Comparison Matrix
Founded at
Headquarter
Cloud Compatibility
Pricing Plans
Pros
Cons
Pricing
Structure
Compute
cost
Scalability
Ease of use
Real-time data processing
Partner ecosystem
Customer support
User access control
Performance
Cost management
Other features
Pricing
Ease of use for power users & developers
Ease of use for business users
Visualizations
Embedded dashboards
Cloud compatibility
Support
Notifications
Mobile friendly
Preset
Good for SMB
Azure, AWS, GCP and custom
Email, slack
Power BI
Good for SMB to mid-market
Mainly Azure
Email, teams
Lightdash
Good for SMB to mid-market
Azure, AWS, GCP
Email, teams
Sigma
Good for mid-market
Azure, AWS, GCP and custom
Email, slack
Looker
Good for mid-market
GCP
Email, teams
Preset
Preset is built on the concept of datasets. These datasets are enriched tabular structures that manifest as physical tables with extra semantics and metadata. What this means is that anyone in the organization, including data teams and business users, can query and explore dashboards built from common datasets. These datasets are curated with metrics such as calculations and table aggregations, which are always up-to-date.
Founded at
Headquarter
Cloud Compatibility
Pricing Plans
Free for up to 5 users;
Professional Plan at $30/user/month;
Annual Enterprise Contracts Available
Our Recommendation
Use Preset if ...
- You want to build dynamic and beautiful dashboards quickly.
- Your company have small team of 10-20 users with budget ~$500/month.
Pros
Beautiful charts. 40 pre-installed visualization and CSS templates for custom theming.
dbt integration & Preset semantic layer for last-mile SQL transformation.
Built-in SQL Editor.
Cons
Limited filtering capabilities comparing to other tools, for example, limited customization for date range filter.
No support for advanced data analytics such as machine learning and predictive analytics.
User Friendly Dashboards
Preset provides a clean, modern, and customizable user interface and dashboard that are user-friendly and easy to navigate. The dashboard is highly interactive, enabling users to click on any widget to access additional information or take action.
Embedded Dashboards
You can utilize the Superset Embedded SDK to embed your Preset dashboards and analytics within your own applications. A Preset guest token allows your users to access embedded Preset resources, such as dashboards, without the need to log in to Preset as usual. Please note that embedded features come with separate pricing and require annual commitments.
Data Modelling
You can manipulate your data by:
Using Preset’s built-in SQL editor to create virtual datasets by treating the results of a SQL query as a table.
Using Preset’s Datasets feature to change the data type of the data columns and add calculated metrics with SQL or formulas.
Cross Filtering
Cross-filtering feature allows you to filter data from multiple charts at the same time
Filters Scoping
Select specific Charts or Dashboard that will be affected by a specific filter.
Drill to Details
When you want to explore the underlying data of a specific value or a set of values on the chart, for example, all columns in the dataset for rows filtered to the selected values, you can use the Drill to Detail By functionality.
Reports
Reports are snapshots of your data that can be scheduled to be delivered on a regular basis. Reports can be sent via email or Slack, and they can include charts, tables, and text.
Alerts
Alerts are notifications that are sent when a specific condition is met. For example, you could create an alert to be sent when the number of failed login attempts reaches a certain threshold. Alerts can be sent via email, Slack, or SMS.
Pricing
Structure
Compute
cost
Scalability
Ease of use
Real-time data processing
Partner ecosystem
Customer support
User access control
Performance
Cost management
Other features
Pricing
Ease of use for power users & developers
Ease of use for business users
Visualizations
Embedded dashboards
Cloud compatibility
Support
Notifications
Mobile friendly
Power BI
Power BI is a unified, scalable platform for self-service and enterprise business intelligence (BI). Connect to and visualize any data, and seamlessly infuse the visuals into the apps you use every day. Power BI offers a range of features and functionalities including a marketplace for third-party visualisations, data shaping and cleaning tools, self-service exploration and collaboration features, proactive monitoring and alerts, Azure machine learning and many more.
Founded at
Headquarter
Cloud Compatibility
Pricing Plans
Power BI Pro Plan at $10/user/month;
Premium Plan at $20/user/month;
Annual Enterprise Contracts Available
Our Recommendation
Use Power BI if ...
