Overview

Redash

Stacks345

Followers502

Votes12

Power BI

Stacks953

Followers945

Votes29

Power BI vs Redash: What are the differences?

Introduction

Power BI and Redash are both popular business intelligence tools used for data visualization and analysis. While they serve similar purposes, there are key differences between the two platforms that make them distinct in terms of features, functionality, and user experience.

Integration and Connectivity: Power BI offers extensive integration with Microsoft products and services, such as Excel, SharePoint, and Azure. It also supports a wide range of data connectors, including SQL Server, Oracle, and Salesforce. On the other hand, Redash supports various data sources, but its integration options are comparatively limited.
Ease of Use and User Interface: Power BI provides a user-friendly and intuitive interface, making it accessible to users with minimal technical knowledge. Its drag-and-drop functionality and visual query builder facilitate easy data exploration. In contrast, Redash has a steeper learning curve, requiring users to have some knowledge of writing SQL queries to create visualizations.
Collaboration and Sharing: Power BI allows users to share dashboards and reports with others through various channels, including email, embedded links, and SharePoint. Additionally, it offers more advanced collaboration features like commenting and annotations on visualizations. Redash, on the other hand, provides limited collaboration features and lacks the ability to comment on visualizations, making it less suitable for collaborative projects.
Customization and Extension: Power BI allows users to customize visualizations extensively, with a wide range of formatting options and the ability to create custom visuals using Power BI Developer Tools. Redash, on the other hand, offers limited customization options, with fewer formatting choices and a smaller selection of pre-built visualizations.
Pricing and Licensing: Power BI offers both free and paid versions, with the paid version providing access to advanced features like data export and collaboration. The cost of Power BI is generally higher compared to Redash. Redash, on the other hand, is an open-source tool available for free, making it a more cost-effective option for small businesses or organizations with limited budgets.
Data Transformation and Preparation: Power BI offers a robust suite of data transformation and preparation tools, allowing users to clean and shape their data before visualizing it. It provides features like data modeling, merging, and creating calculated columns. Redash, on the other hand, focuses more on visualization capabilities and lacks comprehensive data transformation and preparation features.

In summary, Power BI offers extensive integration options, a user-friendly interface, advanced collaboration features, extensive customization capabilities, various pricing options, and robust data transformation capabilities. Redash, on the other hand, has limited integration options, a steeper learning curve, limited collaboration features, fewer customization options, a free open-source model, and focuses more on visualization than data transformation.

Advice on Redash, Power BI

Vojtech

Head of Data at Mews

Nov 24, 2019

Decided

Power BI is really easy to start with. If you have just several Excel sheets or CSV files, or you build your first automated pipeline, it is actually quite intuitive to build your first reports.

And as we have kept growing, all the additional features and tools were just there within the Azure platform and/or Office 365.

Since we started building Mews, we have already passed several milestones in becoming start up, later also a scale up company and now getting ready to grow even further, and during all these phases Power BI was just the right tool for us.

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Detailed Comparison

Redash	Power BI
Redash helps you make sense of your data. Connect and query your data sources, build dashboards to visualize data and share them with your company.	It aims to provide interactive visualizations and business intelligence capabilities with an interface simple enough for end users to create their own reports and dashboards.
Query Editor;Dashboards/Visualizations;Alerts;API;Support for querying multiple databases	Get self-service analytics at enterprise scale; Use smart tools for strong results; Help protect your analytics data
Statistics
Stacks 345	Stacks 953
Followers 502	Followers 945
Votes 12	Votes 29
Pros & Cons
Pros 9 Open Source 3 SQL Friendly Cons 1 Memory Leaks 1 All results are loaded into RAM before displaying	Pros 18 Cross-filtering 4 Database visualisation 2 Access from anywhere 2 Intuitive and complete internal ETL 2 Powerful Calculation Engine
Integrations
PostgreSQL Cassandra MongoDB Amazon DynamoDB Amazon RDS Amazon Athena Jira PagerDuty Prometheus Slack	Microsoft Excel

What are some alternatives to Redash, Power BI?

Metabase

It is an easy way to generate charts and dashboards, ask simple ad hoc queries without using SQL, and see detailed information about rows in your Database. You can set it up in under 5 minutes, and then give yourself and others a place to ask simple questions and understand the data your application is generating.

Superset

Superset's main goal is to make it easy to slice, dice and visualize data. It empowers users to perform analytics at the speed of thought.

Cube

Cube: the universal semantic layer that makes it easy to connect BI silos, embed analytics, and power your data apps and AI with context.

Mode

Created by analysts, for analysts, Mode is a SQL-based analytics tool that connects directly to your database. Mode is designed to alleviate the bottlenecks in today's analytical workflow and drive collaboration around data projects.

Google Datastudio

It lets you create reports and data visualizations. Data Sources are reusable components that connect a report to your data, such as Google Analytics, Google Sheets, Google AdWords and so forth. You can unlock the power of your data with interactive dashboards and engaging reports that inspire smarter business decisions.

AskNed

AskNed is an analytics platform where enterprise users can get answers from their data by simply typing questions in plain English.

Shiny

It is an open source R package that provides an elegant and powerful web framework for building web applications using R. It helps you turn your analyses into interactive web applications without requiring HTML, CSS, or JavaScript knowledge.

Azure Synapse

It is an analytics service that brings together enterprise data warehousing and Big Data analytics. It gives you the freedom to query data on your terms, using either serverless on-demand or provisioned resources—at scale. It brings these two worlds together with a unified experience to ingest, prepare, manage, and serve data for immediate BI and machine learning needs.

Periscope

Periscope is a data analysis tool that uses pre-emptive in-memory caching and statistical sampling to run data analyses really, really fast.

Looker

We've built a unique data modeling language, connections to today's fastest analytical databases, and a service that you can deploy on any infrastructure, and explore on any device. Plus, we'll help you every step of the way.