Microsoft Power BI: omnipresent in virtually every organisation. One of the first questions clients ask when we set up a data warehouse is: does it work well with Power BI? Answer: yes, of course! The question is, however, whether Power BI's dominance will last…
There is nothing wrong with Power BI… is there?
Of course, there is much positive to say about Power BI: the desktop application is free, it integrates well into the Microsoft ecosystem, and most things work fine. Moreover, there are many plug-ins enabling you to create virtually any visualisation. The drill-down system (clicking through to analyse individual data points in greater depth) works brilliantly.
However, there are also quite a few things that do not work particularly well. The most well-known: the slowness of the application (also read: how to make Power BI faster). Another is that Power BI requires licences for both publishing and viewing dashboards, making it quickly expensive. Quickly publish a dashboard that can access all (on-premises) data sources? Forget it - that requires a gateway or a (costly) local installation of server software. Geo-data on your dashboard? Possible, provided you meet a whole string of requirements…
One more: automatically update when relevant things change, preferably with only those things that are relevant and changed? It should be possible… but it is very difficult to set up. The biggest annoyance is probably the DAX query language. You need to work with it the moment you have any form of complexity in your data, for example to make year-to-date comparisons. A true nightmare, even for experienced analysts.
All in all, Power BI feels dated. In times of ChatGPT and AI, you expect a more intuitively working application - that things happen more naturally. Alternatives to Power BI are particularly strong in exactly that area.
We highlight one we have high expectations for: Metabase.
Metabase: a serious alternative?
Metabase - we do not mean the company behind Facebook - is a start-up with a product that works exceptionally well. The software leaves all major competitors far behind, certainly in terms of user-friendliness. Here is why:
Making dashboards - why would you? With X-ray, a dashboard creates itself. You click a data source and you get - fully automated - the most important highlights of your datasets. And: linked datasets are immediately included in the analysis.
Example of an automatically generated dashboard. This (fictitious) healthcare institution easily gains insight into time registration. Employees are automatically linked, filters intelligently applied.
Never. Again. DAX. Queries.
Virtually all experienced Power BI users breathe a sigh of relief when we tell them this. Linking data largely happens automatically anyway and - insofar as data needs to be linked or further calculated - via the intuitive interface.
No more DAX queries. You simply click everything together. Complex calculations, such as year-to-date comparisons, work at least as easily.
It is free. Yes, there is a paid version that is interesting for larger organisations. For most organisations, the free version suffices - especially when combined with Datalab Studio, our data warehouse and self-service platform.
Full support for geo-data. WMS, WFS, and even directly importing shapefiles - it is all possible. No more expensive ArcGIS or plugins needed.
Collaboration. Within Power BI you can of course collaborate, but it becomes difficult when multiple people want to work simultaneously on datasets or dashboards. Here you can tell that Metabase was designed in a different era than Power BI.
What is - in our view - the handiest feature of all: alerting and automatically sending reports in a smart way. Most dashboard tools support sending dashboards, manually or automated. Metabase goes a step further. You can set target and alert values. Does a metric you have chosen fall above or below these thresholds? Then you and your colleagues receive a signal: the relevant charts directly in your inbox or via Slack. Of course, also if you simply need to send the key revenue figures to the manager every Friday afternoon or Monday morning.
The future of Power BI
Does this mean Power BI is definitively coming to an end? Certainly not. Microsoft is not standing still and is integrating all sorts of AI into virtually all their programmes (even Paint). This means we will see many of the handy features of Metabase in Power BI in the future too. But it remains clunky: the 'old world' of data analysis must, after all, continue to work with Power BI. The law of the handicap of a head start, in practice.
Many organisations are accustomed to working with Power BI. Convincing IT departments to use something else often meets resistance. That is why we expect Power BI will not leave the stage any time soon.
Increasingly, within data science, you see organisations working technology-agnostically. This creates more room for new technologies, instead of one prescribed, clunky standard solution. In that space, Metabase will certainly flourish…