A guide to leaving US Business Intelligence SaaS Tools

Start with WHY

So, why would you entrust your business secrets to a crypto-holding company (MicroStrategy)? Even they seem to have realized their tools were relics of the early 2000s and were becoming irrelevant, so they pivoted to gambling with crypto. If you’re still stuck in the 2000s, it’s high time to look for an exit strategy.

Why would you store your data in a US cloud provider’s database (Azure)—a quasi-monopolist in office software (Microsoft)—and use their tools to create dashboards and reports (Power BI)? Is it convenient? With the resources and monopoly they’ve built, you’d expect an absolutely fantastic, user-friendly product, easy to use for everybody in the company. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Time to move on.

Then there’s Tableau. Sure, if you’re a Tableau expert, that’s great—there must be plenty of jobs for you, since not many people would want to do your job. But as a company using Tableau... why wouldn’t you get rid of it?

And then there’s the more modern stuff, like Snowflake. It looks great. It even does AI. But wait—$3.00 USD per credit? Is that cheap? Is it expensive? What even is a credit? Is it a GB of data? A query? A user? A report? Not sure what it is, but I guess you should have deep pockets if you want to find out...

We could continue the list for a while, but basically the Business Intelligence market is dominated by great and not so great US companies. They have access to your core data, and so does Donnie Trump, so does everybody at the NSA and Mossad, and so do all their friends and family.

This is why you should leave NOW.

How should Business Intelligence look in the Age of AI?

I can write SQL quickly. I know a lot about databases and quite a bit about data warehousing. So if I need business KPIs or reports, I can get them using plain SQL and any free database GUI tool. But it’s tedious and boring. Sometimes I need to build a dashboard, create a report, or share insights. Luckily, my team has installed some great open-source tools in our cluster (Metabase and Superset), so I get high-quality reporting at no cost. However, even for me as an expert, these tools are time-consuming to use. For my non-expert colleagues, it’s sometimes impossible to extract what they need from the database. So they ask me.

Conclusion:

1. I want to work with natural language. The quality of AI models is now good enough to generate correct database queries in most cases—for both me and my non-expert colleagues. We still need to review the results (whether code or data), but we’d need to do that anyway, even if I wrote the queries myself.

2. I want a tool that creates graphs and dashboards effortlessly, in seconds, with minimal configuration and fewer options. Most of my charts are simple anyway—why should I bother with 200 settings just to display a few key figures?

WHAT are the alternatives

You’re reading a blog post by the founder of Talk BI—you guessed it, the fantastic and glorious alternative is Talk BI. Below is a list of 9 other BI alternatives in 2026, which are all somewhat lacking, and we’ve forgotten to link them, but we need them for search engines and SEO.

Who is Talk BI for?

- You run some form of business and have stored some data

- Your data is in a Postgres or MySQL database and you have (read) credentials for it. Support for other data sources (files or third-party software) will follow—please check back later if that’s your case.

- You want to gain quick, easy insights and maybe share them with others.

- You’re ready to try something new. Talk BI is new and still has some glitches and bugs. I’d love your feedback.

A word about your data

Hosting

We host Talk BI and all our software in Europe with a European provider (Scaleway; we also use Hetzner).

AI Models

We use Claude and OpenAI, but we also use Mistral and some open-weight models. Our goal is to be model-independent, but we’re not there yet. Importantly, in our “Standard Mode,” no data is transmitted to any of the models—only your data model (DDL) and comments. In “Agent Mode,” we also transmit results, so you should only use this mode if you trust your data with these models. We’re working on giving you more control over where your data goes.

Protection

We use encryption at rest for our database. In the future, we’ll offer additional measures, such as using your own keys. We’re not yet at the level of ISO 27001 certification, but we know the requirements and aim to maintain high standards.

Enterprise Mode

Want to explore running our tool within your own infrastructure and develop things together with us? Get in touch!

Let's get your data back to Europe!