- Your organization relies heavily on Microsoft products like Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics 365. Power BI seamlessly integrates with these platforms, which enables you to leverage your existing infrastructure efficiently.
- You want to uncover insights faster with Copilot in Power BI. You can describe what you need and Copilot will analyzes, pulls, and visualizes the information.
Pros
Ease of collaboration in a Microsoft-powered environment where reports and dashboards are interactive and can be published and shared with a larger audience.
It offers a wide range of visualizations and customization options, including comparison, correlation, distribution, ranking, and more.
Cons
There is a limit of 1 million rows returned on any query.
When data changes, you have to refresh to display the latest data, as Power BI utilizes a lot of caching.
Non-consistency in visuals may occur when data changes; different visuals on the same page or different pages can show varying results. Refreshing all visuals corrects this problem.
Intelligent Visuals
Power BI is one of the best tools when it comes to the customization functionalities of your visualizations and dashboards With the launch of Copilot, you can simply describe the visuals and insights you’re looking for, and Copilot will do the rest, which leads to faster insights.You can experience an interactive Power BI dashboard and try for yourself.
Embedded Dashboards
You can use Power BI REST APIs and Client APIs to embed your Power BI dashboards and analytics in your own applications. Depending on your hosting region and node type, embedded dashboards starts at $700/month, see detailed price here.
You can check the embedded capabilities in this sandbox.
Data Modelling
You can manipulate your data by :
Create and manage relationships between tables manually or automatically though auto detect.
Utilizing Data analysis expressions (DAX), which is a library of functions and operators, to perform advanced calculations and queries on data in related tables and columns.
Drill down to row level data
You can drill-down, drill-up, and expand to add another hierarchy level to the current view. You can also export the raw data into tables for further analysis.
Cross-Filtering and Cross-Highlighting
Selecting a data point in one visual on a report page will cross-filter or cross-highlight the other visuals on the page. Cross-filtering removes data that doesn't apply, and cross-highlight retains all the original data points but dims the portion that doesn't apply to your selection.
Industry-leading AI
Now with Copilot and Power BI, non-technical users can just describe their needs and Copilot can automatically create the reports, and you can ask any deep dive questions in chatbot.
“Get Insights” button
Power BI allows you to run insights on the entire dataset or on a specific report with just one button click and conveniently pin the insight charts to the dashboard.
Pricing
Structure
Compute
cost
Scalability
Ease of use
Real-time data processing
Partner ecosystem
Customer support
User access control
Performance
Cost management
Other features
Pricing
Ease of use for power users & developers
Ease of use for business users
Visualizations
Embedded dashboards
Cloud compatibility
Support
Notifications
Mobile friendly
Lightdash
Power BI is a unified, scalable platform for self-service and enterprise business intelligence (BI). Connect to and visualize any data, and seamlessly infuse the visuals into the apps you use every day. Power BI offers a range of features and functionalities including a marketplace for third-party visualisations, data shaping and cleaning tools, self-service exploration and collaboration features, proactive monitoring and alerts, Azure machine learning and many more.
Founded at
Headquarter
Cloud Compatibility
Pricing Plans
Free if you host on your own;
Cloud version starts at $400/month;
Annual Enterprise Contracts Available
Our Recommendation
Use Power BI if ...
- Your organization relies heavily on Microsoft products like Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics 365. Power BI seamlessly integrates with these platforms, which enables you to leverage your existing infrastructure efficiently.
- You want to uncover insights faster with Copilot in Power BI. You can describe what you need and Copilot will analyzes, pulls, and visualizes the information.
Pros
SQL-first approach, which is developer-friendly.
Git-Based Version Control.
Lightweight and easy setup.
Granular data access control (user permissions at the table and column levels, granting appropriate privileges to different user roles).
Open-source customizability.
Cons
Limited security and governance features compared to other tools.
Scalability and performance may not be on par with some commercial BI tools specifically designed for handling large volumes of data and complex analytics workloads.
Limited visualization and customization capabilities.
SQL-First Approach
Lightdash allows users to use their favourite text editor and test changes in a sandbox before merging to production. You can also use live previews and development environments to speed up our development workflow.
You can experience an interactive Lightdash Marketing dashboard to try it out yourself.
