Mammoth vs Power BI
Microsoft-estate economics, or free viewers with prep included.
If your organisation is already deep in Microsoft, Power BI is hard to argue with on price. It is bundled or cheap per seat and it sits next to everything else you use. Teams hit friction in the middle of the workflow instead: dataflows and gateways to maintain, DAX to learn, and a per-viewer cost that quietly caps who gets to see the dashboard. Mammoth keeps prep, refresh and sharing in one place and never charges for viewers.
Side by side
The same nine criteria we use on every comparison
Including the two where the answer doesn't favour us.
| Mammoth | Power BI | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to first trustworthy dashboard | Around 15 minutes from raw data | Days. Faster if the model already exists |
| Who can build one | Anyone on the team, in plain language | An analyst. DAX for anything non-trivial |
| Data preparation | Same product, same canvas, re-runnable | Power Query and dataflows, extra setup |
| Cost to share with 200 viewers | $0. Viewers are free on every plan | Pro or Premium per-user, or a capacity purchase |
| Keeping numbers current | Scheduled and event-driven refresh, built in | Scheduled refresh via a gateway you maintain |
| On-premise and hybrid sources | Direct connections, or SFTP and API ingestion | Strong, via the on-premises data gateway |
| Microsoft estate integration | Connectors to SharePoint, SQL Server and more | Deeper. This is Power BI's core advantage |
| Entry price | Free tier, then $199/mo | Low per-user, often already licensed |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type II, ISO/IEC 27001:2022, HIPAA, GDPR | Varies by vendor, edition and region — check their trust page |
Power BI pricing and capabilities as published August 2026. If something here is out of date, tell us and we'll fix it.
Fair's fair
What Power BI does better
No comparison is worth reading if it pretends the other tool has no advantages. These are real.
- Excellent value if you already hold Microsoft 365 or Fabric licences
- Tight integration with Excel, Teams, Azure and the wider estate
- A very large community and abundant learning material
- Strong semantic modelling once DAX is in place
So which should you pick?
Genuinely depends on the job. Here's how we'd decide.
Choose Power BI if…
- You're standardised on Microsoft and licences are already paid for
- You have someone comfortable with DAX and dataflows
- Most consumption happens inside Teams and Excel
Choose Mammoth if…
- You don't want to run gateways or learn DAX to get a number out
- Viewer licensing is limiting who sees the dashboard
- The data arrives messy and needs real preparation first
Test it against your own data.
Twenty minutes on the free plan will tell you more about the difference than this page can. Keep Power BI running while you do.
- 21-day Pro trial
- No credit card
- Viewers always free