In a data-driven age of decision-making, business intelligence has come to spell out business success. Projections compiled by Reuters forecast the business intelligence software market to grow to nearly $30 billion by 2022.
Foremost amongst all these newfangled solutions is the industry leader and stalwart, Microsoft and Power BI. Certainly, the data analysis universe has no dearth of options when it comes to interactive dashboards and rich visualizations for BI reporting.
But Microsoft’s Power BI tool has managed to make a splash across more than just Microsoft-dedicated users. Power BI allows users to transform their data into visually-captivating, compelling, and meaningful information when compiling reports.
Our focus on Power BI is their embedded options. We often find software vendors and partners who are looking to embed rich analytics inside their application, and while they are considering Yurbi, they may already be using Power BI Embedded or considering it as well.
For more discussion on the non-embedded version of Power BI, please visit the blog of our internal user brand, DashboardFox. We go into detail on the Free, Power BI Pro, and Premium offerings here.
To learn more about Power BI Embedded, we are going to break down what it is, the top reasons we find that organizations are looking for an alternative, and suggest 5 (plus 1 bonus option) to consider as an alternative.
What Is Power BI Embedded?
Power BI Embedded is used primarily to embed data within custom applications, for viewing by external users. It’s the only family of SKUs that you can purchase through Azure instead of Microsoft 365.
However, you’re limited because the “App Owns Data,” so you don’t get the use of the Power BI web app, nor can you embed in Microsoft Teams or Sharepoint. That being said, Power BI Embedded capacity is purchased hourly, billed hourly, and paused with no long-term commitments.
This at first glance makes it a good option for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) who are developing an application to take to market, want to use Power BI as the data visualization to add value to their own app, but don’t yet have the monthly revenue stream to support ongoing payment commitments (but read below before you reach this conclusion).
What Are The Top Reasons Businesses are Looking To Replace Power BI Embedded?
Despite the myriad benefits and powerful uses, users and evaluators of Power BI Embedded often begin to look for alternatives.
Despite the power marketing buzz that comes along with any Microsoft product, you may be surprised to know that Power BI in general still has a low market share when comparing to other BI platforms (2.44%).
And this doesn’t take into just the embedded analytics space, but the overall BI space.
Granted Microsoft Power BI is relatively new compared to many in that chart, but here are the top reasons we hear why Power BI Embedded is not a great fit for many ISVs
- Cost
- Complexity
- Privacy and Compliance
- On-Premise Deployment Need
- White Label
For now, we’ll just list these, but in our next article, we’re digging into deeper on why those are the big 5 reasons for Power BI. For this article, let’s get into the alternatives to help with your research.
6 + 1 Best Alternatives to Power BI Embedded
Even though it’s a major player, gaining ground every day, Power BI Embedded does have its work cut out for itself. There are quite a few “competitors,” or, rather, alternatives to its use and functionality that you might consider.
Logi Analytics
One of the top tools for embedding analytics in commercial and enterprise applications is Logi Analytics. Users report that Logi Analytics’ power rests in:
- Quickly being able to create, deploy, and modify analytics content. There’s virtually no learning curve as users can be onboarded, get up, and running in a matter of weeks when using the Logi tool. There are also online “labs” available to help users gain further mastery.
- A virtually endless number of modifiable elements with only a minor level of JavaScript and HTML expertise required
- Its ease of embedding and integrating, using custom fonts and CSS, which make Logi Analytics content look like the user’s own native product
Gooddata
Gooddata is a fantastic tool that allows you to easily access data, create visualizations, and make better decisions overall. It also allows users to distribute and publish this data for viewing among key decision-makers.
The performance of Gooddata is incredibly stable overall and features all the bells and whistles you might expect. These include:
- Custom predictive or prescriptive algorithms
- Drag-and-drop self-service analytics
- Powerful KPI dashboards for individual insights and tools for embedding analytics into process or web, desktop, or mobile applications
- Easily scalable performance in real-time for any number of clients
Yellowfin BI
Yellowfin BI is where analytics hits the road of multiple visualization formats. It’s a unique tool that allows businesses to gain insights and intelligence through data discovery, action-based dashboards, and storytelling (through storyboards), all in one platform.
