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Power BI vs. SquaredUp: Which is right for IT teams?
This guide compares SquaredUp and Power BI across real-time monitoring, operational dashboards, business intelligence, data visualization, and reporting. Learn which platform is best suited for IT teams and enterprise organizations.
At first glance, Power BI and SquaredUp both look like dashboarding tools. In practice, they solve different problems.
SquaredUp serves engineering teams and IT teams, including SREs, DevOps engineers, engineering managers, and technology leaders. It connects to monitoring, cloud, DevOps, and ITSM platforms. This gives teams a real-time insights into service health, performance, and key metrics in one place.
Power BI is Microsoft's business intelligence platform, designed for analysts and business teams. It is great at turning large amounts of data into reports, dashboards, and long-term trends for business decisions.
The following comparison breaks down how the two platforms differ.
Feature comparison
Feature | Power BI | SquaredUp |
|---|---|---|
| Underlying Architecture | Uses a centralized setup that collects and prepares data before analyzing it. Complex data sources often require ETL pipelines. | Uses a data mesh architecture that queries source systems directly, providing a unified view without moving or duplicating data. |
| Setup & Integrations | Often requires custom connectors and data pipelines for IT and engineering data sources. | Offers built-in integrations for 100+ tools, with direct connections and no pipeline development required. |
| Time to first dashboard | Hours to days, especially when data needs to be consolidated, modeled, or integrated from multiple sources. | Minutes. Connect your tools and start visualizing data immediately. |
| Custom visualization & report design | Offers a large library of custom visuals through Microsoft AppSource, including maps, Gantt charts, decomposition trees, and other advanced visualizations. | Provides a focused set of visualizations for operational dashboards and KPI tracking. It does not support highly customized reports. |
| Query & customization | Fully customizable through DAX and Power Query — powerful for modeling and analyzing complex data, but requires learning Microsoft's proprietary languages. | SquaredUp supports custom SQL queries. Write standard SQL against any connected source to pull exactly the metrics your team needs. |
| Dashboard Sharing | Sharing dashboards across teams usually requires Pro or Premium licenses for viewers, causing costs to scale with adoption. | Flexible and low cost sharing model |
Now that you know how they work, here's how that translates into real-world use cases
Best fit by use case
Use Case | Power BI | SquaredUp |
|---|---|---|
| Business & financial reporting | ✅ Strong fit Built from structured enterprise data for financial reporting, business analytics, and executive dashboards. | ⚠️ Fit varies by audience Good fit for MSPs (client billing/usage reporting); not designed for enterprise financial/business analytics. |
| Cloud Cost & FinOps | ⚠️ Partial fit Requires building the connection to cloud cost/billing data yourself, but once modeled, can produce detailed FinOps dashboards with spend broken down by subscription, resource group, tag, and other business dimensions. | ✅ Strong fit Out-of-the-box cost dashboards for Azure, AWS, and GCP. Built-in plugins make live cost data available without any pipeline setup. |
| IT Health & Infrastructure | ⚠️ Partial fit Possible, but requires infrastructure data to be collected, modeled, and refreshed before it can be visualized effectively. | ✅ Strong fit Built-in integrations with VMware, Veeam, SCOM, Azure, AWS, and more by default, giving real-time visibility into infrastructure health. |
| Engineering KPIs & DORA Metrics | ⚠️ Partial fit Requires custom integration and modeling to calculate DORA metrics from tools such as GitHub, Jira, and Azure DevOps. | ✅ Strong fit Surfaces DORA metrics through native GitHub, Jira, and Azure DevOps integrations, with dashboards available out-of-the-box. |
| ITSM reporting | ⚠️ Partial fit Best for long-term trends, SLA reporting, and executive dashboards. Reporting on ITSM tools such as Jira and ServiceNow requires custom data modeling. | ✅ Strong fit Ready-to-use dashboards for ServiceNow, HaloITSM, Jira Service Management, and other platforms. Shows live ticket status, SLAs, and service performance. |
| NOC & Wallboard Displays | ⚠️ Partial fit Can be used for wallboards, but keeping dashboards displayed continuously often requires additional configuration or third-party solutions. | ✅ Strong fit Built for NOC screens and wallboards, with dashboards designed to stay visible 24/7. |
Here's what our customers say about SquaredUp
“SquaredUp is incredibly impressive.
It’s far easier to use than anything we’ve tried, and the data is consistently accurate.”
Matt Dunn
Operations Director, FocusIT
“We were on the hunt for a centralized dashboarding solution that was scalable and easy to share with customers. SquaredUp checked every box”
Andre Ghanima
.NET +DevOps Developer, Evidi
“We used to have that transparency a long time ago; we missed it a lot.
Now we have it back – and we’re super happy.”
Rob Brewer
CEO, Axio Tech
“The visualization inside of SquaredUp is second to none.”
Brian DeKind
President, DeKind
Stop building pipelines for data that's already there.
Connect your tools and bring engineering metrics, service health, cloud costs, and operational KPIs into one place. SquaredUp helps teams and large enterprises gain operational visibility with live dashboards. Start your free trial to see how SquaredUp unifies data from across your tools and services.
