Power BI vs Improvado: Which Marketing Data Platform Fits Your Team? (2026)

Power BI and Improvado serve different roles in the marketing data stack. Power BI is a general-purpose business intelligence platform built for visualization and self-service analytics across any department. Improvado is a marketing-specific data pipeline that extracts, transforms, and governs data from 500+ marketing sources before pushing it to BI tools like Power BI. This comparison explains what that architectural difference means for marketing teams evaluating both platforms.

Power BI vs Improvado: Different Tools for Different Jobs

Power BI excels at turning clean data into interactive dashboards and reports. Improvado handles the unglamorous work that comes before visualization: extracting data from fragmented marketing platforms, normalizing metrics across channels, applying governance rules, and ensuring your Power BI dashboards show trusted numbers. Same goal — unified marketing visibility — but fundamentally different starting points.

Full disclosure: we're Improvado, and this page reflects our perspective. We've done our best to represent Power BI's capabilities accurately — and where we've missed something, email us and we'll fix it. Our goal is to help you make the right call, even if that's not us.

Quick Verdict: Power BI vs Improvado

Feature Comparison: Improvado vs Power BI

The table below compares both platforms across the decision criteria that matter most when evaluating marketing data infrastructure. Power BI's strength is visualization and self-service analytics. Improvado's strength is the ETL and governance layer that sits upstream.

What Sets Improvado Apart: 4 Key Differentiators

Power BI and Improvado solve adjacent problems. Power BI assumes your data arrives clean, unified, and ready to visualize. Improvado exists because marketing data never arrives that way. The differentiators below explain what happens in the gap between raw API responses and the dashboards your team actually needs.

Your Marketing Team Operates the Pipeline — No Engineering Tickets Required

Power BI's Power Query is a general-purpose transformation tool. It works for any data type — sales, finance, operations, marketing. That generality comes with a cost: marketing teams either need to learn M language and DAX, or they file tickets with IT every time a new campaign structure requires a schema change.

Improvado is built specifically for marketers. The transformation layer includes pre-built logic for cross-channel normalization (mapping "impressions" from Google Ads to "impressions" from Meta, even though the API fields are named differently), campaign hierarchy handling, and UTM parameter parsing. Marketing ops managers configure pipelines through a no-code interface. When analysts need custom SQL, they have full access. No tickets required.

The practical difference: when your paid search team launches a new campaign structure in Google Ads, Power BI requires someone to update the Power Query transformations and republish the dataset. With Improvado, the pipeline automatically detects the new structure, applies normalization rules, and the data flows into your warehouse without manual intervention.

Improvado review

"Now, we don't have to involve our technical team in the reporting part at all. Improvado saves about 90 hours per week and allows us to focus on data analysis rather than routine data aggregation, normalization, and formatting."

Jeff Lee

Marketing Data Governance Catches Errors Before Anyone Sees Them

Power BI has strong governance capabilities through Microsoft Fabric — role-based access, data lineage, metadata management. But it's designed for IT and data teams governing enterprise data warehouses. It doesn't know what a healthy marketing campaign looks like.

Improvado's Marketing Data Governance includes 250+ pre-built rules specific to marketing operations: budget pacing validation (alert when daily spend exceeds monthly budget divided by days remaining), conversion tracking checks (flag when a campaign shows clicks but zero conversions for 48+ hours), metric anomaly detection (surface when CTR drops 30%+ week-over-week), and pre-launch validation (confirm tracking parameters are live before budget starts flowing).

These rules run automatically on every data sync. When a problem is detected, alerts go to the people who can fix it — the campaign manager, not a data engineer. Power BI can show you the problem after the fact in a dashboard. Improvado stops bad data from reaching the dashboard in the first place.

500+ Marketing Connectors With Guaranteed Maintenance

Power BI offers broad connectivity — Azure services, databases, SaaS apps, files. But marketing platforms are a moving target. Google Ads changes its API quarterly. Meta deprecates fields without warning. TikTok Ads, Walmart Connect, and Samsung DSP are newer platforms that don't yet have native Power BI connectors.

Improvado maintains 500+ pre-built connectors covering the full marketing and sales stack: paid channels (Google Ads, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, Walmart Connect, The Trade Desk), organic (Google Analytics 4, Adobe Analytics), CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo), and call tracking (CallRail, Invoca). When platforms update their APIs, Improvado's connector team handles the breaking changes — your pipelines keep running, and historical data is preserved for two years under the maintenance SLA.

Need a connector that doesn't exist? Improvado builds custom connectors in 2–4 weeks with an SLA. Power BI requires your team to build and maintain custom connectors using Power Query — or you hire a third-party ETL tool, which reintroduces the integration complexity you were trying to avoid.

Improvado review

“Improvado handles everything. If it's a data source of any kind, either there's a connector for it, or we get one created.”

Beau Payne

Dedicated Customer Success — Not Ticket-Only Support

Power BI Pro and Premium Per User subscriptions include Microsoft's standard support model: documentation, community forums, and ticket-based assistance. Premium Capacity customers can purchase enhanced support plans, but the baseline is self-service. That works well for general BI use cases where best practices are well-documented.

