Serving & Analytics
Data architecture technologies for business intelligence, exploration, and the serving layer where people meet the data.
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The default BI layer of the Microsoft estate
Business Intelligence
Power BI is Microsoft's business intelligence platform — free Windows authoring in Power BI Desktop, publishing and sharing through the Power BI service at a per-user price, and an on-premises Report Server for organisations that cannot publish to the cloud.
Visual analysis as a craft, hosted or on your own servers
Business Intelligence
Tableau is Salesforce's business intelligence platform, licensed by role — Creator, Explorer, Viewer — and deployable either as the hosted Tableau Cloud or as Tableau Server on the customer's own Windows or Linux machines.
BI on a governed semantic model written in code
Business Intelligence
Looker is Google Cloud's business intelligence platform, built around LookML — a version-controlled modelling language in which metrics and joins are defined once and every dashboard, explore, and API call is generated from that definition rather than from ad-hoc SQL.
Serverless BI for the AWS account you already have
Business Intelligence
Amazon Quick Sight — until October 2025, Amazon QuickSight — is AWS's serverless business intelligence service, billed per user or per session, with SPICE, its in-memory engine, caching data for dashboards that must stay fast without hammering the source.
A spreadsheet over the warehouse, with write-back
Business Intelligence
Sigma is a cloud analytics platform whose interface is a spreadsheet: business users pivot, filter, and add formulas against live warehouse tables, with input tables writing values back into the warehouse rather than into a local file.
BI whose metrics live in your dbt project
Business Intelligence
Lightdash is an open-source BI platform that builds its semantic layer directly from a dbt project — dimensions and metrics are declared in the dbt YAML an analytics team already maintains, and every chart and dashboard is generated from those definitions.
Reports written in markdown and SQL, published as a static site
Business Intelligence
Evidence is an MIT-licensed framework that builds business intelligence from plain files: SQL queries and charts are written inside markdown, and the project compiles to a static website that can be deployed anywhere a static site can.
Dashboards that run at OLAP speed, defined in files
Business Intelligence
Rill is an Apache-2.0 BI tool distributed as a single Go binary: metrics and dashboards are defined in SQL and YAML in a local project, served by an embedded DuckDB or a connected ClickHouse, and deployed to Rill Cloud when they are ready to share.
Query, visualise, share — self-hosted and free, with no vendor above it
Business Intelligence
Redash is a BSD-licensed query-and-dashboard tool: analysts write SQL against any connected source, turn results into visualisations, assemble them into dashboards, and share them — running entirely on the team's own infrastructure, with no commercial edition to upgrade to.
Fast, approachable BI for self-serve analytics
Business Intelligence
Metabase is an open-source business intelligence tool focused on quick setup and non-technical self-serve — dashboards, a visual query builder, and native SQL when needed.
Open-source data exploration and visualization at scale
Business Intelligence
Apache Superset is an open-source BI platform with a rich visualization library, SQL IDE, and fine-grained access control, built for customization and larger deployments.