The 2025 Plan to Ditch Power BI: My FOSS BI Project

Introduction: The Inevitable BI Crossroads

For years, Power BI has been my go-to tool for data visualization and business intelligence. It’s powerful, deeply integrated with the Microsoft stack, and its entry-level Pro license seems deceptively affordable. But as my team's needs have grown and our desire for flexibility has intensified, I've found myself standing at a crossroads. The very features that once felt like strengths—the seamless ecosystem, the managed service—now feel like constraints. That’s why I’ve drafted my 2025 plan: to methodically migrate my organization away from Power BI and onto a fully self-hosted, Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) BI stack.

This isn't just about saving money. It's about reclaiming ownership, fostering innovation, and building a data platform that truly fits our unique needs, not the other way around. This post documents my reasoning, the alternatives I considered, and the actionable roadmap I'm implementing to make this ambitious project a reality.

The Growing Pains: Why I'm Leaving Power BI

Power BI is an incredible tool for many, but its model presents significant challenges as you scale or seek deeper control over your data environment.

The Reality of "Affordable" Licensing

The Power BI Pro license at ~$10/user/month is a brilliant market entry strategy. However, the costs quickly escalate. Need to share reports with a wider, view-only audience without licensing every single person? You're pushed towards Premium Per User (~$20/user/month) or the much more expensive Premium Per Capacity model, which starts at thousands of dollars per month. This per-user pricing model punishes data democratization, making it prohibitively expensive to give everyone in the company access to insights.

The Golden Handcuffs of the Microsoft Ecosystem

Microsoft has perfected the art of the walled garden. Your reports are built in the Power BI Desktop app, published to the Power BI Service, and deeply intertwined with Azure and Office 365. The language, DAX (Data Analysis Expressions), is powerful but also proprietary and has a steep learning curve. Migrating dozens or hundreds of complex DAX-driven reports to another platform is a monumental task, creating a powerful incentive to stay, even if the fit is no longer perfect. This is classic vendor lock-in, and I'm ready to break free.

Hitting the Customization Ceiling

While Power BI has a vast library of custom visuals, you are ultimately limited by what the platform allows. Want to embed analytics in a truly custom way? Need to modify the BI tool's source code to add a specific feature? With a SaaS product like Power BI, you can't. You are a tenant in their service. A FOSS solution, on the other hand, gives you the keys to the kingdom. You can modify, extend, and integrate it in ways a proprietary tool would never permit.

Why FOSS? The Allure of Open-Source BI

My decision to move to a FOSS alternative is driven by three core principles: ownership, predictable costs, and community-led innovation.

Gaining Control and True Data Ownership

With a self-hosted FOSS BI tool, you own the entire stack. The application runs on your servers (or your private cloud), connects to your databases, and you control every aspect of the data's journey. There are no opaque service layers or sudden feature deprecations from a vendor. The code is transparent, and you have ultimate control over security, compliance, and your technology roadmap.

A More Predictable Cost Model

FOSS isn't free—you still pay for hosting, maintenance, and development time. However, it shifts the cost model from unpredictable, per-user license fees to predictable, infrastructure-based operational expenses. Whether you have 10 users or 1,000, your software cost is zero. Your only scaling cost is the server infrastructure required to handle the load, which is far more manageable and predictable than SaaS license creep.

Tapping into Community-Driven Innovation

Tools like Apache Superset and Metabase are backed by vibrant, global communities. This means rapid development cycles, a constant stream of new features, and a wealth of shared knowledge in forums, blogs, and chat channels. If you encounter a bug or need a new database connector, you can often find a solution from the community or even contribute one yourself. This collaborative ecosystem is a powerful engine for innovation.

FOSS BI Showdown: Power BI vs. The Challengers

To make an informed decision, I compared Power BI against the two leading FOSS contenders: Metabase and Apache Superset.

My Project: Building a New BI Stack with Metabase

After careful consideration of the options, I chose Metabase as the cornerstone of my new FOSS BI project. Here’s why and how I'm setting it up.

Why Metabase? Simplicity Meets Power

While Superset is incredibly powerful, its complexity felt like a lateral move from Power BI's steeper learning curves. My primary goal is data democratization—enabling our marketing, sales, and operations teams to answer their own questions without writing a single line of SQL. Metabase excels at this. Its intuitive "Ask a question" interface allows non-technical users to explore data, filter, and summarize with a few clicks. For our data analysts, the full SQL editor is still there when needed. It strikes the perfect balance for our organization.

Our Self-Hosted BI Architecture

Our new stack is designed for simplicity and scalability:

• Hosting: We are deploying Metabase via Docker on an AWS EC2 instance. This gives us full control and allows us to easily scale the server resources as needed.
• Application Database: A small, managed PostgreSQL instance (AWS RDS) stores all the Metabase metadata—questions, dashboards, users, and permissions.
• Data Source: Metabase connects directly to our primary data warehouse, which is built on Snowflake. The connectivity was seamless.

Early Challenges and Smart Solutions

The transition wasn't without its challenges. The primary hurdle was replicating some of the complex, multi-table data models we had in Power BI. The solution was to push that complexity down into the data warehouse layer. We created pre-joined, aggregated views in Snowflake specifically for BI consumption. This not only solved the problem but also improved performance and created a single source of truth for our business logic, rather than having it locked away in a PBIX file.

The 2025 Roadmap: A Phased Migration Plan

A big-bang migration is a recipe for disaster. My plan for 2025 is a phased approach to ensure a smooth transition and user adoption.

Q1: Proof of Concept & Core Dashboard Replication

The first quarter is focused on proving the viability of Metabase. I will identify the top 5 most-used Power BI reports and meticulously replicate them. This will serve as a functional benchmark and a powerful demonstration for stakeholders.

Q2: User Training and Internal Onboarding

With a working proof of concept, Q2 is all about the people. We will run workshops for different departments, showcasing how to use Metabase to answer their own questions. We'll create simple documentation and onboard a pilot group of "power users" to champion the new tool.

Q3: Parallel Operations and New Development

In Q3, both systems will run in parallel. However, all new requests for dashboards or analytics will be built exclusively in Metabase. This stops the growth of our Power BI dependency and gradually shifts the center of gravity to the new FOSS stack.

Q4: Final Migration and Sunsetting Power BI

The final quarter is for the endgame. We will conduct a final audit of any remaining essential reports in Power BI, migrate them, and formally communicate a decommissioning date. By year-end, we will cancel our Power BI Premium licenses and be fully operational on our FOSS BI platform.

Conclusion: Is Ditching Power BI Right for You?

My plan to ditch Power BI is not a critique of the tool itself, but an acknowledgment that our organization's priorities have evolved. We now value ownership, flexibility, and predictable costs over the convenience of a managed, all-in-one ecosystem.

This path is not for everyone. If your company is deeply embedded in the Microsoft stack and your BI needs are met without significant cost or flexibility concerns, Power BI might remain the perfect choice. But if you're a tech-savvy team, a cost-conscious organization, or a company that fiercely values data ownership and customizability, then a move to a FOSS BI solution like Metabase or Superset isn't just possible—it's a strategic imperative. My 2025 project is underway, and I couldn't be more excited about building a future on a foundation that we truly own.