Best AI Analytics Platforms in 2026: ThoughtSpot, Sisense, Qlik, Databricks and Tellius Compared

ThoughtSpot now sells its AI agent two ways: capped at 25 questions per user each month, or metered by credit from $0.10 with no charge for model tokens. The price of an answer depends on which door you walk through.

Five platforms keep landing on the same shortlist: ThoughtSpot, Sisense, Qlik, Databricks and Tellius. All five answer plain-English questions against live data. They split on who caps a query, who bills by data volume instead of seats, and who was never built to compete on price. Since our August review, three of the five changed how they sell. This is the 18 October 2026 re-read of every pricing page, written for the data lead who is budgeting for 20 to 200 people.

What Changed Since Our 4 August Review

We reopened all five vendor pricing pages on 18 October 2026 and compared them with what this guide said in August. Four of five moved.

• ThoughtSpot added usage pricing. Its page now toggles between per-user plans and a usage model that starts at $0.10 per credit. The 25-query cap in the August guide applies only to the per-user plans.
• Sisense added a self-serve plan. In August its plans page led straight to a demo request. It now lists Enterprise and Self-serve, and Self-serve carries a free-trial button. Neither plan shows a price.
• Databricks added a database line. An Operational Database product now starts at $0.069 per CU. The $0.15, $0.22, $0.40 and $0.07 per DBU lines are unchanged.
• Tellius kept its tiers and added detail. Premium is capped at 50 million rows in live mode and a 10 GB in-memory cache. It still shows no dollar figure.
• Qlik held steady. Starter, Standard and Premium kept their August prices, and the plans now name Answers Agents and an MCP Server.

We also re-judged the lineup. Two catalog entries looked like challengers because they carry free tiers: Rows AI and Akkio. Neither earned a slot. Rows now shows a banner saying it joined Superhuman, and its prices differ from what we had stored. Akkio's pricing page lists a single enterprise plan for media agencies and no self-serve tiers. Re-checked 18 October 2026: the lineup of five holds.

How to Choose Between Them in 2026

Start with who is asking the questions. Ignore, for now, what the platform can technically do. A tool a marketing manager can drive alone is a different purchase from an analytics layer a product team ships inside its own app.

Four things separate these five.

• Who pays for the AI, and how. ThoughtSpot meters its agent at 25 queries per user per month on per-user plans. On its usage model it bills by the credit. Databricks bills Genie by the DBU, its consumption unit, once a free allowance runs out.
• Seats or data volume. ThoughtSpot prices per user or per credit. Qlik prices by gigabytes of "data for analysis", so 200 people on a small dataset can cost less than five on a large one.
• Self-service or embedded. Sisense is built to sit inside someone else's product. The other four start from internal dashboards.
• Time to first dashboard. Self-serve plans start with a trial. Capacity-priced and embedded deals start with a sales conversation.

If you only need a shortlist matched to your stack and budget, Smart Match takes a few questions and narrows the directory for you. The rest of this guide is for readers who want the pricing mechanics first.

The Shortlist at a Glance

All prices are as listed on each vendor's own page on 18 October 2026. Annual billing applies wherever a vendor states it. The table ends where public pricing ends. Two of the five publish no dollar figure at all.

ThoughtSpot: Two Ways to Pay for the Same Agent

ThoughtSpot now has a per-user view and a usage view on one pricing page. In the per-user view, Essentials runs $25 per user per month, billed annually, for 5 to 50 users and up to 25 million rows. Pro runs $50 per user per month for up to 1,000 users and 250 million rows. Enterprise is custom, with unlimited users and data.

Essentials lists dashboards and insights only. The AI agent, Spotter, starts at Pro. On the per-user plans it is capped at 25 queries per user per month, and that cap is the same on Enterprise.

The usage view changes the math. It starts at $0.10 per credit, and ThoughtSpot states that it does not meter or charge for LLM tokens. Bring your own model provider and that provider's fees may still apply. A Developer plan for embedding is free for one year, with up to 10 users and 25 million rows.

