Mode (now folded into ThoughtSpot) is a SQL-notebook product with no native alerts and no embedded analytics — and a strategic future tied to ThoughtSpot's roadmap. Qrly is BI + AI in one self-hostable platform: natural-language Ask (NL→SQL) on your choice of local LLM (Ollama, LM Studio) or cloud (Claude, Gemini, OpenAI, Azure), live dashboards, multi-channel alerts, and embedded analytics via signed-JWT.
No dunking. Mode is genuinely loved for good reason. Here is where each tool is stronger.
The features most teams actually evaluate when deciding between Qrly and Mode.
From migration conversations with dev, IT and support leaders. Marketing teams, stay where you are.
Mode has tasks, subtasks and sections — but no real verified questions and materialization model, no Alert, no question history audit, and no dependency graph beyond simple task-to-task links. Engineering teams consistently outgrow it once they start caring about regression patterns, escalation policies and cross-project impact analysis. The moment a support engineer asks "which questions were raised to Critical last month but then downgraded?" the limits of Mode's data model become obvious.
Qrly is built as an BI platform first. Priority, severity, Alert clocks and QQL history audit are part of the core model, not a dashboard bolt-on. Permissions, materialization and alert thresholds are defined per project type, so support, engineering and ops can each have their own lifecycle without fighting the tool.
The Advanced tier lists at roughly €24.99 per user per month with a yearly commitment (as of 2026-04). A 50-person team clears €15,000 per year on Mode alone before Enterprise features like OIDC, SAML and region pinning enter the conversation. Add a few Mode Apps, an integration middleware bill, and the fully-loaded cost of running Mode for a mid-size team usually surprises finance teams at renewal.
Qrly's cheapest tier — The Pulse — is €1,875 per year per tenant, with unlimited users & projects inside the tenant. That is €5,625 over three years for a single tenant, not the first-year run rate of a per-seat tool. Headcount growth, new teams, external contractors and the occasional customer-facing portal user do not change the bill. Annual flat fee per tenant, unlimited users inside it, and you move on.
Mode is SaaS only. Data residency is tied to the Enterprise upsell, there is no on-prem option, and no path for regulated or air-gapped teams. For defence, healthcare, finance, and public-sector teams this is usually a non-starter — procurement simply cannot approve a tool that cannot run inside the organisation's own network perimeter.
Qrly runs on your Linux box, your Kubernetes cluster, or your sovereign-cloud tenant. No data leaves your boundary if you do not want it to. Backups, encryption keys, audit logs and user directories stay inside the same controls you already apply to the rest of your stack. If your security team maintains a "no external SaaS for sensitive data" policy, Qrly fits that posture without exceptions.
SSO, OIDC, audit log, data residency, advanced forms and admin console live on Enterprise or Enterprise+. The features you need to deploy Mode responsibly at 50+ users are rarely in the tier you first signed up on, and the upgrade path involves a sales conversation rather than a self-serve toggle. Teams that adopt Mode bottom-up often hit this wall twelve months in.
Qrly ships SSO, OIDC, audit log and EU data residency in every license. Compliance is a default, not an upgrade path. Administrators do not have to justify a tier jump to IT security to enable the controls IT security already requires — the controls are already there on day one.
List prices as of 2026-04. 50-user team, 3-year total cost of ownership.
Most teams are up and running on Qrly within a working week.
Mode's API exposes everything you need. Most teams script a one-shot export, import into Qrly, and keep Mode read-only during a short overlap. For smaller workspaces the built-in CSV export works fine and needs no code at all.
It depends on the team. For marketing, creative, ops and general task-management work, Mode is genuinely excellent and Qrly is not trying to replace it there. For engineering, ops, finance and regulated teams that need a real BI platform with verified questions, alerts, dashboards and self-hosting, Qrly is the better fit. Many companies run both side by side — Mode for the campaigns calendar, Qrly for the SQL editor and embedded analytics — and that is a perfectly reasonable end state. The switch only becomes urgent when a single team has been stretched to do both jobs with one tool and neither is going well.
Yes, via CSV export from Mode or Qrly's generic API-based importer. Teams, projects, tasks, sections, assignees, due dates, custom fields and attachments map cleanly. Mode itself has no official Tableau-style dedicated importer, so any tool-to-tool move goes through CSV or API regardless of destination. The import wizard in Qrly lets you preview mappings, rename fields on the fly and re-run the import idempotently if something needs tweaking before you cut over.
Mode Goals and Portfolios are genuinely strong for executive cross-project visibility and OKR-style planning. Qrly covers the same ground with projects-of-projects roll-ups, custom dashboards and QQL saved filters, but teams whose workflow revolves around quarterly goal trees and portfolio health may find Mode's dedicated UI more tailored. For engineering-led organisations that track delivery, Alert compliance and defect trends as their primary KPIs, Qrly's reporting is closer to what you actually present in a steering committee.
Because engineering and data teams need things Mode does not do well: real verified questions and materialization, Alert delivery with multi-channel fan-out, cross-dialect QQL operators (regex, JSON, range, FTS), a customer-facing analytics portal, scheduled subscription pipelines across multiple mailboxes, and self-hosting. These are first-class in Qrly and either absent or minimal in Mode. The cultural symptom is usually the same: analysts silently maintain a parallel spreadsheet, or open issues in Hex notebooks instead of Mode, because the tool does not carry the weight.
Yes. Qrly has a timeline / gantt view with dependencies, milestones and drag-to-resize interactions, comparable to Mode's Timeline. Cross-project planning uses the advanced roadmap, which is included in every Qrly license rather than gated behind a higher tier. Critical-path highlighting, milestone rollups and baseline-vs-actual comparisons work out of the box, so a programme manager who is fluent in Mode's Timeline will feel at home within a session.
€1,875 per year per tenant on the cheapest tier (The Pulse), with unlimited users & projects inside the tenant — €5,625 over three years for a single tenant. Mode Advanced at list price is roughly €24.99 per user per month on annual commitment, which puts a 50-user team at around €45,000 over three years before Enterprise upgrades, Mode Apps and integration costs. The gap widens as headcount grows — on Qrly the 80th or 150th user inside the tenant costs nothing, while on Mode that same growth compounds into the annual renewal.
Self-hostable. Flat pricing. QQL, Alert and embedded analytics included. Made in Belgium.