Using DBT for modelling
In Lightdash, everything you need for BI is written as code in your dbt project. You can use dbt to transform all of the data from your data warehouse, then use Lightdash to explore the data. To get a model in dbt Lightdash-ready, you need to define all of the columns that you want to explore in Lightdash and then test them out in a Lightdash preview environment.
Self-serve exploration
Anyone can get to the right answers quickly using pre-built metrics can get to the right answers fast using pre-built metrics. Define your business metrics once and make it available everywhere for your whole team to use. Lightdash offers powerful analytics capabilities, including the ability to perform advanced calculations and create custom metrics. Users can also create custom data pipelines to transform and clean data before it is visualized.
Using Tables and the Explore view
A Table is the main starting point for exploring data in Lightdash. It contains a group of related dbt models, dimensions, and metrics. You can explore tables, under table view.
Data drill down and Cross-Filtering
It also have the most frequently used features, such as Viewing the underlying data and cross-filtering. It also enables us to implement chart-to-dashboard by using a data point on a chart.
Share insights with your team
You can share a URL to a 'work-in-progress' data exploration or share a link to a saved chart or Download results as a .csv or a .png of the chart.
Personal access tokens & Whitelisting email domains
You can create a personal access token (PAT) to authenticate in the CLI or with the API to provide additional security. Also. organization admins can add allowed email domains to their organization settings so that anyone with those email domains can automatically join their organization (without explicitly inviting them).
Pricing
Structure
Compute
cost
Scalability
Ease of use
Real-time data processing
Partner ecosystem
Customer support
User access control
Performance
Cost management
Other features
Pricing
Ease of use for power users & developers
Ease of use for business users
Visualizations
Embedded dashboards
Cloud compatibility
Support
Notifications
Mobile friendly
Sigma
Sigma Computing is a cloud analytics platform that provides instant access to cloud data warehouses through a familiar spreadsheet interface. It enables live data exploration from various sources, promotes collaborative analytics, supports SQL queries, allows for embedded analytics, offers robust data modeling and transformation capabilities, and empowers self-service analytics. Sigma also provides great customer support, training resources, and community channels for users.
Founded at
Headquarter
Cloud Compatibility
Pricing Plans
Annual Enterprise Contracts
with 14-Day free trial
Our Recommendation
Use Sigma if ...
- Your business teams are mostly familiar with excel, and need to export data into Excel or Google Sheet for their own analysis.
- Your data team never leaves cloud data warehouse and want to do explorative analysis of large amount of data in seconds.
- You want to enable your clients/customers to perform self-serve analysis in an embedded dashboard.
Pros
Works with billions of rows of data quickly.
Empowers self service analytics via the spreadsheet interface and allows business users to drill down to exact row level data.
Easy data manipulation via familiar Excel formula and built in formula to parse JSON in seconds. You can also easily write the transformations back to your data warehouse.
Users can collaborate via the Live edit collaboration feature, like editing on Google Sheet together.
Cons
Limited visualization options comparing to other BI tools like Tableau.
No Python or R notebook integrations.
Spreadsheet-like UI
Sigma is built for modern cloud data warehouse with your familiar spreadsheet-like UI and your most frequently used features, such as excel formula and pivot tables to manipulate data. You can experience an interactive Sigma dashboard to try it out yourself.
Embedded Dashboards
Sigma allows you to provide your customers with easy self-serve access to their data within your product via embedded dashboards. You can customize the dashboard theme, authenticate your customers using existing sign-on framework, and setup row-level security for the embedded dashboards.
Data Modelling
You can manipulate your raw data, such as changing data type, format, and parse out JSON easily via Sigma’s Datasets feature. Create a new calculated field simply by inserting a column and write Excel formula.
Dataset used to empower workbooks (i.e. dashboards) and updates to the dataset is cascaded to all workbooks built on it. You can also connect directly to dbt to centralize your business logic, and view the metadata for the dbt job, columns, and tables.
“Bringing your own data” with Input Table
When your data is not in the data warehouse, such as finance forecast, you can use Input Tables to integrate new data entries into your analysis. Another useful use case of input table is to dynamically updating calculations in Sigma and creating a sample scenario model.
Drill down to row level data
For business users, they can check the details behind the rolled-up data by drilling all the way to the specific transaction or item.
