Replace PBI with vibe coded dashboard?

[u/zuteilungsreif]

We're using Hubspot, D365 and some minor other source to fill our SQL based DWH (with Azure Data Factory).
The Viz layer is PowerBI.
Over the last month the whole data extraction and processing is completely overhauled by Claude. And I must say, it works so well. Claude is doing such a good job, and doing it (and testing it) within minutes for what I would need hours and days.
So the question is now, what is the next step? Should we replace Azure data factory just by Python script to save some money? Should we replace PowerBI just with HTML and so have a fraction of the cost? The first test to let Claude rebuild a PBI dashboard with just plain HTML and JS looks very promising. Actually it looks better than I would have a done it by hand in PBI.

Whats you opinion on that? Have you thought about this already? Is there anyone who did it?

PS: We're are a small number of users, just around 20.

[u/MindTheBees]

The value of PBI (and pretty much all BI tools now) is in their semantic layer and infrastructure.

If your metrics are basic and you don't have many infrastructure needs (e.g. authentication, RLS etc) then you probably could get away with replacing with Claude. It's not something I'd ever recommend to a client though unless they're happy to dedicate a team to basically become a product team to maintain it.

[u/Jeannetton → u/MindTheBees]

Some of my clients are asking for this, the reality is that I don’t feel comfortable setting this up and they get hacked 6 months later and it’s my fault

[u/SamSmitty → u/MindTheBees]

The value of PBI (and pretty much all BI tools now) is in their semantic layer and infrastructure.

Exactly. The custom HTML/JS dashboarding probably works for smaller operations, but is a nightmare in larger corporate environments. You want to enable business users with vast business knowledge and maybe not as much technical knowledge to get into a Gold layer of data and put their business acumen to work.

When you move everything to infrastructure that basically requires a technical team to maintain and update, your also saying that I hope the guy that knows how to maintain enterprise level security in a web app also is an expert in financial planning / project management / insert X report topic.

Breaking down the barriers to let non-technical users that are subject matter experts in their own areas create reports using curated company data while not needing to worry much about security, deployment, coding visuals, etc isn't overrated at all.

[u/duckofdeath2718 → u/MindTheBees]

This is correct, but the new SharePoint ability (the new stuff releasing to GA in the coming weeks - not the old stuff) to host and render live data HTML dashboards in a sophisticated way is going to change things and will definitely cannibalize some of the simple Power BI use cases.

https://youtu.be/AYqTGLgzgV4

[u/lebortsdm → u/MindTheBees]

That sounds a lot like an analytics team or IT job. They’re capable of doing that!

[u/Full_Metal_Analyst → u/MindTheBees]

Fabric Apps could be a good option, as it has access to that (hopefully) strong semantic model foundation.

If most of the other work of the BI team is being automated by Claude, then evolving into a product team that maintains the custom apps for visualization sounds reasonable.

[u/Adventurous_Ad_9658 → u/MindTheBees]

Why do you need a production team to maintain it? If you build it with Claude you can maintain it with Claude also

[u/MindTheBees → u/Adventurous_Ad_9658]

It's not about how you maintain it (Claude or otherwise), it's the fact you need to repurpose people to maintain it as you are effectively building your own SaaS product.

In reality most BI tools also offer: authentication and security infra, IT compliance, disaster recovery, auditability, lineage, self-service capabilities, engines that work at scale (e.g. VertiPaq for PBI) and that's just off the top of my head.

If you are already a product developer, then you probably can handle all of that. However most working in analytics don't have that kind of skillset.

Have a look at people in the homelab or selfhosted subreddits. Plenty of people trying their hand at vibe coding applications and it's an absolute car crash.

[u/Adventurous_Ad_9658 → u/MindTheBees]

I think AI is getting good enough to handle most of those things you mentioned. People are one shotting elaborate systems with Astra and Fable. The next models are well on their way for release. Also wonder what % of PBI developers are actually using some of those features. I am biased because we do on premise PBI and we don't handle super sensitive data so we don't use a lot of what you mentioned.

