, Apache Superset has SQL Lab and Metabase has native queries, both free and self-hosted, and Looker Studio is free and hosted.
Which alternatives run Python?
None of the others treat Python as the authoring language. They generate SQL. If Python is load-bearing, the real choice is Hex against a Jupyter or Databricks deployment you run yourself.
What does compute add to the bill?
Advanced compute is billed per minute of kernel runtime, on top of the editor seat, and your warehouse still charges for the queries. A tool that aggregates in SQL at the source leaves you one line on the invoice rather than three.
Can I publish a Hex app to a client?
You can publish the app, and sharing is bound to seats. Flitch publishes to a link, a password or your own domain with no seat for the reader, which is usually what decides a client-facing report.