Introduction
Power BI has been a leading business intelligence tool, empowering organizations to visualize data, uncover insights, and make informed decisions. Its strong reputation is built on years of innovation, a large user community, and consistent performance across industries. Its rich feature set offers:
- Interactive dashboards and reports.
- Seamless integration with Excel and Azure.
- AI-powered data modeling and analytics.
- Real-time data connectivity.
- Role-based access and data security.
However, as business needs grow more complex, many users encounter limitations, ranging from steep learning curves to performance bottlenecks with large datasets. If you're exploring alternatives, this blog will walk you through the top Power BI alternatives and guide you in selecting the solution that best fits your business goals.
Why consider Power BI alternatives?
While Power BI offers strong analytics capabilities, its cost and limited custom visualizations can be restrictive as business needs grow. The following are some of the reasons to consider Power BI alternatives:
- Cost effectiveness: Power BI’s pricing can become expensive at scale, especially for organizations needing premium features or with large user bases.
- Performance: Users may experience slow performance with large datasets or complex reports, limiting real-time analysis.
- Steep learning curve: The learning curve for Power BI can be steep for non-technical users, making adoption across teams challenging.
- Customization: Power BI offers limited flexibility for creating highly tailored visualizations or embedding fully customized dashboards into applications.
Given these limitations, exploring top Power BI alternatives could be the right strategic move for enhancing your enterprise analytics.
6 best Power BI alternatives
Power BI is a widely recognized business intelligence tool known for its seamless integration with Microsoft products. However, depending on your business-specific needs, some alternatives may offer more suitable solutions. Here are the top six alternatives to Power BI you should explore for your business needs in 2025 and beyond:
Bold BI
Bold BI® is powerful, embedded AI-powered analytics tool that lets you host analytics on your terms—on-premises or in the cloud. It lets you easily embed dashboards into your applications and empowers every user with self-service BI, enhanced by built-in AI insights. For those seeking new analytics features not offered in Power BI or those exploring different solutions, Bold BI stands out as the top alternative to Power BI.
What makes Bold BI different:
- Transparent pricing: Bold BI offers flexible, transparent pricing with unlimited dashboards and no hidden fees. Compare this to Power BI’s increasing pro license costs.
- AI-powered insights: Ask questions in plain language, auto-generate visuals, and build dashboards from prompts without coding—unlike Power BI, which requires semantic models, verified answers, and technical expertise to use Copilot effectively.
- Flexible deployment options: Bold BI offers cloud and on-premises deployment options to meet your security, compliance, and infrastructure needs, unlike Power BI, which restricts deployment to Microsoft Fabric and Azure environments.
- White-label embedded analytics: Bold BI lets you customize dashboards with full branding control, offering a fully resalable experience under your own brand—unlike Power BI, which retains Microsoft branding and lacks full white-label support.
- Secure authentication: Integrate seamlessly with external systems using API key-based authentication—unlike Power BI, which lacks native support and requires additional setup.
- Flexible data refresh: Automatically update dashboards or widgets at custom intervals—every 5 minutes, hourly, or daily—unlike Power BI, which limits refreshes to 8 times daily on the Pro plan and 48 times daily on the Premium plan.
- Easy collaboration: Collaborate with built-in commenting across all Bold BI environments—unlike Power BI Desktop, which doesn’t support comments.
- Customization and embedding capabilities: Embed dashboards and AI insights into your apps effortlessly using JavaScript SDK and REST APIs, compatible with React, Angular, Blazor, and more—unlike Power BI, which ties embedding to Azure and the Microsoft stack with complex token setups.
Explore our comparison page to learn more about why Bold BI is the best alternative to Power BI in 2025. Apart from Power BI, Bold BI also stands out as the best analytics tool in many ways. For more information, refer to our article “How does Bold BI compare to other similar tools?”
Tableau
Tableau is an analytics solution that allows users to explore data interactively, generate insights using AI-powered tools, and embed visualizations into web applications.
Some of the key features that it offers are:
- Agent-powered intelligence: The Tableau Agent fosters human–AI agent collaboration—unlike Power BI’s limited Copilot features.
