Mode (now part of ThoughtSpot) is a SQL-and-notebook workbench — it has report alerts and white-label embeds, but not a governed BI layer, and its roadmap now sits inside ThoughtSpot's. 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 data, engineering and IT leaders. Analysts who live in a notebook, stay where you are.
Mode gives an analyst a SQL editor, a Python or R notebook and a report builder in one document. What it does not give the organisation is the layer underneath: a verified badge with an audit log, results materialised on a refresh interval, a per-user query budget and a governor, or a modelled star schema whose filters are always applied as a security boundary. The moment somebody asks "which of these four reports is the one finance signs off?" the limits show.
Qrly is built as a BI platform first. Verification with an audit log, result materialisation, four opt-in caching tiers, the query governor and OLAP models with rollup, cube and grouping sets are part of the core, not a convention the team agrees to follow. Permissions run Tenant to Organisation to Project to Collection, so analysts, engineering and finance each get their own surface without a second installation.
Mode does not publish a price for its paid plans — they are quoted, per user, on an annual commitment — so the sticker is whatever comes back from a sales cycle. What is public is the shape of it, and the shape is what matters: the bill tracks headcount, and OIDC, SAML and region pinning sit in the top tier. The question to take into the renewal is not what the number is today, but what happens to it the year those reports become something the whole company reads.
Qrly is priced on revenue, not seats: a €15M-revenue company pays €6,300 a year — €18,900 over three years — for unlimited everything, one organization, one installation. That is €18,900 over three years for one organization, 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 fee on revenue, unlimited everything, one organization, one installation, 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 and the 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.
Our own list price in full, and an honest account of how Mode charges. The Qrly column is the published schedule evaluated at €15M of revenue — the number of people using it does not move it.
Methodology, 28 August 2026. Qrly publishes a complete rate card, so the figures in our column are quoted exactly. The other column describes a pricing model rather than quoting a number: vendor list prices change without notice and several of these vendors do not publish one at all. For current figures, go to the vendor’s own pricing page.
Most teams are up and running on Qrly within a working week.
Everything worth taking out of Mode is SQL. Mode's API exposes the query behind every report, and the report editor shows it too, so most teams script a one-shot export and keep Mode read-only during a short overlap. The real work is deciding which reports deserve to become governed questions.
It depends on the work. For an analyst who lives in a SQL-and-Python notebook and publishes an ad-hoc report at the end of it, Mode is genuinely excellent and Qrly is not trying to replace that. For teams that need governed, reusable questions — verified badges, materialised results, alerts, dashboards, embedded analytics and self-hosting — Qrly is the better fit. Many teams run both side by side — Mode for exploratory notebook work, Qrly for the questions the business reads every morning — and that is a perfectly reasonable end state. The switch becomes urgent when a notebook output has quietly become the reporting layer and nobody can tell which version is current.
Everything worth moving is SQL. A Mode report is built on a query, and the query text comes out through Mode's API or straight from the report editor. Point Qrly at the same warehouse, paste the SQL into the native editor, and Qrly reverse-engineers any flat SELECT into a visual QQL definition — joins, filters, group by, having, order by with NULL ordering, limit and offset. CTEs, UNION and subqueries are reported as lossy and stay as native SQL. Mode parameters become Qrly template variables, bound as prepared-statement parameters rather than substituted into the string, so the query you paste is the query that runs.
Qrly has no notebook. There is no Python or R cell and no place to run pandas next to a query — if that is the centre of your workflow, keep Mode. What Qrly gives you instead is the governed layer beneath the analysis: OLAP models with rollup, cube and grouping sets, period-over-period comparison, calculated fields, verified questions with an audit log, and an AI layer running on a local or cloud LLM of your choosing. In practice the split is clean: exploratory statistical work stays in a notebook, and the numbers the business reads every week become Qrly questions.
Because a reporting layer needs things a notebook product is not built for: verified questions with an audit log, result materialisation on a refresh interval, alerts with multi-channel fan-out, cross-dialect QQL operators (regex, JSON, range, full-text search), a customer-facing analytics portal behind signed JWT, scheduled subscription pipelines across multiple mailboxes, and self-hosting. These are first-class in Qrly. The symptom is usually the same one: nobody can say which of four similar reports is the one finance signs off, so the real reporting layer quietly becomes a spreadsheet somebody re-pastes every Monday.
Yes. QQL is a visual query builder first — pick a source table, add filters from around 35 operators, group, aggregate, join and order without typing SQL, and the compiler emits the right dialect for whichever of the 40 connection types you are on. The generated SQL is always readable, and a flat SELECT converts back into the builder, so SQL and point-and-click are two views of the same question rather than two separate tools. Analysts keep the Monaco editor with schema-aware autocomplete, EXPLAIN and AI explain; everyone else never has to open it.
Qrly is priced on revenue, not seats: a €15M-revenue company pays €6,300 a year — €18,900 over three years — for unlimited everything, one organisation, one installation. Mode’s paid plans are quoted rather than listed, so there is no defensible figure to put beside that, and we would rather leave the column empty than fill it with a guess. What is public is the model: per user, on an annual commitment, with SSO and region pinning in the top tier. On Qrly the 80th or 150th user costs nothing; on any per-seat tool that same growth compounds into the renewal.
Self-hostable. Flat pricing. QQL, Alert and embedded analytics included. Made in Belgium.