Domo vs Microsoft Power BI

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.

Microsoft Power BI is the most widely used business intelligence platform in the world, especially in organizations that already run on Microsoft 365, Azure and Excel. It turns data from spreadsheets, databases, cloud services and enterprise systems into interactive reports and dashboards.

The workflow starts in Power BI Desktop, a free Windows application where analysts connect to hundreds of data sources, clean and reshape data with Power Query, build data models with relationships, and write calculations in DAX. Reports are published to the Power BI service, where they are shared through workspaces and apps, embedded in Teams, SharePoint and custom applications and secured with row-level security. Microsoft Fabric, launched in 2023, adds data engineering, warehousing, real-time analytics and OneLake storage on shared capacity. Copilot generates report pages, summaries and DAX from natural language. Licensing is per user (Pro, Premium Per User) or per capacity through Fabric, where viewers on larger capacities do not need paid licenses; Microsoft raised Pro and Premium Per User prices in April 2025.

Power BI suits organizations of every size inside the Microsoft ecosystem, and enterprises that need governed, company-wide reporting at a low per-user cost. DAX and data modeling have a real learning curve, and Desktop authoring runs only on Windows. Tableau offers more flexible visual exploration, Looker focuses on a governed semantic layer for Google Cloud users, and Metabase or Superset are open-source options for teams wanting simpler or self-hosted BI.