Mammoth vs Power BI
Power BI feels free.
Until your team actually uses it.
Power BI's price sounds great because it hides inside Microsoft 365. The real costs show up later — Power BI Pro licenses for every analyst, Premium capacity for any meaningful sharing, DAX expertise to make the formulas behave, and an IT team to keep it all running. Mammoth gives business users a self-service dashboard platform with free unlimited viewers — and the data preparation built in.
The honest version
Power BI does serious work inside Microsoft-aligned enterprises. The integration with Excel, Azure, and the Microsoft identity stack is real. If your data team is fluent in DAX and your organisation is fully Microsoft 365, Power BI is a defensible choice — for them.
What it isn't is a self-service tool for business users. The "anyone can build a dashboard" promise tends to dissolve the moment someone needs Power Query to join two tables, or a DAX measure that respects time intelligence, or a Pro licence to share their work with someone outside their workspace. Mammoth was built for the business user that Power BI keeps promising to empower — and the team behind them that doesn't want to argue about licences every quarter.
What "free with Microsoft" actually costs
Four claims about Power BI worth examining.
The pitch
"It's free with our Microsoft 365 subscription."
Power BI is included with Microsoft 365 E5 — for individual analysis. Sharing dashboards with anyone, internal or external, requires a Power BI Pro licence per user ($14/month) or Premium capacity (starting around $4,995/month).
The math
Mammoth viewers are always free.
Every plan, every dashboard, every viewer. No Pro licence required. No Premium capacity to negotiate. 500 viewers cost $0 on Free. They also cost $0 on Enterprise.
The pitch
"Anyone can build dashboards in Power BI."
Anyone can drag fields onto a canvas. Making the numbers right typically requires DAX (Microsoft's measure language), Power Query M (its data prep language), and an understanding of star schemas and relationships. In practice, "anyone" means "someone with weeks of training."
The math
In Mammoth, anyone means anyone.
Describe what you want to see in English. AI generates the dashboard. Pick a theme. Refine by typing. No DAX. No M. No semantic model to design. First dashboard in 15 minutes.
The pitch
"Power BI handles data preparation."
Power Query (the M language) handles row-level transformations inside the dataset. For pipeline-level work — scheduling, dependencies, multi-source consolidation, approval gates, audit logs — you'll typically need Azure Data Factory, Synapse, or a third-party tool. And someone to maintain them.
The math
Mammoth includes the whole pipeline.
Connect, prepare, automate, control — all in the same platform as dashboards. No separate Data Factory. No DAX-for-prep workarounds. One product, one bill, one place to debug.
The pitch
"It scales — just buy Premium capacity."
Premium capacity starts around $4,995/month for F64 SKU. For larger datasets or higher concurrency, costs scale into five and six figures annually. Most mid-market teams hit the threshold sooner than expected.
The math
Mammoth scales without unlocking a new SKU.
The same DuckDB engine powers Free and Enterprise. 1B+ rows processed monthly at Starbucks. You move tiers for more storage, more users, or longer audit retention — never to unlock performance.
Two ways to use Mammoth
Replace Power BI, or coexist.
Both paths are real. Both are common. Pick the one that matches your team.
01
Replacement path
For teams stuck on Power BI licence complexity.
If your Pro/Premium licensing is a quarterly negotiation, if business users wait on IT to publish dashboards, if Power Query has become a black box only one person understands — Mammoth replaces the whole thing.
- Self-service for business users, really this time
- No DAX, no M, no semantic modelling
- Pipeline, dashboards, and sharing all in one platform
- Predictable pricing — no Premium capacity tiers
02
Coexist path
For teams keeping Power BI for IT-driven analytics.
Power BI stays where it earns its keep — IT-managed semantic models, complex DAX, Azure-native pipelines. Mammoth becomes the self-service layer business users can actually use, feeding clean data to Power BI through a managed database.
- Managed PostgreSQL or BigQuery, provisioned in 5 minutes
- Power BI gets a clean, well-modelled data source
- Business users build dashboards in Mammoth; IT keeps Power BI
- Fewer licence arguments per quarter
Side by side
Where Mammoth and Power BI differ.
