Tellius vs Power BI

Looking for a Power BI alternative? See why more teams choose Tellius.

Tellius is the best alternative to Power BI. Here's why.

Power BI gives you dashboards. Tellius gives you answers, insights, and a path forward. While traditional BI tools require you to build visualizations and hope the insights emerge, our semantic layer connects directly to how your business operates. No more pre-built reports that miss the mark or dashboard sprawl. Ask questions in natural language, follow your curiosity, and get meaningful insights without waiting on anyone.

Answer & Insight-oriented: Conversational, agent-powered guidance from question to diagnosis to recommended action

Agentic Analytics: Tellius Kaiya agents automate complex multipart, multistep analysis and offer a code-free AI agent building experience to turn analysis into action

Deeper “why” out of the box: Automated driver analysis, cohort/segment discovery, and change explanations—prioritized narratives in business terms

Contextual, Actionable Answers & Insights: Tellius provides deeper contextual understanding and industry-specific AI tuning for more relevant, actionable answers and insights

Built for scale: Works directly on unaggregated, large-scale data across multiple datasets, enabling deep drill-down to the most granular level without pre-aggregations—avoiding manual data prep and unlocking faster, richer insights.

Dashboard-oriented: Power BI is primarily designed for dashboarding, visualizations, and reporting

AI Assistant: Copilot creates and describes charts but doesn’t close the loop from “what” to “what to do.”

Surface-level insights: Power BI's Quick Insights, Key Influencers, Explain Increase/Decrease, Decomposition Tree, etc lack the statistical rigor and depth/breadth/automation of Tellius's root-cause analysis.

Generalist Assistance, Limited Context: Power BI Copilot offers broad, non-specialized AI support that lacks deep industry context—producing generic answers rather than domain-tuned, highly actionable insights.

Aggregated Views: Optimized for aggregated views; drilling to raw-level data often requires manual extracts, custom queries, or pre-built aggregations, adding complexity, delays, and limiting the scope of analysis.

Detailed Comparison

Legend:

=Built-in

= Partial / limited

= Not Available

= Requires add-on/licensing

Generative & Agentic AI Analytics

Conversational interface

(doesn’t span all data sources)

Generative narratives

(lacks deep context)

Multi-step agentic analytics workflows

(no persistent multi-step workflows across sessions)

Human-in-the-loop approvals for agent actions

Automated Insights

Automated driver analysis & change explanations

(explains drivers using existing visuals/measures but limited RCA depth)

Automated segmentation & cohort discovery

(requires DAX/ML models)

Kick-off insight directly from search/question

Customizable generative insight narratives

Conversational AI Analytics

Complex question handling (top-N per group, windowed calcs, cohorts, etc.)

(handles simple groupings/filters; anything more complex requires DAX)

Cross-source conversational analysis (no pre-built dashboards)

Industry/role-ready KPI semantics

Advanced Analytics

No-code AutoML (regression, classification, clustering)

(Azure ML/other services)

Point-and-click ML & model explainability

(Azure ML)

Bring-your-own model & operationalization

(Azure ML)

What-if analysis and scenario planning

AI Augmented Data Prep

Cross-source join suggestions & semantic alignment

(manual modeling)

Natural-language transforms with data-quality profiling

(manual in Power Query)

Generative code-based prep (auto-generated)

Monitoring & Anomalies

Proactive anomaly detection with RCA & routing

(manual thresholds; limited deep dives)

Insight feed

(updates depend on refreshed reports or subscriptions)

Threshold-based alerting

Performance & Scale

Sub-second at scale on billion-row facts (no extracts)

(DirectQuery performance varies)

Works directly on unaggregated, large-scale data across multiple datasets (vs preaggregated views)

(DirectQuery supports in-DB compute but often uses in-memory import mode)

Unlimited users (vs seat-based pricing)

(role-based, per-user licenses)

"For people who know PBI and are developers? I could potentially see them saving some time with it. But if you are a business user who doesn't make reports already? There's such a low probability that Copilot will spit out *exactly* your requirements/report in the way you intend."
— Data Analyst

WHY TELLIUS

Not Just Answers. Better Decisions. Faster.

Empowering self-service analytics

Designed from the ground up to deliver an integrated analytics environment that combines natural language conversational exploration, automated insights, accessible advanced analytics, and agentic workflows. This approach enables anyone—regardless of technical skill—to ask questions, uncover answers, and take action in a single, seamless workspace.

