Top 10 Alternatives to Power BI:
Free and Paid (2024)

If you’re on the hunt for the best BI platform out there, try out Tableau. Launched in 2003, Tableau is known as the “gold standard” in data visualization.

When compared with Power BI, Tableau has a great edge in terms of data visualization which can be seen in areas like user-interface, data exploration, interactive visuals, deployment, and others.

Add to it the fact that Tableau’s community is massive with hosted conferences year-round. With this level of interaction with its audience, Tableau surely knows its users’ needs and wants.

Tableau has lots of products under its wings depending on the use — for individuals, teams and organizations, or embedded analytics.

Zoho may be a familiar name to you as they’ve been a threat to Google ever since they started.

Complete with its own set of different tools and services, Zoho relaunched its BI tool as Zoho Analytics from its former name, Zoho Reports.

With a “Very Good” rating on most review sites, Zoho Analytics is easy to learn perfect for new BI users and analysts.

Sisense is one of the top BI tools in the market with lots of rewards like the “Best Business Intelligence Software 2019 Award” given by Finances Online.

In addition, Sisense is being used by lots of companies from startups to Fortune 500 including Sony, ESPN, Comcast, NASDAQ, and others.

Sisense is also the first tool to offer a “full-stack” start-to-finish solution from an integrated database to analytics and visualization tools.

One of the reasons why big companies love Sisense is its ElastiCube interface which lets it connect with any data source through complex data mashups.

Qlik Sense (and its lesser version, Qlik View) is a data analytics platform with an associative analytics engine designed for everyone — executives, managers, decision-makers, analysts, etc.

For 9 years, Qlik retained its spot as a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for analytics and business intelligence.

Qlik has a so-called “Associative Data Indexing Engine” which helps you consolidate your data, take a deep analysis, and give you insights so you can make better business decisions.

With Qlik, you’ll also see data that are usually not reported or shown in some query-based tools. Combine this with AI-powered insight suggestions and automation and you’ll surely make fresh discoveries as well as unexpected insights.

IBM has been with us ever since 1928 so it’s unsurprising to see their BI tool entry on the list.

IBM Cognos Analytics has your back on the entire analytics cycle — from discovery to predictive analysis.

One of the best features of IBM Cognos is its AI-assisted data preparation. With this, you’re able to collect your data from different data sources and then clean and combine them into one.

And because we know that IBM makes computers, you can take into heart their promise of data protection where you can control who has access to your sensitive information.

SAS has been in the analytics industry for more than 40 years. As of 2018 Fortune Global, 92 of the top 100 companies are using SAS.

SAS came from “Statistical Analysis System” which was a program that resulted from the absence of computerized statistics program to analyze large amounts of agricultural data in 1966.

As for their tool, SAS BI could take care of your BI needs like visual data exploration, easy analytics, interactive reporting and dashboards, and collaboration.

Behind the scenes, SAS has algorithms that would help you detect significant and relevant data complete with visualizations to help you assess the findings.

Infor Birst is another reliable business intelligence and analytics tool designed to cater to your querying and end-user data visualization needs.

One of the things that Birtst does best is managing raw data and convert it using the ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) process. The data will then be ready for deep analysis and reporting.

With Birst, it’s also possible for you to establish real-time connections to different databases or model your data directly on the tool itself.

Lots of Birst users applaud the app’s design that follows the Kimball methodology for dimensional modeling which makes the dimensional modeling easier to understand.

Chartio is a powerful analytics tool that empowers everyone to explore and discover their own insights.

Lots of popular companies like Trustpilot, Squarespace, Udemy, Prezi, and others are among Chartio’s customers. Also, Chartio is a world leader for self-service BI with lots of rewards from companies like G2, one of the world’s largest tech marketplace.

Chartio is perfect for first-time BI tool users as the tool is easy to use, navigate, and learn. Nothing could be easier than a drag-and-drop navigation interface, is there?

You can use Chartio with or without data warehouse storage. The tool itself allows you to switch storage as much as you need. This makes process automation easier without manually planning the reports.

Surprised to find Excel in here? It’s only natural to include Microsoft Excel here. After all, Power BI was inspired by Excel.

Also, Excel has some of the components of Power BI like:

• Power Map (for immersive 3D geospatial maps)
• Power Pivot (for creating memory tabular data)
• Power View (for graphs and charts creation)

All that power means Excel could also be a BI tool. With more than 400 functions, Excel is great for quick computations and analysis.

Aside from BI functions, Excel is kind of an all-around spreadsheet tool that offers you more freedom over what you can do than your usual BI tool.

Unfortunately, though Excel has advanced plotting and charting features, it’s nowhere near the quality of visuals you see on BI tools like Power BI.

Though placed last, Looker isn’t any bit of a “least” compared to any in this list. Looker is one of the most popular BI products out there and is preferred by more than 700 companies worldwide.

Among the awards received by Looker include “Industry Excellency Award”, “2019 Top 50 Fastest-Growing Products”, “G2 Crowd Leader”, and even “Award for Solution Innovation” given by Google Cloud Platform.

Looker has robust features with great data exploration capability. It’s also easy to use with a web-based interface where you can do your reports and share them with your organization.

Also, Looker can analyze both web-hosted and SQL information. You can also design visuals through code and make them more complex.

Power BI is great if your team is already on the Microsoft ecosystem using tools and apps under its wings. At the same time, there are lots of alternatives out there you can try ranging from free to expensive and basic to advanced.