Marketing data pipelines are different. Every company has unique campaign taxonomies, attribution models, and reporting requirements. Improvado includes a dedicated Customer Success Manager and access to professional services as part of the platform subscription — not an add-on. Your CSM learns your business, helps design transformation logic, troubleshoots data quality issues, and ensures new connectors are configured correctly.

The value shows up during expansion. When you add a new marketing channel, your CSM schedules the connector setup session, validates the data mapping, and confirms the output matches your existing schema — before the pipeline goes live. With Power BI, that coordination work falls on your team.

Improvado review

“Having a single point of contact simplifies everything. If we ever need assistance, we can reach out directly to Improvado instead of managing it internally. That's worth something.”

Jonathan Hemnes

EVP of Engineering

When to Choose Power BI Over Improvado

Power BI is the better choice in several specific scenarios. Here's when it wins:

• Your marketing data is already unified in a warehouse. If your data engineering team has built ETL pipelines that deliver clean, transformed marketing data to Snowflake or BigQuery, Power BI provides a cost-effective visualization layer with strong AI capabilities. You don't need Improvado's transformation and governance — you've already solved that upstream.
• You need cross-departmental BI, not just marketing analytics. Power BI handles sales, finance, operations, and marketing in a single platform. If your primary use case is enterprise-wide dashboards where marketing is one input among many, Power BI's generality is an advantage, not a limitation.
• Your team is heavily invested in the Microsoft ecosystem. If you're running on Azure, using Microsoft 365 for collaboration, and your analysts are fluent in DAX and Power Query, Power BI integrates seamlessly. The switching cost to a different BI tool would outweigh Improvado's ETL benefits.
• Budget constraints require the lowest per-user cost. Power BI Pro starts at $14/user/month. For small teams with simple visualization needs and no complex transformation requirements, that's hard to beat. Improvado's pricing is outcome-based and scales with data sources and transformation complexity — better ROI at scale, but higher entry cost.
• You don't need marketing-specific governance. If your reporting needs are straightforward (basic performance dashboards, no attribution modeling, no budget pacing alerts), Power BI's general governance is sufficient. Improvado's 250+ marketing rules are overkill when you're just tracking channel performance.

What Improvado Customers Say

Marketing teams choose Improvado when they need unified data pipelines that eliminate manual work and ensure governance at scale. Here's what that looks like in practice.

Case study

Yodel Mobile relies on Improvado for daily budget pacing and campaign optimization. Having centralized, reliable data allows them to make quick adjustments to ensure campaigns stay on track. Read full case study →

“Improvado allows us to have all information in one place for quick action. We can see at a glance if we're on target with spending or if changes are needed—without having to dig into each platform individually.”

Kasia Pasich

Data Analyst, Yodel Mobile

Case study

At Signal Theory, for most clients, the reporting process is now fully automated, taking 30 minutes to an hour at most. For clients with unique data sources requiring manual input, the system is flexible enough to accommodate specific needs without compromising overall efficiency. Read full case study →

“Reports that used to take hours now only take about 30 minutes. We're reporting for significantly more clients, even though it is only being handled by a single person. That's been huge for us.”

Shayna Tyler

Analyst, Signal Theory

Pricing Comparison: Improvado vs Power BI

Power BI and Improvado use fundamentally different pricing models. Power BI charges per user or per capacity. Improvado charges based on the scope of your data pipeline — number of sources, transformation complexity, and data volume.

Power BI Pricing

Power BI offers several tiers as of February 2026:

• Free: $0 — basic access via Microsoft Fabric; limited sharing, 1 GB datasets, no collaboration features
• Power BI Pro: $14/user/month (paid annually) — collaboration enabled, 10 GB datasets, 8 refreshes per day, integration with Microsoft 365
• Premium Per User (PPU): $24/user/month (paid annually) — 100 GB datasets, 48 refreshes per day, AI visuals, AutoML, deployment pipelines
• Premium Capacity: starts at $4,995/month (P1 SKU, 8 v-cores) — unlimited viewers, up to 400 GB datasets, includes Microsoft Fabric; scales to P5 (128 v-cores, contact sales)
• Microsoft Fabric: pay-as-you-go or reserved capacity — includes Power BI plus data engineering, real-time analytics, and Synapse pipelines

For teams under 500 viewers, per-user licensing (Pro or PPU) is typically more cost-effective. At scale, Premium Capacity becomes cheaper than paying per user. Power BI's total cost of ownership also depends on whether you need additional ETL tools — if your marketing data isn't warehouse-ready, you'll need a separate solution for extraction and transformation.

Improvado Pricing

Improvado's pricing is outcome-based. The primary cost drivers are:

• Number of data sources (each connector has a base cost)
• Data volume and refresh frequency (real-time syncs cost more than daily batches)
• Transformation complexity (pre-built templates vs. custom attribution models)
• Support and services tier (dedicated CSM and professional services are included; enterprise SLAs available)

Pricing is modular — you pay for the capabilities you use. This model works better for mid-market and enterprise teams where the ROI comes from eliminating manual data work and ensuring governance. Small teams with fewer than 10 data sources may find per-user BI tools more cost-effective. Contact Improvado for specific pricing.

