Key takeaways
Depending on your needs, you may choose from various versions of business intelligence (BI) software as alternatives to Microsoft’s Power BI.
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Microsoft Power BI is a business intelligence software tool that lets you connect multiple data sources to create interactive and informative insights.
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Some other popular business intelligence tools include Salesforce Tableau, IBM Cognos Analytics, and Google Charts.
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You can leverage BI tools to extract insights from your business data and create visualizations for sharing.
Explore Power BI, including its key features and uses, and then discover some alternatives to Power BI and how they compare to find the best software for your requirements. If you’re ready to strengthen your business intelligence skills, consider the Google Business Intelligence Professional Certificate. In this four-course series, you can learn in-demand skills like data modeling, data visualization, and dashboarding and reporting. Upon completion, you’ll earn a shareable certificate to display on your resume or LinkedIn profile.
What is Power BI?
Microsoft Power BI is a business intelligence software tool that lets you connect multiple data sources to create interactive and informative insights. In general, business intelligence (BI) refers to tools or software that handle data from your business and give you the functionality to generate clean and presentable visualizations, such as graphs or dashboards. A key benefit of business intelligence software is its ability to wrangle various data sources, even semi-structured or unstructured, such as social media, and provide a platform to analyze these data sets.
Power BI effectively provides these key functionalities and enables your team to extract meaningful insights about your data from unrelated sources. The three basic components available within Power BI are:
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Power BI Desktop: The Windows application of Power BI available on your desktop
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Power BI service: A software as a service (SaaS) application and software available online
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Power BI mobile apps: Mobile applications from Power BI available on Apple iOS, Android, and Windows
With these three vital elements of Power BI, you can build, edit, and share your insights using dashboards, reports, and visualizations. Power BI also lets you store your data sets and visualizations on your servers.
Read more:What Is Power BI? What It Is, How It’s Used, and More
Features of Power BI
Beyond combining multiple data sets and building visualizations to add to dashboards, Power BI has additional features to explore. You can use the filtration feature, a part of Power Query within Power BI, to filter your information to the exact data you want to showcase, which you can then present on a page, as a report, or in a visual format. Another valuable feature of Power BI is that it automatically refreshes your data sets with new information while updating your dashboards, meaning your insightful charts and graphs have the most recent information.
Power BI has pros and cons, including not requiring coding knowledge but being slow to load large data sets, which you should consider when selecting business intelligence software.
Some of the relevant pros of Power BI include:
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Intuitive and does not require in-depth coding or programming knowledge
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Inexpensive compared to other alternatives
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Allows you and your organization to improve your business intelligence
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Features the ability to integrate with Microsoft applications as well as third-party apps
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Allows you to see the historical changes made to your data sets
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Provides users of other Microsoft software a recognizable layout and format
The cons of Power BI as a business intelligence software include:
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More extensive data sets may take a long time to load
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A large variety of options and features, which makes it hard to master
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Difficulties with handling massive amounts of data at once
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Hard to understand which feature of Power BI to use for your purposes
What is Power BI used for?
The uses of Power BI, from checking sales quotas to creating visuals, vary depending on your type of role and your goals for using the software. For example, key decision-makers may seek to access Power BI to view only a completed dashboard. At the same time, an analyst may need to work with the data to create a report on Power BI Desktop. Three of the top uses of Power BI include the following:
Dashboards
Dashboards allow you to showcase insights and answer why your data sets are essential to drive business decisions. Configured on one page, dashboards allow you to combine multiple graphs or charts you have built into one view, telling a story with your findings and presenting impactful metrics to your team.
Integrations
Since Power BI comes from Microsoft, you can easily integrate your work with various other Microsoft applications, such as Excel, Teams, or PowerPoint, with only a few clicks. Another critical integration option is Power Automate, a relatively new feature released in 2021 that helps automate and optimize business processes. Beyond other Microsoft products, Power BI can also integrate with on-premise applications you use and third-party cloud services.
Power Query
Since Power BI commonly handles large sets of diverse data, being able to run queries on this data is vital. Power Query gives you the ability, through the Power Query Editor, to transform, edit, and cleanse your various sources of data before working with them in Power BI to create visualizations. The design allows beginners to find insights into their data through its Q&A functionality.
9 Microsoft Power BI alternatives
Depending on the attributes you are looking for in a potential business intelligence software, such as integration options or capabilities, various alternatives exist to Power BI. Exploring similar products allows you to determine the right choice for your situation. Below are descriptions of nine of the top Power BI alternatives available today.
