What is Headless BI?
Headless BI refers to business intelligence software that operates without a traditional user interface. In other words, it is a BI product that delivers data and insights to other applications or systems, rather than presenting them to end-users through a visual dashboard or reporting tool. In fact, this is a special case of embedded BI where data visualisation part is custom but reporting API is provided by the headless BI component. Main benefits are:
- Headless BI allows organizations to more easily integrate their business intelligence data with existing applications and at the same time satify even very custom data visualisation requirements.
- Better scalability: headless BI systems are designed to deliver data and insights to other applications, they can be more easily scaled to meet the needs of growing organizations.
- Reduced costs: headless BI can be a more cost-effective solution for organizations because it eliminates the need for expensive visual reporting and dashboard tools.
On practice headless BI product is a self-hosted server application that exposes reporting web API for making analytical queries and data exports. This application has a configuration (usually in the form of JSON or yml) that contains all necessary metadata needed to translate these analytical API queries into database queries.
Headless BI Products Comparison
| Product | Price | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cube.js |
Core: free
Cloud: $$
Premium: $10k/year
|
Open source / Free when self-hosted ("Cube Core"). Built-in pre-aggregations. Client-side API library (JS), integration examples. A lot of built-in data connectors. | No high-level API for reports (only raw data is returned). No built-in exports to PDF, Excel, CSV or rendering to HTML/image. No XMLA connector (for SSAS). |
| MetricFlow |
(free)
Cloud: $$
Team plan: $100/mo/seat
|
Free/Open source (self-hosted). This is more a semantic layer middleware which hides complexity of underlying DB queries from client applications. | Non-aggregated queries are not supported. MetricFlow doesn't offer any API for reports generation: HTML rendering/exports should be implemented on your side (or another BI product). Introduces its own MQL syntax. Lack of support by many BI tools. Many DBs are not supported either (like MySQL). |
| PivotData Microservice |
$
Starts from $999
|
High-level web API for tabular reports HTML generation (including pivot tables) and exports to various formats: PDF, Excel, CSV, JSON, image. PivotDataService API is suitable for interactive end-user report builder (client-side example is included). A lot of built-in data connectors, built-in DuckDB. Custom connectors are supported (your own web API as a data source). PivotDataService can use another headless BI products as a data source (say, cube.js via Postgre connector). | No automatic built-in pre-aggregations (only short-living in memory cache). |
| GoodData |
$$
Starts from $12,000/year
|
Combines embedded BI capabilities with API-first approach. Offers predictive analytics capabilities, strong security and governance features. | Cloud-native solution (free self-hosted Community Edition is suitable only for evaluation), enterprise-grade pricing. |
| icCube |
$$$
More than $22,000/year
|
This is an OLAP server with XMLA/MDX interface with a separate "Web Dashboards" front-end / Supports Excel as a client / can be used as a drop-in SSAS replacement | To benefit from the full power of icCube you need MDX knowledge. |
| PowerBI |
$$$
Premium starts from $59,940/year
|
PBI has a sematic layer inside and it can be used as a 'headless BI' via Execute Queries API / Reports Export To File API or XMLA endpoint (so even Excel can be used as a front-end!). | XMLA endpoints / self-hosted version require PowerBI Premium which is rather expensive. No export to simple <table> HTML. |