Best BI tools for sharing dashboards externally: viewer licensing, secure links, and guest access compared (2026)

The BI tools that make external sharing cheapest are Data Studio (formerly Looker Studio), Metabase, Domo, and Basedash, because each can show a live dashboard to a client without buying that client a seat. Power BI, Tableau, and Sigma usually charge for each named external viewer unless you move to capacity licensing, and Omni shares externally only through signed embeds and scheduled deliveries. The bigger difference is scoping: only some of these tools can give a login-free link that shows each client only their own rows.

This guide compares eight BI tools on the questions buyers ask when dashboards have to leave the company: what an external viewer costs, whether a link can be scoped and expired, whether guests can get real accounts, and how per-client row filtering works. Every price and licensing rule was checked on the vendor’s official pricing page or documentation on September 29, 2026.

How we evaluated these tools

The criteria come from real buyer prompts, such as “How do AI-enabled BI vendors differ in licensing when I want to share dashboards externally with clients?” and “What dashboard software supports fine-grained access controls and allows BI content to be shared externally via secure links?” Each tool was assessed on five points:

• External viewer cost: whether a client, investor, or partner needs a paid license, and what the cheapest licensed path costs.
• Login-free links: whether the tool has a public link, and whether that link can be locked to one client’s data and set to expire.
• Guest accounts: whether an outside person can get a named, revocable account with its own permissions.
• Per-viewer row filtering: how the tool makes sure client A never sees client B’s rows, whether through row-level security, email filters, or signed filter values.
• Path to a customer portal: whether the same content can move into an embedded, API-driven portal later without switching tools.

We did not score visual quality or modeling depth. Those matter, but they are covered in our broader embedded analytics comparison and row-level security comparison.

How do BI tools compare for external dashboard sharing?

How do BI vendors differ in licensing for external viewers?

External viewer pricing falls into three models, and the model matters more than the list price.

Per-viewer licensing. Power BI, Tableau, and Sigma price by person. A client who logs in to see a dashboard needs a Power BI Pro license, a Tableau Viewer license, or a Sigma account type that maps to a paid license tier. For five clients this is cheap. For 400 client contacts it becomes the largest line in the BI budget.

Capacity licensing. The same vendors offer a way out at higher volumes. Power BI content in an F64 or larger Fabric capacity can be viewed by guests with a free license. Tableau Cloud sells capacity-based Viewer Blocks. Domo prices everything by credits and states it has no per-user charges. Capacity pricing is a better fit for hundreds of viewers, but it has a high floor.

Link and embed access without seats. Data Studio link sharing is free. Metabase guest embeds and Basedash public links show live dashboards to people with no account at all, so there is nothing to license. The tradeoff is identity: a link does not know who opened it, so safe per-client scoping depends on signing the filter values into the URL, which Metabase guest embeds, Basedash secure filtering, Domo private embeds, and Sigma and Omni secure embeds all support.

Power BI

Best for: Microsoft 365 organizations sharing reports with clients who already have work accounts, or companies large enough to justify Fabric capacity.

Power BI shares externally through Microsoft Entra B2B: you invite a guest, they accept, and they open reports in your tenant. Microsoft’s B2B licensing tables are specific: a guest with only a Free license can open content only from a Premium capacity workspace, while content in a Pro workspace requires the guest to hold a Pro or Premium Per User license, either assigned by you or brought from their own company. The person sending the invite also needs Pro or PPU.

Fact card: Power BI

• Pricing (as of September 2026): Free account; Pro $14 per user per month and Premium Per User $24 per user per month, billed yearly; Power BI Embedded is variable and sold through sales (Power BI pricing). Microsoft says viewing without a paid per-user license applies at Fabric F64 and above or Premium P1 and above. Azure’s retail price list shows Fabric capacity at $0.18 per capacity-unit hour in East US, which makes an always-on F64 about $8,400 per month pay-as-you-go; Microsoft says annual reservations save 40.5%.
• Public link: Publish to web makes a report viewable by anyone on the internet with no authentication, including detail-level data in the model. It is not available for reports that use row-level security or DirectQuery, and the data is cached for an hour.
• Guest accounts: Entra B2B guests, including personal Gmail and Outlook addresses. Guests using personal accounts can’t use the Power BI mobile apps.
• Row-level security: RLS roles apply to guests; Microsoft notes a guest’s user principal name can display differently in Power BI, which can require RLS rule changes.
• SSO: Microsoft Entra ID.
• AI features: Copilot in Fabric; Microsoft’s plan table shows which licenses and capacities include it.
• Embedding: Power BI Embedded in the “app owns data” model, where viewers need no per-user license.
• Not ideal for: sharing with clients who have no Microsoft work account and no license, on a budget below capacity pricing.