1. Salesforce Tableau
Tableau features many key functionalities behind modern business intelligence software, such as transforming data sets, creating visualizations, and building dashboards to showcase critical insights to drive business decisions. Tableau emphasizes making its product user-friendly to enable professionals at all levels to gain insights from their data. Additionally, regarding simplicity, Tableau utilizes a drag-and-drop feature to make creating visualizations intuitive for all users.
Pricing: In addition to the free version of Tableau, the basic license costs $35 per month for each user [1].
2. Qlik Sense
Qlik allows you to work with your data on its associative engine throughout your company, on personal devices, in your applications, or even within the cloud. Qlik’s business intelligence software, Qlik Sense Enterprise, provides self-service data visualization while featuring guided and embedded analytics to help you accomplish any business case you need to. A few of Qlik Sense’s additional features include artificial intelligence (AI) insights and options for sharing your insights throughout your organization.
Pricing: The standard monthly fee is $825 per month for each user, with a 10-user minimum [2].
3. IBM Cognos Analytics
The IBM Cognos Analytics business intelligence offering combines many of the features you need, including reporting, dashboards, and modeling, into one product. A few of the advanced features include artificial intelligence (AI) to optimize your data, automated tools to identify trends, data protection functionality, and options to share your visualizations through email, the mobile app, or Slack.
Pricing: The standard plan option is $11.25 per monthly user [3].
4. SAP BusinessObjects BI suite
SAP BusinessObjects BI suite is a centralized tool and analytics platform offering enhanced user autonomy, real-time functionality, and the ability to scale your user base efficiently. This software features a robust reporting analytics offering, providing you with ad-hoc reporting capabilities and an enterprise reporting system. It also has a role-based dashboard feature that enables you to customize what information different users receive and when.
Pricing: Pricing information is only available after requesting a quote.
5. Amazon Quick Sight
Amazon Quick Sight allows you to use natural language queries to create visualizations and reports, which you can share throughout your business. It can also generate executive summaries for your data, enabling you to grasp its contents and critical insights. You can also build and share paginated reports with other users.
Pricing: The basic package without an annual commitment is $24 per month for each “Author,” someone who can access all the program’s features, while each “Reader” costs $3 per month [4].
6. Strategy One (formerly MicroStrategy)
Strategy One utilizes AI to improve user experience (UX) and elevate your audience’s engagement. Its emphasis on UX is a key differentiating factor for Strategy One from its alternatives. Strategy One also has cloud-native technologies, containerization features, and an AI chatbot named “Auto” to help you conduct business intelligence analysis.
Pricing: Pricing starts at $13 per month per user [5].
7. Datawrapper
Datawrapper enables you to create advanced visualizations from your data sets, such as charts, tables, and maps. It also focuses on being user-friendly, featuring a simple process to upload your data and begin generating visualizations. Additional key features include live updating, no limit on the number of visualizations you can create, multiple export options, and the ability to customize your style through a set theme.
Pricing: In addition to the free version, the next package costs $599 monthly and includes 10 user licenses [6].
8. Google Charts
Like Datawrapper, Google Charts focuses on creating data visualizations within business intelligence. Google Charts features a robust gallery of charts and graphs to choose from to begin your visualization creation, an extensive list of customization options, interactive dashboards, and the ability to update your data in real time.
Pricing: Free
9. Zoho Analytics
As a business intelligence software, Zoho Analytics is easy to learn. It offers a free option if you seek a business intelligence tool to try or use as an entrepreneur. Within Zoho, you can access many cool features, such as AI, predictive analytics, and the ability to create as many reports as you need without a limit.
Pricing: Beyond the free introductory plan, the base plan for Zoho Analytics is $48 per month for five users [7].
What is the Google Power BI equivalent?
In addition to the free Google Charts, Google also offers Looker Studio, which integrates with Google Data Studio. This cloud-based platform offers self-service business intelligence, including the ability to develop engaging data visualizations, transform data into key business metrics, and create shareable charts and graphs. Looker Studio is free for basic access and $9 per month, per project, per user if you upgrade to Looker Studio Pro [8].
Explore our free business intelligence resources
Get insights into in-demand skills and career trends by subscribing to our LinkedIn newsletter, Career Chat. Then explore these additional business intelligence resources:
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Watch on YouTube:Data Careers Explained: BI vs Data Analysis vs Analytics
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Bookmark this glossary:Data Analysis Terms & Definitions
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Learn from an expert:Business Intelligence Analysts Explained: Duties + Skills
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Article sources
1.
Tableau. “Product and Pricing Selector, https://www.tableau.com/product-and-pricing-selector.” Accessed March 9, 2026.
Updated on Mar 14, 2026
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