The Analytics Suite includes five components, to be used separately or together. These include:
- Signals
- Stories
- Dashboards
- Data Analysis
- Data Prep
The platform is flexible enough to be used in many industries, as well as specific roles (such as sales, marketing, and HR). It integrates seamlessly and replaces legacy reporting tools, embeds a modern self-service suite, and ultimately delivers fantastic customer experience.
Microstrategy
MicroStrategy is a great tool if you’re not an IT specialist and you don’t want to rely on IT for analyses and reporting. There’s no complicated code or query language you have to master, just a simple, easy-to-use, click-and-drag functionality, and built-in widgets.
MicroStrategy can be deployed in almost any setting, transferring data from any source, such as relational databases, cloud, enterprise applications, and even Big Data and Hadoop. The analytics platform works in a variety of interfaces, such as Web, email, and Microsoft Office.
It’s also mobile-friendly, which means that users can access and create analyses, edit reports, and share BI data from smartphones and tablets. Some of the perks include:
- The ability to access your data offline
- Security and governance
- Being able to experience the full mobile experience, such as access to GPS
- Downloading big data to devices during off-performance hours
Exago BI
Exago BI is another embedded BI solution developed specifically for non-developers. It’s browser-based, so it doesn’t require downloads to access the tool’s full functionality. It has two main benefits: ease of use and flexibility.
As a user, Exago BI helps you feel like a technical data expert. You can create and interact with tabular reports and dashboards — but you don’t have to necessarily understand the data structure.
Application administrators can also personalize the Exago BI interface to suit an individual user’s capabilities. However, you can still attenuate the platform to allow for very granular control over both the data and the environment. What’s more, Exago BI is totally white-label, as all application CSS, images, and text strings can be modified.
Sisense
Sisense markets itself as a “full-stack” solution, which means that it includes an integrated database, an extract/transform/load modality, analytics, and visualization tools. Users can easily and quickly work with these tools to generate insightful data.
Sisense also includes an analytics engine that processes big data without needing to clean or prep it. That means you can unify diverse data sets for a truly holistic and even predictive view of insights across the company.
This ability to connect any data source to another using the ElastiCube interface is why Sisense is so powerful. You don’t need to script or create intricate models. Instead, you can automatically prepare and combine complex data mashups.
One More Embedded Analytics Option (Hint: Yurbi)
As we said earlier, we believe in transparency and honesty. That is why we wanted to provide you with six of the best choices for data visualization tools without including ourselves in that list.
Although we’re not on the list, we believe that Yurbi provides a complete Business Intelligence platform that includes embedded data visualizations, interactive dashboards, a central repository of reports that support self-service scheduling, ad-hoc reporting, embedded analytics, and advanced security and data governance.
A few key differentiators for Yurbi compared to the list above and Power BI Embedded:
Self-hosted. No need to worry about complex architectures of pushing data into 3rd party clouds or the privacy and compliance woes that follow. With Yurbi you install the software on your private server, on your private network. You control the upgrades, you control the domain space, you control the network, you maintain control of your software.
Affordable. Not every product above talks about their pricing, but we do. We offer a flat, transplant pricing model for larger ISVs. No matter how many users you have, we provide unlimited users for a single price. But for our smaller partners and startups, we do have special pricing that starts as low as $2500 a year. And for our on-premise deployed partners, we offer you the same unlimited user model, with a little surcharge per client deployment. You won’t find a better cost to value ration than yurbi when it comes to embedded analytics.
Support. We’re not as big as those other guys, so you become a big fish in our small pond. Your developers are working with our developers. You’re not having to prove to a Tier 1 support agent your issue to get escalated to someone who can resolve it. You need a feature implemented, we do it quickly versus telling you to submit it to your local user group and wait 2 years (or never). We aim to be a virtual member of your team and if you’re embedding another vendor’s software inside your own, we think it should be like that.
If you’re currently researching embedded analytics, dashboards, and reporting tools take a closer look at a demo of Yurbi and contact us, so we can discuss your requirements to see if we’re a good fit.