Total Cost of Ownership

When comparing total cost, factor in hidden expenses beyond sticker price:

• Power BI: Add the cost of third-party ETL tools (Fivetran, Airbyte, custom scripts), data engineering time to maintain connectors, and analyst time spent reconciling discrepancies across platforms. If your team spends 20 hours per week on manual data aggregation, that's $50K–$100K/year in fully-loaded labor cost.
• Improvado: Higher platform cost, but includes ETL, transformation, governance, and professional services. Teams typically reduce manual reporting time by 70–90%, freeing analysts to focus on insights rather than data prep.

The break-even point depends on your team size and data complexity. For mature marketing organizations running 30+ campaigns across 15+ channels, Improvado's all-in model delivers better ROI than stitching together separate ETL and BI tools.

Frequently Asked Questions: Power BI vs Improvado

What is the main difference between Improvado and Power BI?

Power BI is a business intelligence platform for visualization and analytics. Improvado is a marketing ETL platform that extracts, transforms, and governs data before delivering it to BI tools like Power BI. Improvado handles the data pipeline; Power BI handles the dashboards. Many teams use both together — Improvado feeds clean data into Power BI for visualization.

Can Improvado integrate with Power BI?

Yes. Improvado pushes transformed marketing data to any warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift) or directly to BI tools including Power BI, Tableau, and Looker. The most common architecture: Improvado extracts and transforms data from marketing platforms, loads it into your warehouse, and Power BI consumes it for visualization. This gives you Improvado's marketing-specific ETL plus Power BI's visualization capabilities.

Does Power BI have marketing data connectors?

Power BI has general-purpose connectors for common platforms (Google Ads, Meta, LinkedIn). However, these connectors require configuration in Power Query, don't include marketing-specific transformations (cross-channel normalization, UTM parsing, attribution logic), and aren't maintained when APIs change. For comprehensive marketing coverage (500+ sources including TikTok, Walmart Connect, Samsung DSP), you need a dedicated ETL tool like Improvado.

Which platform is better for enterprise marketing teams?

It depends on where your bottleneck is. If you already have clean, unified marketing data in a warehouse, Power BI Premium provides enterprise-scale visualization with strong governance and AI capabilities. If your challenge is unifying fragmented data across dozens of marketing platforms, Improvado solves the upstream problem — and then you can use Power BI (or any BI tool) for visualization. Enterprise teams with complex data pipelines typically need both.

How long does it take to migrate from Power BI to Improvado?

This question reflects a common misunderstanding — you don't migrate from Power BI to Improvado; they serve different functions. The typical implementation timeline: Improvado's ETL pipeline is deployed in 2–4 weeks (connector setup, transformation logic, validation), at which point clean data starts flowing into your warehouse. Power BI dashboards can continue running on the new data source with minimal changes. Migration complexity depends on how much custom Power Query logic needs to be replicated in Improvado's transformation layer.

What does Improvado include that Power BI doesn't?

Improvado includes 500+ pre-built marketing connectors with guaranteed API maintenance, marketing-specific transformation logic (cross-channel normalization, campaign hierarchy mapping, UTM parsing), Marketing Data Governance with 250+ pre-built rules, dedicated customer success management, and professional services. Power BI focuses on visualization, self-service analytics, and enterprise BI governance — it assumes your data arrives pre-transformed and ready to analyze.

Is Power BI cheaper than Improvado?

Power BI has a lower sticker price — Pro licenses start at $14/user/month. But total cost of ownership includes the ETL layer. If you're using third-party tools (Fivetran, Airbyte) or building custom scripts to extract and transform marketing data, add that cost. If your analysts spend 20+ hours per week aggregating data manually, add that labor cost. Improvado's platform cost is higher, but it eliminates those hidden expenses. The break-even point depends on your team size and data complexity.

When does Power BI make more sense than Improvado?

Choose Power BI when your marketing data is already unified in a warehouse, you need cross-departmental BI (not just marketing), your team is heavily invested in the Microsoft ecosystem, or budget constraints require the lowest per-user cost. Power BI is a better fit for small teams with simple visualization needs. Improvado is better for mid-market and enterprise marketing organizations where the bottleneck is data unification, not visualization.

The Bottom Line: Power BI and Improvado Solve Adjacent Problems

Power BI is an excellent BI platform. Its AI capabilities, Microsoft ecosystem integration, and cost-effective per-user licensing make it a strong choice for visualization and self-service analytics. The limitation isn't Power BI itself — it's the assumption that marketing data arrives clean and ready to visualize.

Improvado exists because that assumption is false for most marketing teams. Data scattered across 30+ platforms, inconsistent naming conventions, API changes that break pipelines, and the absence of governance rules specific to marketing operations — these are upstream problems that no BI tool can solve. Improvado handles extraction, transformation, and governance so that Power BI (or Tableau, or Looker) can do what it does best: turn clean data into insights.

The honest answer: mature marketing organizations often need both. Improvado unifies the data pipeline. Power BI visualizes the results. The question isn't which tool is better — it's whether your team has already solved the data unification problem, or whether that's the next bottleneck to address.