Domo vs Lightdash

Domo is a cloud business intelligence platform founded in 2010 in Utah by Josh James, co-founder of Omniture, and listed on Nasdaq in 2018. It combines data integration, dashboards, low-code apps and AI in one hosted product aimed at business teams, not only analysts. In September 2026 Progress Software completed a $400 million acquisition of Domo's AI and data platform business, so Domo now sits inside Progress's data portfolio.

The platform includes 1,000+ prebuilt connectors, drag-and-drop Magic ETL, Cloud Amplifier for querying Snowflake, BigQuery or Databricks without copying data, charts and dashboards, scheduled reports and alerts, App Studio for low-code data apps, embedded analytics for customer-facing reporting, workflows and AI agents with governed model management. Pricing is credit-based: you buy a pool of credits consumed by storage, data refreshes, workflows and AI, with unlimited users and a 30-day free trial.

Domo fits mid-size and large companies that want one vendor for pipelines and dashboards and value mobile, executive-friendly reporting. Power BI is far cheaper for Microsoft shops, Tableau has deeper visual analytics, and Looker Studio or Metabase cover simpler needs for little or no cost. Credit consumption can be hard to forecast, and independent estimates put typical contracts in the tens of thousands of dollars per year.

Buying tip: because of the Progress acquisition, ask about roadmap, support continuity and contract terms before renewing or signing a multi-year deal, and model credit burn on your real refresh schedules during the trial.

Lightdash is an open-source business intelligence tool built on top of dbt, made by a London-based startup. Instead of defining metrics in a separate BI layer, analysts declare dimensions, metrics and joins in the same dbt YAML files that describe their models, so business logic is version-controlled, reviewed in pull requests and reused everywhere.

Business users then explore those governed metrics through a point-and-click interface, build charts and dashboards, and schedule deliveries to Slack, email or Google Sheets. Lightdash also offers an AI analyst that answers natural language questions using the semantic layer, a SQL runner, spaces with permissions, dashboards-as-code and embedding for customer-facing analytics. The core is open source and can be self-hosted for free, while Lightdash Cloud adds managed hosting with unlimited viewers, and Enterprise adds SSO, embedding, advanced permissions and support.

It is a strong fit for data teams that already run dbt and want a semantic-layer BI without Looker's cost or a proprietary modeling language. It requires dbt, so teams without it are better served by Metabase or Power BI. Visualization options are less rich than Tableau, and cloud pricing starts at a level aimed at companies rather than individuals. Looker is the closest conceptual match, while Metabase and Superset are open-source alternatives that work directly on database tables.