Limitation: a credit price is not a monthly bill. ThoughtSpot's page does not say how many credits one Spotter question uses, so a usage forecast needs a pilot.

Sisense: Now With a Self-Serve Door

Sisense still publishes no price. What changed is the page. It now offers an Enterprise plan for regulated industries and a Self-serve plan "for startups and growing teams", with a free-trial button on the second.

Both plans are built around embedding. The Self-serve description names natural-language queries, auto-narratives and an assistant your customers can use. It also names two ways to embed: an iframe or the Compose SDK. The Enterprise plan adds white-labeling, bring-your-own LLM and a stated 99.99% SLA.

That makes Sisense easier to try than in August, since a product team can now put a working dashboard in front of its own customers before anyone signs a contract or sits through a pricing call. It does not make it easier to budget. Not yet. A trial tells you whether the product fits your app, not what year two costs.

Limitation: with no figure on either plan, you cannot compare Sisense with the other four without a conversation.

Qlik: Pay by Data Volume, Not by Seat

Qlik Cloud Analytics inverts the usual model. Starter costs $300 a month, billed annually, for 10 users and a fixed 10 GB of data for analysis. More users can be bought, but not more data.

Standard starts at $825 a month for 25 GB, and additional users cost nothing from this tier up. Premium starts at $2,750 a month for 50 GB, adds predictive analytics through automated machine learning, and carries Qlik's "most popular" label. Enterprise starts at 250 GB and is quote-only.

A 40-person finance team looking at ten years of transactions will outgrow the data cap long before it runs short of seats. A 300-person sales org running the same dashboards for everyone barely moves the data meter. The structure rewards breadth of readers and punishes breadth of data. Plan for that.

Limitation: few teams have measured their "data for analysis" before they start shopping, so the sticker price is hard to turn into a real budget.

Databricks: The Platform Teams Grow Into

Databricks is not competing for the same first purchase as the other four. It is a platform for data engineering, machine learning and analytics together, billed pay as you go at per-second granularity.

Data Warehousing is the SQL and BI layer most relevant here. Genie is the natural-language assistant, and it bills only after a free usage allowance runs out.

Committed-use contracts discount all of it, and a free trial is available. As an illustration only, 1,000 DBUs of warehousing in a month at the $0.22 starting rate is $220 at list price. The hard part is guessing how many DBUs your queries burn, not the multiplication.

A team that starts on Databricks for BI alone often pays for capability it will not touch for a year, and that is fine if the roadmap includes machine learning, and wasteful if it does not. Teams end up there anyway because the same platform later runs the machine learning work a pure BI tool cannot. Our directory lists it alongside its closest neighbours in the data science and ML category.

Limitation: per-second billing across several product lines makes a monthly bill hard to forecast before you have a few months of usage.

Tellius: Sized for the Small Analytics Team

Tellius lists two tiers, both marked "Customized". Premium is for up to 10 users and carries a free-trial button. Enterprise has unlimited users and adds automated machine learning, SAML single sign-on, APIs and embedding with white-labeling.

What it sells is agentic root-cause analysis through its Kaiya assistant: point it at a metric that moved, and it investigates why. That is a narrower promise than the full BI suites above it, and a fair trade if root-cause questions are most of what your team asks. It is a poor trade if they are not. The 10-user cap and the 50-million-row live-query limit on Premium show who it is for: a small team working against a cloud warehouse.

Limitation: with no published figure on either tier, Tellius is the hardest of the five to budget for sight unseen.

What These Five Cost in Practice

Two vendors publish enough to do arithmetic. Here is what the published prices imply for a 20-person team, billed annually.

