Alternatives
Best Power BI alternatives
Most people leaving Power BI are not leaving over the charts. Copilot is not included in the $14 seat, or in Premium Per User at $24. It needs a Fabric capacity, minimum F2 at $262.80 a month, on top of seats. DAX and a Windows-only Desktop add time on top of that. Here are ten 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 |
|---|---|---|
| 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 |
| Looker Studio | Reporting on Google Ads, Analytics and Sheets with no budget. | Free |
| 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 |
| Sigma | Finance and operations people who work in spreadsheets. | No public pricing |
| ThoughtSpot | Teams who would rather people asked a question than opened a dashboard. | Essentials from $25/user/month, billed annually |
| Hex | Data teams who work in notebooks. | Free Community tier, then $36/editor/month |
| Basedash | Teams buying AI dashboards at enterprise scale. | $1,000/month floor, no smaller tier |
Enterprise BI
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.
Looker Studio
Free- Best for.
- Reporting on Google Ads, Analytics and Sheets with no budget.
- Where it wins.
- Free, with Google sources connected in a couple of clicks.
- What it costs you.
- Thin modelling, and it slows badly once the data is large or needs joining.
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.
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.
Basedash
$1,000/month floor, no smaller tier- Best for.
- Teams buying AI dashboards at enterprise scale.
- Where it wins.
- SSO, SCIM and audit logs on the lowest tier, and it self-hosts.
- What it costs you.
- $1,000 a month floor, with nothing below it.
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.
Hex
Free Community tier, then $36/editor/month- Best for.
- Data teams who work in notebooks.
- Where it wins.
- Python, SQL and no-code cells in one document.
- What it costs you.
- $36 per editor per month after the free tier, and it is built for analysts rather than for the people reading the output.
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.
When to stay with Power BI
- Your company already runs on Microsoft 365, Azure or Fabric.
- You have an analyst who knows DAX, which is not quickly replaced.
- You need enterprise governance and your reporting already sits inside Fabric.
- You have more than a handful of users and $14 a seat is the deciding number.
Questions
What is the cheapest Power BI alternative?
Looker Studio and Apache Superset are free. Metabase is free for unlimited users if you self-host, which means someone runs and upgrades it. Among hosted tools, entry prices here start at $20 a month.
Which alternatives work on a Mac?
All of them. Every tool here runs in a browser. Power BI Desktop, where reports are authored, is Windows only.
Which is easiest for a team with no analyst?
The ones that build from a description rather than a field list, so Flitch or Basedash, and Metabase for simple reporting. The enterprise tools all assume someone whose job is building reports.
Do these connect to the same data as Power BI?
For SQL databases, warehouses, spreadsheets and the usual SaaS tools, yes. The gaps are inside Microsoft: Dataverse, Azure Analysis Services and Excel models.
Can I bring my Power BI reports with me?
No. Reports do not move between tools, because each keeps its model and visuals in its own format. The data moves, and so do the definitions behind it, which is the part worth writing down first.