- Trusted data governance: Ensure data accuracy and control with Tableau’s advanced governance tools—unlike Power BI, which lacks robust content management.
- Deployment freedom: Deploy Tableau on Windows, Linux, on-premises, or any cloud—unlike Power BI, which locks you into Windows and Azure.
Yellowfin BI
Yellowfin is a BI platform that combines data visualization with automated insights and storytelling tools, helping organizations move beyond static dashboards to deliver engaging, narrative-driven analytics experiences.
Its key features include:
- Seamless integration: Embed analytics that look and feel like part of your product to deliver a smooth user experience, unlike Power BI, which often feels bolted-on and retains its branding.
- Customization freedom: Gain full control of the UI with flexible APIs and developer-friendly tools. In Power BI, deeper theming changes can be tedious.
- Transparent pricing: Yellowfin offers predictable pricing models (per user, per unit, revenue share, or fixed) with no hidden fees, unlike Power BI, which charges for computing power and fluctuates with usage spikes.
- Scalable architecture: Built on an open architecture that scales predictably with your business, unlike Power BI’s complex ecosystem, which can lead to high costs and performance challenges.
Sisense
Sisense is an AI-powered analytics platform that empowers businesses to model, visualize, and embed in-context analytics within applications, driving smarter, action-oriented decisions.
Its key highlights include:
- Seamless integration: Enhance reporting and enable effective data management for all users—unlike Power BI, which locks many integrations behind premium connectors at an extra cost.
- Governance controls: Maintain full control with Sisense’s local-first architecture, strict privacy standards, and enterprise-grade governance—unlike Power BI, which requires custom-built components that can delay platform rollout.
- Custom analytics apps: Build fully tailored analytics applications by using Sisense’s APIs and SDKs—unlike Power BI, which often requires advanced coding in DAX, Python, or R to achieve similar flexibility.
Qlik Sense
Qlik Sense uses an associative data model to enable interactive data exploration. It is useful for businesses that analyze complex datasets through intuitive dashboards.
Its selling points include:
- Interactive experience: Enjoy native, intuitive interactivity with Qlik Sense—unlike Power BI, which offers basic interaction and limited exploration.
- Cost transparency: Scale confidently with Qlik Sense’s customizable, capacity-based pricing and no hidden costs—unlike Power BI, where costs rise significantly with scale.
- AI integration: Benefit from Qlik Sense’s built-in AI assistant and natural language capabilities—unlike Power BI, which restricts advanced AI features to costly Fabric subscriptions.
Domo
Domo is a cloud-based business intelligence platform with real-time dashboards and a mobile-first design. Domo’s scalability makes it flexible for medium growing teams.
Its key features include:
- Data integration: Connect to over 1,000 data sources effortlessly with Domo—unlike Power BI, which limits many integrations behind premium connectors at an extra cost.
- Governance: Enable self-service BI with Domo’s built-in governance tools for user management, auditing, and impact analysis—unlike Power BI, which requires custom-built components that can slow down deployment.
- No-code intelligent apps: Build custom low- and no-code applications easily with Domo—unlike Power BI, which often requires advanced coding in DAX, Python, or R to achieve similar functionality.
Exploring these six competitors and alternatives to Power BI gives you a solid starting point to understand what each platform offers, but choosing the right analytics solution goes beyond interactive dashboards and integrations—explore our blog “8 Tips for Choosing the Right BI Tool” to discover how to evaluate BI platform features in the context of your business needs.
Why Bold BI is the best Power BI alternative
Now you have a better understanding of the best Power BI alternative for business intelligence to use for your data visualization and business intelligence needs. Among the various options available in the market, Bold BI® stands out as a compelling alternative that offers a range of features designed to enhance your analytics experience at an affordable, transparent price.
You can explore the Bold BI features page to discover how it matches up against other leading business intelligence platforms or read our article “How does Bold BI compare to other similar tools?” for detailed information.
Ready to see Bold BI in action? Get started with a free trial or book a 30-minute personalized demo to explore how Bold BI can transform your data strategy. If this is your first experience with an analytics platform, Bold BI provides a smooth onboarding process, ensuring you get up and running quickly with expert guidance and support every step of the way.
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