Tradeoffs: Power BI has the most mature guest model in this list, but every path to license-free external viewing runs through capacity, and the one free public option cannot coexist with row-level security. Compare Basedash vs Power BI.

Tableau

Best for: enterprises already on Tableau Cloud that share with a known, stable set of external users or build an embedded portal on Tableau’s APIs.

Tableau Cloud licenses every user by role: Creator, Explorer, or Viewer. An external client is a site user like any other and needs at least a Viewer license. Tableau’s authentication docs say multi-factor authentication is required for every Tableau Cloud sign-in, through Tableau with MFA or your SAML identity provider, which is safer for sensitive client data but adds friction for occasional viewers.

Fact card: Tableau

• Pricing (as of September 2026): Tableau Standard from $15 per user per month and Tableau Enterprise from $35 per user per month, billed annually on an annual contract; every deployment needs at least one Creator license (Tableau pricing). Tableau Cloud also sells capacity-based Viewer Blocks for broad viewer access, priced through sales.
• Public link: none documented for Tableau Cloud content; viewers sign in.
• Guest accounts: external people become licensed site users, authenticated with Tableau with MFA, Google, Salesforce, or SAML.
• Scoped access without provisioning: connected apps sign embed requests with a JWT, and on-demand access lets embedded viewers in without pre-created accounts. Tableau lists an Embedded Analytics license or Capacity-based Viewer Blocks as a prerequisite.
• Row-level security: for embedded viewers, user attribute functions read values passed in the connected-app JWT, so one workbook can filter rows per viewer.
• AI features: Tableau Pulse on Standard and Enterprise; Tableau Agent in Tableau Cloud and Pulse on Cloud+.
• Embedding: Embedding API v3 and REST API through Tableau Embedded Analytics, sold through sales.
• Not ideal for: one-off client shares or dozens of occasional viewers who would each need a license and an MFA setup.

Tradeoffs: Tableau gives strong control over who sees what, but there is no low-cost way to send a live dashboard to someone outside the site. Compare Basedash vs Tableau.

Data Studio (formerly Looker Studio)

Best for: agencies and small teams with Google-hosted data that need free, live client reports.

Google’s help center now calls Looker Studio “Data Studio”; the sharing model is unchanged. Reports can be shared with specific Google Accounts, Google Groups, or anyone with the link. Google’s sharing guide says link viewers need no login, invited viewers need a Google Account, and assets can be shared with up to 1,500 people and groups.

Fact card: Data Studio

• Pricing (as of September 2026): free; Data Studio Pro costs $9 per user per project per month and adds team content management and Google Cloud support. Pro report owners can give schedule permissions to viewers who are not Pro users.
• Public link: “anyone with the link can view” or “anyone on the internet can find and view.” Google Workspace admins can restrict link sharing to their domain.
• Guest accounts: any Google Account, including personal Gmail. People without one must create one or use link sharing or a PDF.
• Row-level security: filter by email address returns only rows matching the signed-in viewer’s email. The viewer must be signed in to Google and consent to share their email, or the charts show nothing.
• SSO and SCIM: Google identity; no separate SAML or SCIM settings in Data Studio.
• AI features: unknown; not covered in the sharing documentation reviewed.
• Embedding: reports can be embedded on websites through link sharing.
• Not ideal for: clients who won’t use a Google Account, or data outside Google’s ecosystem that needs row-level control, since the free link option has no per-viewer scoping.

Tradeoffs: Data Studio is the cheapest option by a wide margin, but “anyone with the link” shows the same data to everyone, and per-client filtering requires every client to sign in with Google. See Basedash vs Data Studio.

Metabase

Best for: technical teams that want free, signed embeds scoped per client, with an open-source fallback.

Metabase has three external options. Public links, which only admins can create, show view-only results to anyone with the URL. Guest embeds load only with a JWT signed by your server, and locked parameters in that token restrict each viewer to their own data without creating a Metabase account. Full SSO-based embedding creates real users, who count toward your bill.

