We are looking for visualizations tools that can afford access to many different platforms. We are short on engineers to support connections and want to be minimally reliant on them. We have exhausted our vertical capabilities and now are looking to branch data across disparate systems.
I found Power BI complicated, I am wondering what others have found.
Metabase is more user friendly and totally targeted at non technical people. Setup is super easy and it supports all of the most popular datasources.
You can give meaningful names and descriptions to your tables and columns. This helps the end users when they are creating the queries (called "questions" in Metabase). Question creation is all done visually, you can even join tables and do aggregations (group by) without coding any line of SQL, although SQL can be used for more complex cases.
PowerBI works for your use case of connecting to different data sources, but it also requires programming knowledge. It's not an solution you can deploy without a programmer who has experience in SQL (querying your data sources) and data engineering (how to structure data such that the queries execute performantly).
We use Metabase as an alternative solution (main one is QlikView). Metabase setup is quick and intuitive and connection to databases is relatively easy - you just have to give it JDBC links (you do it in the GUI). After that the end users can do data exploration / dashboard building on their own (using dashboard builder and / or SQL). Ask extra questions if you are interested, will answer with great pleasure.