Domo vs. Power BI

Two tools that commonly come up when searching for a cloud BI tool are Domo and Microsoft’s Power BI. Let’s take a look at each tool and better understand how they can support your BI needs.

Introduction to Domo

Domo is an end-to-end solution for business intelligence. It has features that cover all of your BI needs, including connecting all your data sources, analyzing and visualizing your data, low-code and no-code application building environment, decision intelligence support, and the ability to easily publish and share data wherever you need to share it.

Domo makes it easy to connect all your data into one platform, integrate data science and AI tools for analysis, create powerful and customized reports, and then share data with partners and stakeholders through embedded analytics. Domo focuses on intelligence and providing automatic, real-time insights that enable decisions, not just analytics.

Introduction to Power BI

Because Power BI is part of the Microsoft family, its use and integration fit well into the entire Microsoft Office suite. This can be both a benefit and a drawback. Users deeply familiar with advanced Office tools will find Power BI has a similar feel. The drawback is that some features can have a steep learning curve and aren’t as powerful as other tools on the market.

Comparing key features

In order to understand how Domo differs from Power BI, let’s take a look at some key features you need for your cloud BI solution and how each tool performs.

Domo product highlights:

Dashboards: Domo includes tools to build custom and ad hoc business intelligence dashboards. With an intuitive UI, users can easily create shareable dashboards with a large variety of visualizations through Domo’s native chart library.

Visualizations: Domo has more than 150 interactive chart types. Domo also includes apps that allow you to connect to other chart-building libraries so you can build visualizations with the tools you feel most comfortable with.

Integrations: With more than 1,000 pre-built connectors, Domo allows you to easily connect your data from nearly anywhere, including your existing data lake or data warehouse. Plus, with powerful ETL tools, you can easily build custom connections to any data source.

Governance: Domo was built with governance in mind. It comes with intuitive governance features for enabling self-service BI, allowing teams to create user profiles, track and audit usage, and perform impact analysis across multiple data environments.

Data Science: Included within Domo are critical data science actions that help you prepare and analyze data. Plus, integration with R and Python means you can write custom scripts within the platform. Tools like AutoML allow you to deploy machine learning algorithms across your data environment.

Intelligent Applications: Domo allows users to build custom low- and no-code applications. These applications support integrating data where and when needed. Use them to connect custom data sources or build data workflows into third-party applications.

Power BI Product Highlights:

Dashboards: Power BI includes tools to build drag-and-drop reports. These can be saved and published to be used on other websites or accessed through the Power BI mobile application (separate from the desktop application).

Visualizations: Users can use hundreds of visuals available through the Microsoft app store, or they can create their own visuals through the open source tool Custom Visuals Framework.

Integrations: While Power BI says it includes integrations with other platforms, many of these are “premium” connectors that come at an extra cost.

Governance: Power BI does have tools that enable governance. However, some components have to be built from the ground up and can delay roll out of your platform.

Data Science: Tools like Power Query include a data modeling feature that is very similar to other Microsoft products, including Excel. Power BI also features AI tools to further enhance your data science. However, users are not able to build custom data science or AI-based models within Power BI.

Where Domo shines for enterprise BI

Domo shines as an enterprise BI platform. Here are some key advantages to using Domo over Power BI.

Usable and intuitive features: Because Domo is an all-in-one BI solution, built purposefully for cloud-enabled BI, you only need one tool to manage all your needs. Domo consistently ranks higher than Power BI on ease of use across all features. The platform is designed to support both the general business user and advanced data science professionals.

Customized to your needs: Domo includes many pre-built features that allow you to tailor your BI to your needs. It also includes an intelligent app-building environment so you can continue to customize your BI in ways that fit directly into your workflows.

Additionally, Domo has wide-ranging integration capabilities that allow you to connect your data across a variety of data sources and tools — even Power BI.

Education and support from Domo: Domo includes an advanced and active user community at Domo Dojo. Users also get access to Domo University for training and ongoing tutorials of different platform features. The Domo Knowledge Base includes articles related to Domo features and general data science guidelines to help users gain a deeper understanding of how to enable and apply data science and BI in their organizations.