BI + AI in one self-hosted platform — natural-language Ask (NL→SQL), AI anomaly detection and BYO LLM (local Ollama / LM Studio or Anthropic, Gemini, OpenAI, Azure) included by default. No expensive Pulse AI add-on, no Salesforce-Cloud-only AI, no per-seat Creator and Explorer sprawl.
No marketing fluff. Here is where each tool is genuinely stronger.
The features most teams actually evaluate when switching from Tableau.
From real migration conversations with data leaders.
Per-seat pricing looks fair at 10 users. By 50 users you are paying more for Tableau Creator, Explorer and Viewer seats plus a separately licensed embedded-analytics deal than you pay for most business applications in your stack.
Qrly is priced as a flat license tied to your company's revenue tier. The 51st user costs nothing. Neither does the 501st.
Reading a dashboard is cheap. Changing what it asks is not: authoring means a Creator licence, and for most organisations Tableau Desktop habits alongside it. Analysts queue behind the handful of people who hold the seats, and the questions nobody bothers to ask are the expensive part.
In Qrly every question opens in the visual builder or the SQL editor, and any chart point drills through to the rows behind it — ROWS mode strips the aggregation, FILTER mode narrows to the group you clicked. No second licence, no second application.
Authoring needs a Creator. Editing an existing workbook needs at least an Explorer. Reading needs a Viewer. Embedding dashboards in your own product is licensed separately again, and the generative-AI features exist only on Tableau Cloud. The licence matrix, not the software, is what most evaluations get stuck on.
Qrly ships the most-used of those capabilities as standard features. One vendor, one contract, one upgrade path.
Tableau Server is the supported self-host option, and it is still licensed per named user by role — Creator, Explorer, Viewer. The generative-AI features are Tableau Cloud only, so self-hosting and AI are a choice between two things rather than a combination.
Qrly self-hosts on any Linux box or Kubernetes cluster with no user minimum. Your data stays where you put it.
Our own list price in full, and an honest account of how Tableau 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.
Nothing has to be exported. Qrly reads the same databases and warehouses your Tableau workbooks already point at.
For most teams — yes. Qrly covers the core of what teams actually use Tableau for: connecting to the warehouse, building questions and dashboards, scheduled subscriptions and embedded analytics. Teams who depend on a dozen Tableau Exchange extensions should check the feature list first. What Salesforce splits across Creator, Explorer and Viewer seats is one licence in Qrly.
There is no workbook importer, and nothing that reads a .twbx file. Qrly connects to the same warehouse Tableau already reads — 40 connection types compiling to 12 SQL dialects — so the data itself never moves. Migration means repointing the connection and rebuilding each view as a Qrly question.
Custom SQL data sources come across directly: paste the SELECT into the Monaco editor and Qrly reverse-engineers a flat SELECT into a visual definition, flagging CTEs, UNION and subqueries as lossy.
Yes — and without per-seat licensing. Tableau Server runs on your own hardware but still charges for every named Creator, Explorer and Viewer. A single Qrly licence covers unlimited users on your own infrastructure, bare metal or Kubernetes, priced on your revenue rather than your headcount.
Yes — QQL, and it compiles to SQL rather than replacing it. QQL is a JSON query document built in the visual builder: a source table or another saved question, column selections, a nested AND/OR filter tree, aggregations, breakouts, having, order-by, joins and a preferred IANA timezone. The compiler emits SQL for 12 dialects, so the same question runs unchanged on Postgres, BigQuery, Snowflake or SQL Server.
For time-based analysis it offers the PAST_N_DAYS, START_OF_MONTH and AT_TIMEZONE operators, an OLAP time hierarchy from year down to hour, and prior-period and prior-year comparison columns.
Qrly does not replace a data-preparation tool. It reads what is already in your database and shapes it there — calculated fields validated server-side, joins across saved questions, and star or snowflake OLAP models with a dimension and measure catalogue. Teams with heavy transformation keep dbt or their existing ELT and point Qrly at the result.
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. Tableau is licensed per named user and split by role — Creator, Explorer and Viewer — with embedded analytics as a separate commercial arrangement, and Salesforce publishes the current per-role list prices itself. Take those numbers from Salesforce rather than from us, then multiply them by your headcount and by thirty-six months. That multiplication is the entire argument.
Self-hostable. Flat pricing. Your warehouse, your model, your LLM. Made in Belgium.