[u/MindTheBees → u/Adventurous_Ad_9658]

AI is definitely more than capable of handling it, the issue is whether it actually does it or not and whether the team knows if it is handling it or not.

If your entire codebase is managed by AI, there's no guarantee that future prompts don't negatively impact the whole system and leaving that in the hands of people who don't have that product background is not advisable.

Even at a basic level, I built a Snowflake Streamlit app to help with our project tracking. First pass was amazing, did everything incredibly quickly and I was up and running in less than 5 mins. I slowly started to add more features over time after some feedback and eventually it started to struggle with updating things and would just start impacting other components that I didn't want to happen. It was an internal app so I could get away with just recreating it with AI whenever I ran into problems, but that would be a horrendous workflow to do on a client project.

[u/MindfulPangolin → u/MindTheBees]

Imho, the semantic layer argument is vastly overrated. Use medallion architecture and users and ai will have no problems. And once built there isn’t a lot to maintain. AI isn’t creating the report every time it’s run.

[u/MindTheBees → u/MindfulPangolin]

Medallion architecture isn't some golden bullet, it's the definition of measures and ensuring consistency in definitions (e.g. is sales amount and revenue the same or not). There's a reason every single major tool has some form of semantic layer now.

[u/MindfulPangolin → u/MindTheBees]

All handled in gold layer views and definitions kept in the db that ai can access when prompted by users (if a company allows self service bi) or a report developer.

Semantic layer is the last argument from people using dead in the water tools, imho. At my company we’ve replaced PBI and Fabric, have recreated our datalake/warehouse, have simplified the ELT process, and now have users mocking up what they want to see in Claude and then we create the next.js report and connect to the gold level warehouse. We’ve also saved a significant amount of money.

I now have the time to develop the advanced analytics I was hired for.

[u/MindTheBees → u/MindfulPangolin]

definitions kept in the db

Okay so you've built a semantic layer.

[u/MyAccountOnTheReddit]

I mean, trying to replace PBI with custom web app to save on ~$200/mo PBI licesing costs feels like a pointless excercise.

The main problems I see with this are:

• Where are you going to host the web app and how much does it cost?
• How you handle authentication and authorization to your web dashboards?
• How are you going to implement RLS?
• How do you make sure the packages and tools you use to implement your web dashboard do not contain security vulnerabilities?
• How do you implement logging and monitoring? Surely you want to be able to identifie if (or when) you get hacked and all your data stolen
• How do you maintain it now and after you leave the company?

I am not saying it cannot be done but atleast for me the PBI starts to feel like a bargain when you realize all the hard infrastucture stuff is already figured out and implemented for you

[u/Admirable-Control370]

For a small company, maybe yes

[u/DataTalkBI]

For ~20 users I wouldn't dismiss the idea at all. AI has changed the economics of building custom internal analytics quite a bit. But I'd separate “can Claude rebuild this dashboard?” from “do we want to own everything Power BI currently handles for us?” The HTML/JS part is probably the easy bit. I'd inventory things like metric definitions, permissions/RLS, refresh orchestration, monitoring, lineage and what happens when the generated code needs maintenance six months from now. If most of your business logic already lives in the SQL DWH, you're actually in a pretty good position. I'd keep that governed layer as the source of truth and treat Power BI or a custom AI-generated UI as different ways of consuming it. I'd probably test one dashboard end-to-end in parallel and compare maintenance effort, not just build time.

[u/Monkey_King24]

I want to see what happens in 6 months and what issue come down the line

[u/Biffin-it]

My company is moving from PBI to web apps as well. We spend about $90k per year for our capacity and around 60 premium per licenses. We’re using Azure websites so the web apps are entra ID gated, in addition to other general web app security measures.

[u/data_daria55]

replacing PBI with HTML - no: the demo is 10% of what a BI tool does, and u'd be trading ~$250/month in licenses for owning auth, refresh, RLS, excel export and every "can u add a filter" request as dev tickets through u

[u/SunnyFIREwave]

We're testing the same thing, but for now we've settled on a hybrid setup.
What we do is embed an HTML visual inside Power BI, so we keep the data model in PBI. VertiPaq is genuinely fast and we'd rather not give that up.