Fact card: Metabase

• Pricing (as of September 2026): open source free to self-host; Starter $100 per month, or $90 per month billed yearly; Pro from $575 per month with the first 5 users included and $12 per additional user per month; Enterprise from $20,000 per year (Metabase pricing). Metabase states that both your internal team and users of your embeds count as users.
• Public link: admin-only, view-only, no drill-through. Public question links can offer CSV, XLSX, or JSON downloads. Filter parameters added to a public embed URL can be removed by the viewer, so Metabase points to guest embeds for anything secure.
• Scoped link: guest embeds with locked parameters set by your server in the JWT. Guest embeds don’t support row and column security or drill-through, and they show a “Powered by Metabase” banner on open source and Starter.
• Row-level security: row and column permissions, SSO, and usage auditing on Pro and Enterprise.
• AI features: natural language questions and SQL generation on every plan, including open source.
• Embedding: guest embeds, public embeds, and SSO-based modular embedding with multi-tenant data segregation on Pro.
• Not ideal for: sending a scoped link without writing server code, since locked parameters require your backend to sign each token.

Tradeoffs: Metabase guest embeds are the least expensive way to give each client a scoped live dashboard, but they need an app to host them and a developer to sign tokens. Named client accounts cost $12 each per month on Pro. See Basedash vs Metabase.

Sigma

Best for: Snowflake and Databricks teams that share governed workbooks with vendors or partners and can negotiate license tiers.

Sigma has a dedicated guest user account type for external vendors. Guests can only reach workspaces tied to the teams they are assigned, can’t see content shared with “All Members,” and can’t use the REST API. Guest accounts always use password authentication and stop working if your organization provisions users with SCIM. Each guest is assigned a non-admin account type, and Sigma’s license overview says account types determine the license tier used for billing.

Fact card: Sigma

• Pricing (as of September 2026): quote only; sigmacomputing.com/pricing routes to a contact page. License tiers are View, Act, Analyze, and Build. View covers viewing workbooks, PDF and PNG downloads, comments, and natural language questions with Sigma Assistant.
• Public link: public embeds of a workbook, page, or single chart, viewable by anyone with the URL, limited to PNG and PDF export. Only admins can create them.
• Scoped link: secure embeds generate a one-time-use, JWT-signed URL from your server (Sigma embedding overview).
• Row-level security: user attributes passed at sign-in or in the embed JWT.
• SSO and SCIM: SAML and SCIM for internal users; guest accounts are password-only.
• AI features: Sigma Assistant for natural language queries and chart explanations.
• Embedding: secure embeds, an embed SDK for React, and tenant organizations.
• Not ideal for: buyers who need a published per-viewer price before committing, or organizations on SCIM that want guest accounts.

Tradeoffs: Sigma’s guest model is the cleanest way to give a vendor a named, tightly scoped account, but each guest has a license tier and the price is negotiated. See Basedash vs Sigma.

Omni

Best for: data teams with a governed semantic model that deliver client analytics inside their own product.

Omni’s sharing docs describe two routes for external audiences: deliveries (scheduled email, Slack, SFTP, S3, Google Sheets, or webhook sends) and embedding. There is no anonymous public link. Embedded content loads from a URL your server signs with the viewer’s external ID and user attributes, and Omni creates an embed user programmatically.

Fact card: Omni

• Pricing (as of September 2026): no public pricing page (omni.co/pricing returns 404); pricing goes through sales.
• Public link: none.
• Scoped link: signed embed URLs. Embedded content uses the Viewer connection role by default, which limits queries to modeled topics, and Omni flags tiles built on raw SQL that viewers can’t run.
• Guest accounts: embed users provisioned through the embed URL and manageable by admins, with entities for multi-tenant setups.
• Row-level security: access filters keyed on user attributes.
• SSO and SCIM: SAML and SCIM for Okta, Entra ID, and Rippling.
• AI features: AI chat for embed users, scoped to each user’s permissions, plus an AI API and MCP server.
• Embedding: iframe embeds with themes, vanity domains, and create mode.
• Not ideal for: quick one-off shares with a client, which require either a scheduled delivery or an embed build.

Tradeoffs: Omni’s external sharing inherits the semantic model’s governance, which is strong for portals and weak for ad hoc “send this to a client” requests. See Basedash vs Omni.

Domo

Best for: companies that want unlimited external viewers under one consumption contract and accept sales-led pricing.

