Power BI vs Data Studio vs Metabase for Nepali teams

Short answer: if your data already lives in Google Sheets and you want something free by Friday, use Data Studio (formerly Looker Studio). If your office runs on Excel, Windows and Microsoft 365, Power BI is the stronger tool, at $14 per user a month. If you want your data on your own server, or you need to share dashboards widely without paying per viewer, self-hosted Metabase is the one to look at.

That's the headline. The rest of this post is the detail that decides it for a Nepali team: what each one actually costs in rupees, how it handles Tally exports and Bikram Sambat dates, who can see a report without a licence, and how hard each is to learn. We covered what the whole dashboard project costs, build effort included, in what a business dashboard really costs a Nepali SME. This one is only about picking the tool.

What changed with Looker Studio this year?

Google renamed it. On 16 April 2026, Google's release notes said Looker Studio had been rebranded as Data Studio, the name it carried until 2022. The paid tier is now Data Studio Pro. Nothing about the free product's core changed: same reports, same connectors, same sharing. If you search for Looker Studio help, most of it still applies.

Pricing moved elsewhere. Microsoft raised Power BI Pro from $10 to $14 per user a month in April 2025, and Premium Per User from $20 to $24. Metabase's open source edition is still free to self-host, and its cloud Starter plan is $90 a month on yearly billing with five users included. So one tool got a new name, one got more expensive, and one stayed where it was.

How do the three compare on what Nepali teams actually need?

We compared them on the questions that come up in real Kathmandu offices, not on feature checklists. Tap a row for the detail behind it.

What does each tool cost in rupees per year?

Per-user prices look small in dollars. Multiply by twelve, then by the team, then by the rupee rate, and the gap between options gets real. We used Nepal Rastra Bank's selling rate of Rs 152.97 per US dollar on 27 August 2026 and the yearly-billing list price for each plan.

Two things the table hides. First, Power BI's number only covers people who have a licence. If your 50 users are 5 builders and 45 people who just read reports, all 50 still need Pro unless you buy Fabric F64 or Premium capacity, which costs far more. Data Studio and Metabase don't charge viewers that way. Second, Data Studio Pro is priced per user per Google Cloud project, so three people spread across three projects hold nine licences.

Is paying in dollars from Nepal a problem?

It's real friction, not a blocker. All three paid plans bill by international card in US dollars. That means a dollar card or prepaid card from a Nepali bank, an annual foreign-spend limit set by the bank under NRB rules, the bank's exchange margin on top of the NRB rate, and VAT on imported digital services. Annual billing makes one part worse: a single large charge can hit your card limit.

Practical moves: ask your bank about its current limit before you commit, prefer monthly billing if the yearly charge won't fit, or buy through a local Microsoft or Google reseller that invoices in rupees. Self-hosted Metabase sidesteps the question entirely, because there's no licence to pay for.

What about Nepali text and Bikram Sambat dates?

Devanagari is the easy part. All three tools display Unicode Nepali in labels, tables and filters. Test on the cheap Android phones your staff actually use, since a missing font shows up as boxes, not as an error.

Bikram Sambat is harder, and none of the three handles it natively. BS months run 29 to 32 days and change year to year, so you can't convert with a formula. You need a lookup. The common fix, which Power BI users have shared on Microsoft's own community forum since at least 2021, is a date dimension table:

• One row for every Gregorian date you care about, say 2015 to 2030.
• Columns for BS year, BS month number, BS month name (Shrawan, Bhadra and so on), BS day and the Nepali fiscal year, which starts in Shrawan.
• Loaded once from a published BS-AD calendar, then extended each year.
• Every sales, expense or attendance row joins to it on the Gregorian date, so any chart can group by BS month or fiscal year.

Build it once as a table in your database or a Google Sheet and it works in all three tools. It's one of the first things we set up on any Nepali dashboard project.

How does a dashboard actually work, whichever tool you pick?

The tool is only the last step. Every working dashboard follows the same four stages, and where each tool fits depends on the middle two.

In plain terms: the source data is whatever you already have. The model is where you clean it, agree what "sales" means and add the BS calendar. The dashboard is the tool on top. Refresh is the schedule that keeps it true without anyone copying and pasting.

Which tool fits which team?

• Google Workspace office, data in Sheets, 5 to 20 people, clients or donors who need to see reports: Data Studio, free tier. Move to Pro only if you need team workspaces or org-owned content.
• Microsoft 365 office, finance team living in Excel, complex measures like margin by branch and month: Power BI Pro. Budget for every viewer's licence, and for the learning time.
• Data that must stay on your own server, such as a cooperative or health provider, or a report read by 100 staff: self-hosted Metabase on a local or cloud server, with someone who can maintain it.
• Mixed tools and no clean database yet: build the reporting database and BS date table first. Then any of the three works, and switching later is cheap.

The last case is the most common one we see. For a sense of the finished result, our executive KPI dashboard case study shows spreadsheet reporting replaced with one live view, and the self-serve analytics rollout covers what happens when sales and marketing can ask their own questions.

What should you do this week?

• Write down where your top five numbers come from today: Tally, a sheet, billing software, a bank statement.
• Count builders and viewers separately. That one split decides whether Power BI's per-user pricing hurts.
• Ask whether any data must stay in Nepal or on your own server. If yes, Metabase moves to the front.
• Try the free option first. Data Studio free and Metabase open source both cost nothing to test with real data.

We build dashboards on all three and don't resell licences for any of them, so we don't mind which one you pick. If you want help choosing, or want the reporting database and BS calendar done properly the first time, see our data visualisation service or talk to the team.