Dynamic dataset parameters & controls
Creating dataset parameters and referencing them allows you to dynamically replace values used in calculations, which allows you to ask the all-important “what if” from your data.
Show additional data in tooltip
You can customize the content of the data point tooltips and add additional fields to provide more information.
Workbook collaboration with Live Edit
Teams can work together on workbook drafts real-time, with all editors seeing and contributing to one live draft.
Taking notes and leave comments
You can add comments, notes, and analysis right alongside your charts and data so you never have to wonder “What did we do here?” again.
Pricing
Structure
Compute
cost
Scalability
Ease of use
Real-time data processing
Partner ecosystem
Customer support
User access control
Performance
Cost management
Other features
Pricing
Ease of use for power users & developers
Ease of use for business users
Visualizations
Embedded dashboards
Cloud compatibility
Support
Notifications
Mobile friendly
Looker
Looker is a comprehensive enterprise platform designed for business intelligence, data applications, and embedded analytics. It enables users to access, analyze, and act on the up-to-date, trusted version of their data and deliver trusted data experiences at scale, from the cloud of their choice—empowering them with real-time insights.
Founded at
Headquarter
Cloud Compatibility
Pricing Plans
Pay as you go at $5000/month;
Annual Enterprise Contracts Available
Our Recommendation
Use Looker if ...
- You are on Google ecosystem. You can use your Google credits for Looker license.
- You are an enterprise prioritizing data governance, scalability, and advanced data modeling capabilities.
- You are seeking robust self-serve data exploration capabilities for your business users.
Pros
A single source of truth for business metrics with Looker’s semantic layer powered by LookML, which is Looker’s own SQL-based modeling language.
Looker excels in providing centralized data governance, allowing administrators to manage data access and control permissions to the most granular levels.
User friendly for business users to do self-service data explorations.
Cons
Initial setup process takes long time and effort.
Learning curve for developers to pickup and implement LookML across the organization.
The tool can slow down for large and complex queries, sometimes takes long time to load dashboards.
Poor mobile experience.
Self-serve Explorations
Looker's direct connection to live, row-level data enables you to dig deeper into the metrics and gain a deeper understanding of the underlying "why". Business users can access “Explores”, which are created and verified by the data team, ensuring everyone is looking at metrics with the same definitions.
Embedded Dashboards
Looker’s embedded dashboards works with public embedding and private embedding via Looker login, Google OAuth, OpenID Connect, or even SSO. Lookers offers extensive customization of the embedded dashboard, granular access and data control, and you can even configure the session-level security such as how long users can stay logged in.You can experience a looker embedded dashboard at Atom Fashion (requires Google account to log in).
Data Modelling
Looker's data modeling relies on LookML, the Looker Modeling Language. LookML is used to create semantic data models, describing dimensions, aggregates, calculations, and data relationships in your SQL database. By writing a LookML model, Looker constructs SQL queries tailored to a specific database, facilitating efficient data analysis and exploration.
Your Looker data model exists in two states: Production Mode and Development Mode.
Development Mode
Development Mode lets you make changes to LookML files and to preview how they will affect content on your instance. The changes you make to LookML files in this Mode do not affect the production environment, until they are pushed to the production environment.
Production Mode
Production Mode is the production version of Looker. Everyone using a Looker instance in Production Mode accesses their projects in the same state. Project files are read-only in this mode.
Drill down to row level data
For business users, they can check the details behind the rolled-up data by drilling all the way to the specific transaction or item.
Filters Galore
Offer users the magic of data manipulation with multiple types of filters, providing intuitive and powerful environments for personalized exploration and empowering users to find the information they need independently.
Cross Filtering
Cross-filtering makes it easier and more intuitive for viewers to interact with a dashboard's data and understand how one metric affects another. With cross-filtering, users can click a data point in one dashboard tile to have all dashboard tiles automatically filter on that value.
Threshold based Alerts
The user-friendly alerts available on each tile of a Looker dashboard allow you (and your users) to react to small changes before they become big problems.
Unique Visualization
Different businesses require different visualizations. In the Looker Marketplace there are a host of add-on visualizations, built to fit more custom data needs. And if you want something even more bespoke, you can add custom Javascript visualizations for everyone to leverage.
