Power BI or a custom dashboard: how to decide for your company

"We want a dashboard" is one of the most frequent requests we receive. It almost always comes with the question of whether to use Power BI or build something of our own. The answer depends on who will see it, where and for what, and in most cases the important work is not in the dashboard but in the data that feeds it. Let's go step by step.

What each one is

Power BI is Microsoft's business intelligence tool. It connects to your data sources, lets you model them and build interactive reports with charts, filters and tables, published to the cloud and viewed from the browser or the phone. It is paid per user per month. There are similar alternatives from other vendors; what we say here applies to almost all of them.

A custom dashboard is a screen or KPI module designed and developed for your company, usually inside the system you already use or as a web application of your own. It shows exactly what you need, the way you need it, for whoever needs it, with no per-user licenses.

When Power BI is the right answer

Power BI (or an equivalent tool) makes sense when:

• Users are internal and analytical. Management, finance, sales. People who want to explore: filter by month, cross by region, drill down to detail, build their own view.
• The questions change often. If a new analysis comes up every week, a flexible tool beats any development.
• There are few users. The per-license cost is reasonable for 5 or 20 people; it starts to weigh with hundreds.
• They already use the Microsoft ecosystem. If the company lives in Excel, Teams and SharePoint, the learning curve is short and integration is natural.
• You want fast results. With an orderly data source, a useful report can be ready in days.

When a custom dashboard is the better investment

The custom dashboard wins when:

• People outside the company see it. Customers checking the status of their orders, suppliers, partners, franchisees. Paying a license for each one is unworkable, and they need to see only what is theirs, with your brand, inside your portal.
• Many operational users see it. Supervisors, drivers, cashiers, field technicians. They need three or four clear numbers on the phone, not an analysis environment.
• It must live inside your system. An indicator next to the button that affects it is worth more than one in a separate tab. If the dashboard is part of a custom application, it is built with it.
• It needs actions, not only views. Approve, reassign, alert on WhatsApp when an indicator goes out of range. A BI tool shows; a custom system shows and acts.
• It has real-time or very specific design requirements. Plant floor screens, control rooms, indicators that refresh every second.
• You want to avoid long-term license dependence. With many users, the monthly total over three years comfortably exceeds the cost of building your own.

The part almost nobody tells you: the data

In most analytics projects we see, the dashboard is 20% of the work. The other 80% is answering three questions:

1. Where is the data? In the invoicing system, in a spreadsheet someone keeps, in the payroll software, on WhatsApp. Gathering it in one place is the first project.
2. Is it reliable? Duplicate customers, products with three names, dates in different formats. Cleaning them and defining rules (what counts as a "sale", from when a customer is "active") is what makes management trust the number.
3. How often is it updated? A report assembled by hand every Monday is not a dashboard; it is a report. Automating the load is what turns the screen into a living tool.

This is solved with a data warehouse: an orderly database, fed automatically from every source, designed for analysis. And the important part: that warehouse serves Power BI and a custom dashboard equally well. It is the investment you never lose, whatever you change on top.

A quick comparison

Criterion	Power BI	Custom dashboard
Internal analytical users	Ideal	Possible, less flexible
External users (customers, partners)	Costly and limited	Ideal
Many operational users	Costly in licenses	Ideal
Questions that change every week	Ideal	Needs development for each change
Inside your application	Embedded, with limits	Native
Actions from the dashboard	No, view only	Yes
Time to first version	Days (with orderly data)	Weeks
3-year cost with few users	Lower	Higher
3-year cost with hundreds of users	Higher	Lower
Requires orderly data first	Yes	Yes

The most common scenario: both

A combination that works in many mid-sized companies: a data warehouse that gathers everything; Power BI for management and finance to explore; and a custom dashboard inside the operations system so supervisors and customers see their indicators with actions next to them. Each tool does what it does best, and both read the same truth.

How to decide in one meeting

1. List who will see indicators and how many people are in each group.
2. For each group, define whether they need to explore or see and act.
3. Check whether the data is orderly and centralized. If not, that is the first project, with any tool.
4. Project the license cost over three years with the real number of users.
5. Ask whether the dashboard needs to live inside a system you already have or are going to build.

With those five answers, the decision is usually obvious.

In short

Power BI is ideal for internal, flexible, fast analysis with few users. A custom dashboard is ideal when customers or operators see it, it lives inside your system or it needs to act. In both cases, the work that really matters is getting the data in order, and that investment serves either one.

At Arista we build data warehouses, Power BI reports and custom dashboards for companies in Colombia, and we recommend whichever combination makes sense for each case, not the one that is convenient to sell. If you want an opinion on your situation, tell us on WhatsApp which indicators you need and who will use them.