Based on Microsoft's published documentation and Power BI pricing as of early 2026.
| Capability | Mammoth | Power BI |
|---|---|---|
| Getting started | ||
| Time to first published dashboard | 15 minutes | Days to weeks (training + Power Query + DAX) |
| Required skills | English. AI generates the dashboard. | DAX, Power Query (M), basic data modelling |
| Tool surface | One web app. Same workspace from sign-up to publish. | Desktop (build), Service (publish), Mobile, Report Builder |
| Data preparation | ||
| Built-in prep | Visual pipeline + SQL + generative AI | Power Query (M language) |
| Pipeline orchestration | Built in — scheduling, dependencies, webhooks | External — Data Factory, Synapse, Fabric (separate) |
| AI-assisted transformation | Native generative AI on every plan | Copilot in Fabric (separate licence, recent) |
| Approval gates and audit | Built in — checkpoints, draft mode, activity log | External governance tools or Microsoft Purview |
| Sharing & viewing | ||
| Cost per viewer | $0 — viewers always free on every plan | Pro licence required ($14/user/mo) OR Premium capacity ($4,995+/mo) |
| External / public sharing | Public link, password-protected, authenticated — all included | Publish to web (public-only, limited governance) |
| Embed in your own product | REST API + Python SDK on every plan | Power BI Embedded (separate Azure capacity) |
| Pricing | ||
| Per-user licence | $249–$699/mo for a 50-user Pro team | Pro: $14/user/mo. Premium Per User: $24/user/mo. |
| Capacity-based | — | Premium F64: ~$4,995/mo. Higher SKUs scale into six figures. |
| Free tier | Full Free plan — 3 dashboards, single-tenant, AI included | Power BI Service Free — individual use, no sharing |
| Where Power BI remains stronger | ||
| Microsoft 365 integration | SSO via SAML/OIDC. Native Excel and OneDrive connectors. | Native with Excel, Teams, SharePoint, Azure AD |
| DAX language | SQL + AI-generated transformations. No DAX needed. | Mature, powerful for complex time intelligence and measures |
| Fabric ecosystem | Independent platform. Feeds and reads from any database. | Integrated with Synapse, Data Factory, OneLake |
Power BI pricing reflects published list prices as of early 2026. Actual customer pricing may vary with EA agreements, volume discounts, and Microsoft 365 bundling.
The pricing math
A 10-person team. 500 viewers.
10 builders. 500 stakeholders who need to see the dashboards. Here's what it costs each way.
Power BI · Pro licence model
~$85,680/yr
10 Pro builders × $14/mo × 12 = $1,680
500 viewers × $14/mo Pro × 12 = $84,000
Total: $85,680 / year
Alternative: Premium F64 capacity ≈ $60K/yr, still requires Pro for builders.
Mammoth Pro (annual)
~$6,708/yr
10 builders on Pro
500 viewers, included — $0
Total: $6,708 / year
About $79,000 saved per year in the Pro-licence model — and Mammoth includes the data preparation, automation, and pipeline orchestration that you'd otherwise buy as Data Factory, Synapse, or Fabric add-ons.
From customers
Real teams, real pain.
"We reduced our data consolidation process from over 40 hours a month to minutes — and unified our on-trade and off-trade channel data in a single view for the first time."
Customer · previously on Excel & Power BI
"The speed of insights is impressive — as is the visualisation. We went from raw data to a published executive dashboard in under fifteen minutes."
Customer · uses Tableau and Power BI internally
Common questions
What people ask before they switch.
We're already deep in Microsoft 365. Does Mammoth fit?
Yes. Mammoth has native connectors for Excel, OneDrive, SharePoint, and any SQL database (including Azure SQL, Synapse). SSO works via Azure AD. You don't have to leave the Microsoft stack — you just stop needing Power BI as the dashboarding layer.
What happens to my DAX measures?
DAX doesn't translate directly — it's tied to Power BI's semantic model. For most measures (sums, averages, ratios, period comparisons, basic time intelligence), Mammoth handles them natively in the pipeline or via SQL. For genuinely complex DAX work, the Coexist path lets you keep Power BI for those specific reports.
Can my viewers see dashboards without a Microsoft account?
Yes. Public link works with no login. Password-protected requires the password but no account. Authenticated requires a Mammoth account — free and unlimited.
What about row-level security? Power BI has it built in.
Mammoth supports it on the dashboard layer (one dashboard, each viewer sees only their authorised rows). The full feature rolls out in 2026 — see the spec. For the Coexist path, RLS continues to work in Power BI as today.
Will my Excel users feel comfortable in Mammoth?
This is the most common feedback we get: yes, more comfortable than in Power BI. The visual pipeline reads like a series of named steps; the data grid behaves like a spreadsheet they can filter, sort, and inspect. Most users describe the learning curve as 15 minutes, not 15 days.