Power BI alternatives for small businesses: an honest comparison

When Power BI is just fine

Power BI costs little per user, integrates with Excel and the rest of the Microsoft environment, and has a huge community of experts, courses and ready-made models behind it. If the company already has Microsoft 365 E5, the Pro licence is included. Under these conditions it is hard to do better:

• An analyst or an in-house consultant who can model the data and write the measures, and who will maintain the model over time.
• A company already on Microsoft, with identity, mail and documents in Microsoft 365: users sign in with their own account and reports are shared where people already work.
• Many users who only consult, where the cost per person matters more than anything else.
• Data already collected in one place, for example an existing data warehouse: Power BI does its job, visualisation, and does it well.

In these cases an alternative is justified only by a specific reason, not because «there is another one».

When a small business looks elsewhere

The reasons heard again and again are almost never about the quality of the charts. They are about what surrounds them:

• The data model needs someone. Power BI is at its best on a well-built model, and building and maintaining it is a trade. If that person is not there, or leaves, the reports stop. We come back to it in the section on the real cost.
• Price per user is not everything. According to Microsoft's documentation, sending a full report as a PDF by email takes a workspace on Premium capacity or on Premium Per User licensing, and sending it to external recipients takes a paid capacity other than PPU. Copilot requires a paid Fabric capacity (F2 or higher) or Premium (P1 or higher): a Pro licence alone is not enough.
• Production machines and alarms are not the heart of the product. Whoever has part counters, meters and PLCs to read must first bring them somewhere; the report comes after.
• You want a single product instead of one to collect data, one to model it, one for dashboards and one for reports, each with its own vendor and contract.

Muvia was built for this second group of cases: it connects ERP, CRM, databases, files and machines in a single platform, with dashboards, PDF reports, alarms and an AI assistant. It is not a better choice in absolute terms: it is a different choice, with trade-offs that the table below tries to show.

Table: licences, data hosting, PDF reports, alarms, AI, machines

A single table, with what the vendors' pages and documentation say, checked on 21 October 2026. For Power BI it reports what Microsoft's documentation says, for Muvia what the pages of this site say. Where a cell says «see documentation» we have not verified it at the source and do not assert it.

Sources for licence models and features, consulted on 21 October 2026: Power BI plans, Power BI licensing, email subscriptions, Copilot requirements, Fabric home region, Qlik plans, Metabase plans. Power BI, Looker Studio, Qlik and Metabase are trademarks of their respective owners; Muvia is a product of Superduck S.r.l. and is not affiliated with these companies. The comparison with other data platforms is on the page Muvia compared.

The real cost: who maintains the data model

For ten users, the licences of the products in the table cost amounts of the same order: they are compared in a few minutes on the vendors' pages, and rarely decide the matter on their own.

What decides it is the work. An example, with stated assumptions: if maintaining the data model and fixing the reports that break takes two days a month of a person who costs 500 € a day, that is 2 × 500 × 12 = 12,000 € a year, a figure to set beside the cost of the licences. The assumptions are yours, but the question is always the same: how much time does it take to keep the numbers standing, and who does it?

A product that sets out to remove that work should be judged on that: each source becomes a table with no schema to design, KPI definitions live in a query or a function that stays written down, and the same permissions apply from the source to the assistant's answer. Muvia works that way. It does not mean the work disappears: the definitions still have to be written, once, by someone who knows them.

Data in Italy and GDPR

«Data in Italy» is not a GDPR requirement, which asks for lawful processing and safeguards when data leaves the European Union; it is, however, a frequent preference in tenders and customer requests. The questions to ask any vendor are always the same:

• Where the data lives at rest, and whether you can choose. For Power BI, Microsoft states that data is stored in the tenant's home region, chosen at creation. Muvia keeps it in the cloud, in a separate database for each company.
• Who else processes it: the vendors acting as data processors, and where. An AI feature sends questions to a language model: ask which and where.
• What happens to AI data. In Muvia every AI feature is a module the company chooses whether to switch on, and questions to the assistant go through third-party language-model providers: we say so before selling it, and it is worth asking every vendor.
• Who sees what: roles, multi-factor authentication and an activity log that makes it possible to reconstruct who did what. Muvia has custom roles, email codes, authenticator apps and passkeys, and a log sealed every night.
• How you leave: if you change vendor, how you get back the data and the definitions.

This guide is not legal advice: for a specific processing operation you need the data protection officer or a consultant. Muvia's security answers are on the Security page.

Migrating: what you take, what you do not

Changing BI tool does not mean starting from scratch, but it does not mean copy and paste either. In a realistic order:

• You take the knowledge of the sources: which systems exist, which tables matter, who knows them. In Muvia each source (database, CRM, file) is reconnected and becomes a table.
• You take the KPI definitions, to be rewritten: a DAX measure becomes an SQL query or a Python function. It is a good moment to finally write the definitions on a sheet of paper.
• You take the users and roles, to be recreated with the permissions needed: in Muvia custom roles and teams.
• You do not take the layout: charts, filters and report pages are rebuilt on the new data. Plan to redo them, not convert them, and start with the five that are really looked at every week.
• You replace email subscriptions with scheduled PDF reports and alerts with threshold alarms.

The safest way is to run them side by side for a month: the old and the new dashboard in parallel, with ten key numbers compared every week. If they match, you switch off the old one. If they do not, you have found a definition that was never written down, and the month was well spent.