Alternatives
Best Sigma alternatives
Sigma is a spreadsheet over a warehouse, and for a team that thinks in formulas there is nothing else quite like it. Two things send people looking. It needs one of seven data platforms in place before you start, and it publishes no price, so the route in is a trial and then a sales call. The queries the grid generates also land on your Snowflake or BigQuery bill rather than Sigma’s invoice. Here are nine alternatives, grouped by the job they suit.
How to read this
Flitch publishes this page and is one of the tools on it. Prices are the vendors’ own published figures, and every entry says what the tool costs you as well as what it is good at.
Prices checked
At a glance
| Tool | Best for | Entry price |
|---|---|---|
| Power BI | Companies already running Microsoft 365, Azure or Fabric. | Free account, then $14/user/month paid yearly |
| Tableau | Analysts who want the deepest visual exploration available. | Creator $75/user/month, billed annually |
| Looker | Teams who want every metric defined once and governed. | No public pricing |
| ThoughtSpot | Teams who would rather people asked a question than opened a dashboard. | Essentials from $25/user/month, billed annually |
| Flitch | Teams who want dashboards, reports, apps and workflows built from a description. | Free tier, then $20/month |
| Metabase | Teams with an engineer who can run a container. | Free self-hosted, or $90/month + $6/user |
| Apache Superset | Engineering teams who want to run their own BI layer. | Free, self-hosted |
| Hex | Data teams who work in notebooks. | Free Community tier, then $36/editor/month |
| Looker Studio | Reporting on Google Ads, Analytics and Sheets with no budget. | Free |
Enterprise BI
Power BI
Free account, then $14/user/month paid yearly- Best for.
- Companies already running Microsoft 365, Azure or Fabric.
- Where it wins.
- $14 per user per month paid yearly, the cheapest enterprise BI seat there is.
- What it costs you.
- Copilot is not in that price. It needs a Fabric capacity from $262.80 a month on top of seats, and Desktop is Windows only.
Tableau
Creator $75/user/month, billed annually- Best for.
- Analysts who want the deepest visual exploration available.
- Where it wins.
- More control over how a chart looks and behaves than anything else here.
- What it costs you.
- $75 per creator per month billed annually, and it expects someone whose job is building views.
Looker
No public pricing- Best for.
- Teams who want every metric defined once and governed.
- Where it wins.
- LookML puts definitions in version control, so a number means the same thing in every report.
- What it costs you.
- No public pricing, and LookML is an engineering job to write and then keep current.
ThoughtSpot
Essentials from $25/user/month, billed annually- Best for.
- Teams who would rather people asked a question than opened a dashboard.
- Where it wins.
- Search straight onto a live warehouse, with an agent over it.
- What it costs you.
- From $25 per user per month billed annually, and it needs a modelled warehouse first.
Looker Studio
Free- Best for.
- Reporting on Google Ads, Analytics and Sheets with no budget.
- Where it wins.
- Free, with Google sources connected in a couple of clicks.
- What it costs you.
- Thin modelling, and it slows badly once the data is large or needs joining.
Built around AI
Flitch
Free tier, then $20/month- Best for.
- Teams who want dashboards, reports, apps and workflows built from a description.
- Where it wins.
- AI on every plan including the free one, and every chart shows the dataset, columns and calculation behind it.
- What it costs you.
- SCIM and running it in your own cloud need an Enterprise agreement, and it does not build an app with its own auth and payments.
Open source and developer-first
Metabase
Free self-hosted, or $90/month + $6/user- Best for.
- Teams with an engineer who can run a container.
- Where it wins.
- Free under AGPL v3 for unlimited users if you self-host. That is a genuine advantage.
- What it costs you.
- Someone deploys it, upgrades it and keeps it up, and AI sits on the paid tiers.
Apache Superset
Free, self-hosted- Best for.
- Engineering teams who want to run their own BI layer.
- Where it wins.
- Free, and running at scale inside large companies.
- What it costs you.
- Standing it up and keeping it current is a real job, and it assumes SQL.
Hex
Free Community tier, then $36/editor/month- Best for.
- Data teams who work in notebooks.
- Where it wins.
- Python, SQL and no-code cells in one document.
- What it costs you.
- $36 per editor per month after the free tier, and it is built for analysts rather than for the people reading the output.
When to stay with Sigma
- Your team is spreadsheet-fluent and wants formulas rather than prompts.
- You work interactively over hundreds of millions of rows in a warehouse.
- Writing back into the warehouse is part of the process, not a nice extra.
- You are embedding governed analytics inside your own product.
Questions
Which alternative is closest to a spreadsheet?
None of them match the grid, and pretending otherwise would be unhelpful. Power BI and Tableau both read Excel and neither behaves like it. Flitch takes typed data through input tables, so collection does not go back to a spreadsheet, but the authoring is a description rather than a formula.
Do I need a cloud warehouse?
Only for Sigma, Looker and ThoughtSpot. Flitch, Power BI, Tableau, Metabase and Looker Studio read ordinary databases, files and SaaS tools, which turns the warehouse into a choice rather than a prerequisite.
What will Sigma cost?
There is no published figure. Expect a per-seat quote on an annual contract, and then the warehouse compute behind every query on top. The second part is easy to miss, because it arrives from your cloud provider.
Which alternatives write data back?
Flitch has input tables held with it, so a dashboard or an app accepts data entry. Hex writes back through code you write. Sigma writes into the warehouse itself, which is the strongest version of this and the reason some teams stay.
What suits finance reporting best?
If the model lives in formulas, Sigma. If the monthly pack has to arrive as a report, on a schedule, with every number traceable to its calculation, Flitch builds and sends it. Power BI sits between the two and DAX is the price of being there.