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 data 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.
The Power BI path to a number is Power Query M to shape the data, a semantic model to relate the tables, and DAX to express the measure. Each layer is learnable and each layer is a place for the answer to go wrong, which is why so many organisations end up with a small guild of people who are trusted to change a measure and a long queue behind them.
In Qrly you point at a table, filter, group and chart — the query document compiles straight to SQL and the compiled SQL is on screen next to the result. A star or snowflake OLAP model with a dimension and measure catalogue is there when you want governed measures, rather than a prerequisite for the first chart.
Serious Power BI authoring happens in Power BI Desktop, which runs on Windows. The browser service is where reports are consumed and lightly edited. That split means a publish step, a refresh schedule, an on-premises data gateway for anything not already in the cloud, and a .pbix file that is the real source of truth sitting on somebody's laptop.
Qrly has one application, and it is the browser. The visual builder and the Monaco SQL editor — schema-aware autocomplete, EXPLAIN, AI explain, convert SQL to visual and back — are the same screen everyone else is looking at. Nothing to install, nothing to publish, no gateway.
Putting a Power BI report in front of people outside your organisation means Power BI Embedded: a dedicated capacity SKU, an Entra app registration and service principal, and an embed-token flow you build and maintain. It is a procurement exercise before it is an engineering one, and the capacity is sized and paid for whether the customer logs in that month or not.
Qrly embeds a dashboard with a signed JWT and locked parameters, so an embedded viewer cannot widen the query beyond what the token allows. Cascade filters, live push over an interval or a Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY channel, and scheduled subscriptions all work inside the embed — same install, same licence, no capacity to reserve.
Our own list price in full, and an honest account of how Microsoft 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.
The data does not move. Qrly connects to the same databases and warehouses Power BI already reads, so a migration is a rebuild of the logic, not a transfer of records.
COUNT(DISTINCT) and case-conditional measures onto the OLAP measure catalogue; time intelligence onto the time hierarchy and the prior-period and prior-year comparison columns.For most teams — yes. Qrly covers the core of what teams actually use Power BI for: dashboards, reports, ad-hoc questions, alerts and embedded analytics. Teams heavily invested in Azure Synapse, Fabric or Analysis Services should review the feature list first, since Qrly is a query and presentation layer rather than a warehouse or an ETL platform. What is split across Power BI Desktop, the Power BI service and Power BI Embedded capacity in the Microsoft stack is a single product in Qrly, which shortens both the evaluation and the onboarding conversation considerably.
The data does not move. Qrly connects to the same databases and warehouses Power BI already reads — 40 connection types compiling to 12 SQL dialects — so the warehouse stays exactly where it is and nothing is exported.
What does move is the logic, and it moves by hand: there is no converter for DAX or for Power Query M, and we will not pretend otherwise. Shaping steps become part of the QQL query document or a server-validated calculated field. Measures map onto QQL's aggregation whitelist — COUNT, SUM, AVG, MIN, MAX — with COUNT(DISTINCT) and case-conditional measures available in the OLAP compiler, and time intelligence handled by the time hierarchy plus prior-period and prior-year comparison columns. Native SQL you already trust can be pasted straight into the editor, and Qrly will reverse-engineer a flat SELECT back into a visual definition.
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 has no desktop application, and does not want one. Authoring happens in the browser: a visual query builder, or a Monaco SQL editor with schema-aware autocomplete, hover documentation, inline error markers, EXPLAIN and an AI explain step. What you build is a saved question on the server, not a .pbix file on an analyst's laptop that has to be published before anyone else can see it.
There is no on-premises data gateway to install either. Qrly is self-hosted, so it is already on the same side of the firewall as your database.
They are not the same kind of thing. DAX is an expression language for measures evaluated over a semantic model, with Power Query M doing the shaping beforehand. QQL is a query document — source table or another saved question, column selections, a nested AND/OR filter tree with around 35 operators, aggregations, breakouts, having, order-by, four join types and a preferred IANA timezone — compiled to SQL for 12 dialects, so the same saved question runs unchanged on Postgres, BigQuery, Snowflake or SQL Server.
QQL's aggregation set is deliberately narrow: COUNT, SUM, AVG, MIN and MAX, with COUNT(DISTINCT) and case-conditional measures added by the OLAP compiler. Anything past that is written as native SQL, which the sanitiser holds to SELECT and WITH and which the builder can read back into a visual definition. Time comparisons that DAX does with time intelligence are handled by the OLAP time hierarchy and the prior-period and prior-year comparison columns.
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. Power BI runs on two meters — per user per month, and reserved capacity for the workspaces, refreshes and embedded reports that carry the load — and Microsoft publishes current figures for both, so take them from Microsoft rather than from us. Power BI Report Server on-premise is a third question again: it needs Premium capacity, or SQL Server Enterprise with Software Assurance, sitting behind it.
Self-hostable anywhere. Flat pricing. Embedded Analytics and Alert included. Made in Belgium.