BI + AI in one self-hosted platform — natural-language Ask (NL→SQL) and BYO LLM (local Ollama / LM Studio or Anthropic, Gemini, OpenAI, Azure) included by default. No Copilot Premium tier to license, no Azure-only AI, no Microsoft Enterprise Agreement to sign — runs on your infrastructure with EU data residency.
No marketing fluff. Here is where each tool is genuinely stronger.
The features most teams actually evaluate when moving off Power BI.
From real migration conversations with engineering leaders.
Power BI is designed to be the connective tissue of the Azure ecosystem. The moment a team is not all-in on Azure — mixed cloud, on-prem workloads, a non-Microsoft identity stack, a regulator that insists on non-US hyperscaler data residency — the friction shows up: identity assumes Entra ID, hosting assumes an Azure region, licensing assumes a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, and every support conversation eventually routes back to a Microsoft account team.
Qrly is identity-agnostic and runs wherever your ops team wants it to: any Linux host, any Kubernetes cluster, on-prem, AWS, GCP, Hetzner, OVH, or a laptop during a demo — same package, same features, same license. Moving between environments does not require re-negotiating anything.
Every Power BI process template — Scrum, Agile, CMMI — is built around caps and iterations. That works fine for an engineering squad on a two-week cadence. It works much less well for operations, customer support, legal, facilities, HR or compliance teams who still need to track work end to end but do not think in row caps and do not want a refresh chart.
Qrly's primitives are projects, questions and queries. Boards, caps and releases are optional add-ons on top, not the entry point. Non-data teams can adopt Qrly without fighting a ceremony they did not ask for, and data teams can still run their cap workflow on top if they want one.
Power BI remains a capable product, but the web UI has not meaningfully moved in a long time. Developers coming from modern trackers notice the number of clicks it takes to move between dashboards, queries and reports — and the Basic tier's navigation pattern feels dated next to a fresh Linear or Qrly install. Keyboard navigation is inconsistent, search is slow, and the work-item editor still opens in a modal that fights the rest of the UI.
Qrly is a 2026 product. Fewer clicks, faster searches, saner defaults, a keyboard-first shell, and an editor that actually feels at home on a laptop.
Power BI does not ship a customer-facing analytics portal. There is no built-in Alert enforcement, no public request form, no end-user self-service queue, no customer satisfaction survey workflow. Teams who need embedded analytics end up running a second tool (Zendesk, Freshdesk, Tableau Service Management, ServiceNow) and then duct-taping the two together with a fragile sync so that engineering and support can see the same ticket.
Qrly ships a embed portal, Alert engine, auto-escalation, CSAT and scheduled subscription as first-class features in the same product. One tool, one login, one data model, one audit trail — engineering work items and customer dashboards share the same database and the same query language.
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.
Power BI exposes work items through two stable paths: the az boards work-item CLI and the Analytics views OData feed. Qrly ingests either.
az boards work-item CLI or the Analytics views OData feed to pull work items, comments, attachments and state history out of Power BI.For most teams — yes. Qrly covers the core of what teams actually use Power BI for: dashboards, reports, queries, alerts and embedded analytics. Teams heavily invested in Azure Synapse, Azure Fabric or Azure Analysis Services should review the feature list first, since Qrly does not replace CI/CD or source control. What is split across Power BI, Azure Wiki and a third-party scheduling add-on in the Microsoft stack is a single product in Qrly, which shortens both the evaluation and the onboarding conversation considerably.
Yes. Work items can be exported from Power BI using the az boards work-item CLI or the Analytics views OData feed, then imported into Qrly. Standard fields — title, description, state, assignee, tags, iteration path, area path, priority — are mapped automatically. Comments, attachments and full state change history are preserved so QQL WAS / CHANGED queries operate correctly on migrated questions from day one. Custom fields are mapped in a visual UI with dry-run support.
No. Qrly runs on any Linux host or Kubernetes cluster and ships as a single container. It does not require Azure, SQL Server, Windows Server, Entra ID or a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement. It integrates with whichever identity provider you already use — Entra ID, Google Workspace, LDAP or local auth — and can run all four simultaneously on the same install, so you can grant customers, contractors and internal staff access through different providers without running three different copies of the product.
Qrly is a work tracking and embedded analytics product, not a CI/CD or source control replacement. Teams that want to keep Azure Pipelines and Azure Repos can do so — Qrly integrates with any Git provider (including Azure Repos) via webhooks and REST. Many teams keep their existing CI/CD stack on Azure and simply replace Power BI (plus the missing customer-facing embedded analytics) with Qrly, without touching build agents or repositories.
Power BI uses WIQL, which covers the common logical operators and some history functions but has limits around expressing state transitions cleanly — most of the useful history work has to happen in Analytics / OData instead of in a query. Qrly's QQL supports the same core operators plus first-class historical operators (WAS, CHANGED, BEFORE, AFTER) so you can answer questions like "which questions sat in triage for more than three days last quarter" directly as a query, not as a separate report or OData view.
€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, no per-seat increase and no add-on SKUs. The equivalent Power BI Services bill — Basic at roughly €6 per user per month for 50 users, plus Basic + Test Plans at roughly €52 per user per month for 10 QA users — works out around €17,000 over three years before Azure Pipelines parallel-job overage. Running Power BI Server on-prem instead adds Windows Server and SQL Server licensing on top of that.
Self-hostable anywhere. Flat pricing. Embedded Analytics and Alert included. Made in Belgium.