Excel & Google Sheets
BI Tools
Universal. Anyone with spreadsheet skills.
Universal. Anyone with spreadsheet skills.
Rigid UIs. Most users export data to work in spreadsheets.
1 billion+ rows (1000x Excel's limits)
Excel – 1,048,576 row limit. Google Sheets – 10M cell limit.
Unlimited — compute and processing is pushed down to the data warehouse.
Real-time interactivity. Fast with big data.
Real-time interactivity. Slow with big data.
Slow due to compute and processing delegated to the data warehouse.
Modern cloud security. Governed data access and export controls.
Potential risks with files, data exports, emailing, sharing, etc.
Secure in dashboards, but users export CSVs to open in Excel.
Easily connects via OAuth and secure endpoints.
Difficult to securely connect to warehouse - credentials are tied to a computer + data leaves the cloud
Easily connects via OAuth and secure endpoints.
Business plans start at $20/seat
Included with productivity suite. Total cost of ownership rises with add-ins and support resources.
Double cost driver — expensive seat licenses plus data warehouse compute.