• ThoughtSpot Essentials: 20 users at $25 for 12 months is $6,000 a year, with no AI agent.
• ThoughtSpot Pro: 20 users at $50 for 12 months is $12,000 a year. The agent is capped at 500 queries a month across the team (20 users at 25 each).
• Qlik Starter: $300 for 12 months is $3,600 a year for 10 users and 10 GB. Ten more users are extra, at a price Qlik does not list.
• Qlik Standard: $825 for 12 months is $9,900 a year for 25 GB and every user you want.
• Qlik Premium: $2,750 for 12 months is $33,000 a year for 50 GB.

Those are list prices. They exclude implementation time and any add-on capacity. Databricks, Sisense and Tellius cannot be priced this way from public pages, and an unpriced vendor is a real cost in evaluation time. For Databricks you need a workload estimate in DBUs. For the other two you need a quote.

The gap between Qlik Standard and ThoughtSpot Pro is only $2,100 a year at 20 users. Qlik pulls ahead as the team grows past 40, because its price does not rise with headcount. ThoughtSpot pulls ahead for small teams with big datasets, because its price does not rise with rows until you pass 25 or 250 million.

Data Handling, Security and Compliance

Pricing pages are a thin source for security, because they are written to sell a plan rather than to describe how a vendor stores, moves and retains your data once the contract is signed and the first dataset is connected, so treat this section as what each vendor says up front, not as an audit. We did not read any trust-center reports for this update.

• Sisense says its Enterprise plan is built for regulated industries, with HIPAA-ready compliance, column-level security, multi-tenant architecture and deployment on SaaS, dedicated cloud or on-premises.
• Tellius says Enterprise can deploy on a customer's cloud, on-premises, or on Tellius Cloud, and lists SAML single sign-on. Premium is fully hosted on Tellius Cloud.
• ThoughtSpot lists flexible LLM selection among its features and says token use is not metered. If you connect your own model provider, its terms and fees apply.
• Qlik lists managed and shared spaces for governance from Standard up, and multi-region tenants on Enterprise.
• Databricks describes Genie as returning "trusted, governed answers" and notes that trials on your own cloud account still incur cloud-provider charges.

Whichever you pick, ask for the SOC 2 report and the data-processing terms before the pilot, not after. Put three questions in writing: where the AI layer sends your rows, whether a third-party model sees them, and how long prompts and results are kept. A vendor that answers in a sentence has usually thought about it. A vendor that answers with a sales deck has not.

Where Each One Wins: Who Should Pick Which

For a 20-person startup building its first dashboards, ThoughtSpot at $25 a user is the cheapest published way in, though the agent only starts one tier up. For a SaaS company that wants analytics under its own logo, nothing else here does that as directly as Sisense.

A 200-person sales org running three dashboards for everyone fits Qlik's per-data pricing better than per-seat tools, because headcount stops driving the cost. A company already storing raw data in Databricks for machine learning gets its BI layer almost free in engineering terms, since the data never moves.

A five-person analytics team inside a larger company is closest to Tellius and its 10-user Premium tier. If your real need is spreadsheets with an AI layer, start with our guide to AI tools for Excel data analysis and come back only when the sheet breaks.

Lock-in differs too. A Qlik or ThoughtSpot contract is annual, so a wrong pick costs you a year; a Databricks account is pay as you go, so a wrong pick costs you only what you ran, though your data and pipelines tend to settle there and become the real switching cost. None of the five wins on every axis.

The Turn: "Just Start a Free Trial" Does Not Settle This

The obvious objection is that free trials make a pricing comparison unnecessary. Try one platform for two weeks, try another for two weeks, and let the product decide. Four of the five now show a free-trial button.

That works for judging whether natural-language search understands your questions. It does not work for the two numbers that set your annual cost: how many agent queries or credits your team burns in a normal month, and how many gigabytes your real dataset occupies once loaded. Both show up after 30 to 60 days of real use, past most trial windows.

So use the trial for fit and the pricing page for the budget. Ask each vendor what one agent question costs in its own unit, then multiply by the questions your team asked last month.

