Microsoft Power BI vs Redash
Microsoft Power BI and Redash are both business intelligence software. Microsoft Power BI is a commercial product from Microsoft. Redash is open source under BSD-2-Clause, with 29k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Microsoft Power BI when
- An organisation on Microsoft 365 wants low-cost BI that Excel users can pick up.
- Pick Redash when
- Your analysts work in SQL and want a simple query-and-dashboard tool.
Side by side
Microsoft's BI tool for modelling data, building reports and dashboards, and sharing them through Microsoft 365 and Fabric.
Connects to many data sources so SQL users can write queries, visualise results and share dashboards and alerts.
The desktop authoring tool is Windows-only, and capacity licensing through Fabric can get confusing.
After Databricks acquired it, development moved to the community and slowed for a period.
Production-ready (both)
Desktop app and cloud service
Self-hosted server
DAX and Power Query
Python, TypeScript, React, PostgreSQL and Redis
Closed source, sold by Microsoft
Open source, BSD-2-Clause (permissive)
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
2.5k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
29k GitHub stars
Not known
Established: started 13 years ago, latest release v26.9.0.
Other comparisons
More business intelligence and dashboard tools
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.