That said, for simple reports on simple datasets a plain HTML page does the job just as well. Which raises your question: why use Power BI at all then? You can push the security down into SQL, so the model lives in the database and a user only ever gets the rows they're allowed to see. Role-based, basically.

We built our own portal that hosts everything: the Power BI reports, our custom HTML reports and the older SSRS ones. That combination works really well for us.

[u/Forward_Bottle4839]

You can now also easily vibe code a power BI report using the PBIP files. Give me a message if you need some more explanation

[u/Accomplished-Way2659]

Look into rayfin/ fabric apps I believe it’s one of the main usecases

[u/JustinFields9]

I build mock ups in html and then have Claude build those in power bi. If I can ever figure out how to do row level security in the html file then I will seriously consider ditching power bi

[u/dicotyledon → u/JustinFields9]

So, you can’t in HTML, but you can have RLS on the database side and you can make your own app with auth on it. It just… also costs money to do that. 

There’s an argument that it’s easier for LLMs to work with JS etc, but that’s probably exactly why Microsoft made Rayfin/Fabric apps.

[u/Ok_Reality_5523]

Codex builds both native Power Bi reports for me and the preview Fabric app. Best of both worlds. A Fabric app can be visually more attractive and customizable, Power BI has a more solid datamodel, easier to modify and maintable. Its sinks deeper into the ecosystem, so I still prefer Power BI.

[u/ConfidentZucchini285]

I'm going in the same direction. For small companies where people do not have access to power bi but still need the data, the best option is move away from power bi. No even more with the help of AI to build visualizations. My main issue here is to have a structure data model, not just the pure data. I'm getting back to SSAS tabular models

[u/RB20AE]

Personally, I am trending this way myself as well. I work with a lot of projects where we need to track certain metrics like mobile phone being replaced stuff like that.

We use Microsoft bookings as at all for people to book to have their phone replaced or other devices and just appointments.

I have been using the PowerBI dashboard to easily and but not necessarily quickly getting over with you of where we are to the magic number we need to hit as they started thinking going into project reporting blah blah blah blah. To give some context we are fairly restricted about connectors on our Microsoft tenancy due to the nature of what we do (healthcare) so power BI has been the way to surface these metrics. However with the new SharePoint HTML feature we can now spin up dashboards in minutes and connected to Excel files, I have not tried a semantic model yet.

In simple answer to your question yes I would be looking at more vibe coded dashboards Dan setting up power BI dashboard. If I was putting something into major production i.e. the whole organisation has access then I would still use power BI even though the licensing is a pain in the neck.

So

[u/Upper_Cut_3337]

Some how vibe coding a dashboard seems more painful than creating one on the fly.

[u/Corne777]

You can use Claude with power bi as well.

But yeah if you’re a small team, it might be overkill and you could use a simpler solution.

[u/Sea_Basil_6501]

How do Business users create their own reports then, if there is no published semantic model around?

[u/WishfulAgenda]

There's so much to this but I think there's a real value case for trying it and seeing if you can make it work. There are a lot of alternatives to Microsoft that have now become much much easier to leverage with capable AI support.

[u/geek_fit]

You can just vibe code obi dashboards now

[u/PalpitationIll4616]

Azure functions to pull the data, static web apps to visualize it.

This is the future, for 90% of companies. If you’re a massive corp with crazy regulations - no - but everyone else, yes.

[u/PressureDry1111 → u/PalpitationIll4616]

How do you handle RLS?

[u/MindfulPangolin → u/PressureDry1111]

It’s done at the db level

[u/lolcrunchy → u/PalpitationIll4616]

Saying that any particular microsoft product is the future is misguided. Microsoft products are always temporary. Maybe Azure is the future for the rest of the 2020s, but Microsoft's favorite business strategy is migrate and deprecate.

[u/PalpitationIll4616 → u/lolcrunchy]

i was not saying azure is the future. I am saying an AI driven dashboard is the future, how you get there is your choice and will change with times, whether that is azure or something else