Supercharging analysis with deeper insights

Empowers users to uncover not just what is happening, but why, using multivariate analysis, multi-level drilling, and exploration across millions of variable combinations. This depth of analysis reveals patterns, trends, and relationships that traditional dashboards miss, providing the clarity needed to drive informed, confident decisions.

Built for scale, optimized for impact

Built with a robust dual analytics engine that integrates flexible ad hoc exploration for analytical queries at scale, delivering sub-second response times. Deep ML-driven analysis enables organizations to explore massive datasets, uncover trends faster, and make confident decisions—without pre-aggregation.

Conversational Voice-Enabled Search

Trigger Deep Analytical Insights From Search

Infinite Data Scale with Distributed Architecture

User Clarification

Starter & Follow-up Questions

Ask Follow-on Questions & Drill Deeper

Get Answers to Questions You Did Not Ask

Real-Time Analysis of Live Data

Industry-Specific and Multilingual Support

Intent Parsing

Instant Answers Across Data Sources

Hybrid Search (metadata, analytical queries, and insights)

Common Power BI Pitfalls

Copilot = AI assistant, not an agentic analytics guide

Power BI Copilot can generate visuals, write DAX, and handle basic data Q&A, but is a single-session assistant that outputs generalized answers compared to Tellius Kaiya’s multi-step, workflow-oriented AI agents for diagnosing change, running statistic tests, and persistently helping users

Surface-level insights

Power BI's Quick Insights, Key Influencers, Explain Increase/Decrease, Decomposition Tree, etc lack the statistical rigor and depth/breadth/automation of Tellius's AI-powered root-cause analysis. Tellius provides explanations in real business terms, coupling insights with recommendations, next-best-actions, and agentic workflows

Limited contextual understanding

Tellius provides deeper contextual understanding and industry-specific AI tuning for more relevant, actionable answers and insights.

TELLIUS

The Only Agentic AI Platform Built for True Self-Service Analytics

Unified platform for data prep, exploration, and insight generation

Ask questions in natural language and get instant answers

Go beyond dashboards with automated, AI-generated insights

Understand what changed, why it changed, and what to do next

Build agentic workflows that automate multi-step analysis

Scale from ad hoc questions to predictive modeling with AutoML

No SQL, no stitching tools — just answers and actions in one place

Power BI

Faster charting ≠ faster answers

Depth of insight: Copilot summarizes what happened; it doesn’t run true diagnosis. Tellius pinpoints why with driver analysis, cohorts, and change explanations that ladder to decisions—not just descriptions.
Agentic capability: Copilot is an assistant that replies to prompts. Tellius uses agents that monitor KPIs, investigate anomalies, run tests, and recommend next steps—with human-in-the-loop approvals.
Contextual understanding: Copilot’s answers skew generic. Tellius’ domain-tuned semantics and KPI knowledge layer deliver narratives in business terms—relevant, role-aware, and actionable.

Gartner Peer Insights Comparison

Open on Gartner

Tellius

11 ratings

100% willing to recommend

Overall Rating

4.8/5

5 Star

91%

4 Star

3 Star

2 Star

1 Star

Highlighted reviews

FAVORABLE REVIEW

Robust Tellius Tools Simplify Analytics

With Tellius I feel like we have a partner in our process of implementing the platform as well as having the most robust set of tools available in all the products we tested.

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CRITICAL REVIEW

Navigating Through Data Analysis with a Visually Engaging BI Tool

Great BI tool to learn, use, and get quick insights and analysis

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Microsoft

181 ratings

92% willing to recommend

Overall Rating

4.4/5

5 Star

47%

4 Star

47%

3 Star

2 Star

1 Star

Highlighted reviews

FAVORABLE REVIEW

Power BI Enhances Collaboration Yet Presents Advanced Feature and Cost Challenges

Microsoft Power BI creates captivating dashboards with interesting visuals and connects to multiple data sources, transforming data with Power Query. Microsoft Power BI integrates with Microsoft365 which makes collaboration more efficient and provides analytical and governance capabilities with low-level security and …

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CRITICAL REVIEW

Lots of potential, but with big gaps in functionality

While there's a lot you can do with Power BI, there's a lot you can't do, as well, and many of the things that you can't do are very important and should be easy to accomplish in the product. It feels like Power BI is a tool that got lots of up front investment by Microsoft and then was just left to flounder without any attention.

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Data shown reflects a point-in-time snapshot from Q4 2025 on Gartner Peer Insights and may change.

Switching from Power BI? You’re Not Alone.

Many organizations move from Power BI to Tellius to cut the time from question to insight. See how Tellius eliminates manual dashboard maintenance with AI-powered answers, automated workflows, and predictive insights — all in one platform.

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