Who Should Skip All Five

A team under 15 people with one dashboard and no data hire should skip this category for now. Every platform here assumes someone owns data modeling. A spreadsheet with a built-in AI feature, or a text-to-SQL helper such as AI2sql or BlazeSQL, will get that team further per dollar. We compare those two in AI2sql vs BlazeSQL.

Teams whose bottleneck is report writing, not dashboards, should read AI for data analysis report writing. Researchers coding interviews and surveys want qualitative data analysis tools instead.

Enterprises committed to a legacy BI stack should also pause. Migration cost is a real line item that no pricing page shows. Count the analyst hours to rebuild your existing dashboards before you compare sticker prices. Browse the rest of the data analytics directory before you commit, and the wider best data science and ML tools guide if your work leans toward models.

We also left out the incumbents most buyers shortlist, such as Microsoft Power BI, Tableau and Looker. They are not in the HokAI directory yet, so this guide makes no claims about them.

What Would Change This

If any of the five moves to flat, uncapped agent queries at a fixed seat price, the axis this comparison turns on disappears. Watch ThoughtSpot first. It is the only one of the five that now publishes both a numbered cap and a per-credit rate, which makes its next revision the easiest to read.

A published price from Sisense or Tellius would also reshuffle the table. So would Rows or Akkio returning with a clear self-serve plan. We will re-check all five pages again at the next review and date the result in the changes section above.

Frequently asked questions

Does ThoughtSpot cap its AI agent?

On its per-user plans, yes. Spotter is limited to 25 queries per user each month on Pro and Enterprise. ThoughtSpot also lists a usage model from $0.10 per credit, where it says LLM tokens are not metered or charged.

How much does Qlik Cloud Analytics cost?

Starter is $300 a month for 10 users and a fixed 10 GB. Standard starts at $825 a month for 25 GB with no charge for extra users. Premium starts at $2,750 a month for 50 GB. All are billed annually, and Enterprise is by quote.

Is Databricks a business intelligence tool?

Not mainly. It is a platform for data engineering, machine learning and analytics. Its SQL and BI layer, Data Warehousing, starts at $0.22 per DBU, billed per second. Teams usually adopt it for BI after storing data there for other work.

Do Sisense and Tellius publish their prices?

No. Sisense lists Enterprise and Self-serve plans and shows no figure on either. Tellius lists Premium, for up to 10 users, and Enterprise, both marked "Customized". Both vendors offer a free-trial button, so test fit first and ask for a quote.

Which of these has a free option?

None publishes a permanent free plan for general BI use. ThoughtSpot has a Developer plan for embedding, free for one year with up to 10 users. Databricks, Sisense and Tellius show trial buttons, and Qlik sends buyers to contact sales.

Covered in this guide

• Databricks: Unified Lakehouse platform for data engineering, analytics, and AI, founded 2013, valued at $190B (Aug 2026), with consumption pricing from $0.08 per DBU on the published Premium tier.
• Qlik: Data analytics and integration platform used by 40,000+ organizations worldwide.
• Sisense: Analytics platform for building and embedding white-labeled dashboards inside your own applications.
• Tellius: The Agentic Analytics Platform for Enterprise Data Intelligence
• ThoughtSpot: AI-Powered Agentic Analytics Platform for Self-Service Business Intelligence
• AI2sql: AI2sql is an AI SQL generator that converts natural language descriptions into optimized SQL queries for 10+ database types, supporting PostgreSQL, MySQL, BigQuery, Snowflake with 90% accuracy.
• Akkio: Akkio is a no-code AI analytics platform that trains predictive models up to 100x faster than AutoML, with natural language data queries. Plans start at $49/user/month.
• BlazeSQL: BlazeSQL is an AI-powered SQL query tool enabling non-technical users to analyze data in seconds by asking questions in plain English to MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Snowflake databases.
• Rows AI: AI spreadsheet scoring 89% first-try accuracy vs Excel's 53%, with GPT formula functions and 50+ live integrations. Acquired by Superhuman; sunset May 31, 2026.

Sources