Domo’s pricing page is built around credits: usage such as storing data, updating tables, and running workflows consumes credits, and Domo says there are no per-user charges. For external audiences, Domo Everywhere supports public embeds and private embeds. Its programmatic filtering docs describe a server-side flow where a service account requests an embed token with standard or SQL filters for each viewer, so viewers don’t need Domo accounts. Progress Software completed its acquisition of Domo’s business on September 22, 2026.

Fact card: Domo

• Pricing (as of September 2026): credit-based consumption pricing through sales; 30-day free trial with unlimited users and no card required.
• Public link: public embeds for non-sensitive content.
• Scoped link: private embeds with programmatic filters applied by your server, or mirror users provisioned in Domo.
• Row-level security: filters per viewer in private embeds; filter payloads are limited by a roughly 8 KB token size.
• SSO: listed on the pricing page.
• AI features: AI chat and custom AI agents, per the pricing page.
• Embedding: iframes, SDKs, and APIs.
• Not ideal for: teams that want a predictable published price, or buyers wary of roadmap changes after the Progress acquisition.

Tradeoffs: Domo removes per-viewer cost entirely, but credit consumption is harder to forecast than seats. See what the Progress acquisition means for Domo customers.

Basedash

Best for: teams that want to send a live dashboard or single chart to a client, investor, or partner by link, and scope it per viewer, without buying seats.

Basedash is an AI-native BI tool that queries your database or warehouse live. Public sharing turns any dashboard or chart into a tokenized link that opens without a Basedash account and doesn’t use one of the plan’s users. Viewers see current data, can use the filters you choose to expose, and can sort tables. For per-client scoping, secure filtering appends a JWT your server signs with locked filter values such as company_id and a required expiry, so each client’s link shows only their rows and stops working when the token expires.

Fact card: Basedash

• Pricing (as of September 2026): Startup $1,000 per month plus AI usage, for up to 25 users, with $1,000 per month in AI credits; Enterprise custom (pricing). 14-day free trial, no card required.
• Public link: tokenized links for dashboards and individual charts, switchable off at any time. Filters are hidden unless marked “Show on public dashboard,” and exposed filters accept any value a viewer types, so Basedash recommends read-only credentials and secure filtering for sensitive data.
• Scoped link: JWT-signed secure-filter URLs with locked parameters and a required expiry. Invalid or expired tokens return an error.
• Guest accounts: no separate guest role is documented; ongoing named access means adding the person as a workspace member, which counts toward the 25 users, or signing them in through full-app embedding.
• Row-level security: PostgreSQL policies keyed on the basedash.groups session variable, applied to chat, dashboards, automations, and Slack. Postgres only today.
• SSO and SCIM: SAML and OIDC SSO and SCIM on Enterprise.
• AI features: the AI data analyst writes and runs SQL from plain-English questions, builds dashboards, and flags changes with Insights; an MCP server is on every plan.
• Embedding: iframe dashboard embeds and full-app embedding with JWT sign-on, a React SDK (@basedash/embed), allowed origins, and feature toggles. The pricing page lists embedding as an Enterprise feature, so confirm which plan covers the embed and secure-filter options you need.
• Not ideal for: teams that need named external accounts with per-guest audit trails on the entry plan, row-level security enforced in Snowflake or BigQuery through the BI layer, or heavy pixel-perfect report bursting.

Tradeoffs: Basedash is fastest for “send this live dashboard to this client,” but a plain public link is only as private as the URL, and per-viewer scoping needs a server to sign tokens. The flat price is higher than per-seat tools for a very small internal team.

Which BI tool should you choose for external sharing?

You need to send one client a live dashboard today, with no login. Basedash public links, Data Studio link sharing, and Metabase public links all work in minutes. Use them only for data that is fine for anyone holding the URL to see.

Each client must see only their own rows, without a login. Use a signed link or embed: Basedash secure filtering, Metabase guest embeds, Domo private embeds with programmatic filters, or Sigma and Omni secure embeds. All require your server to sign a token. Power BI’s Publish to web can’t do this because it doesn’t support row-level security.

Clients need named, revocable accounts. Sigma guest accounts are the most tightly scoped. Power BI B2B guests fit clients who already have Microsoft licenses. Tableau site users fit a small, stable group. Data Studio works if every client has a Google Account.

You have hundreds of external viewers. Compare capacity pricing: Power BI F64 or higher, Tableau Viewer Blocks, and Domo credits, against link-based tools where viewers don’t count as users. Our usage-based pricing comparison covers the math.

You are building a customer portal with an API. Evaluate embedding depth first: Metabase modular embedding, Sigma secure embeds, Omni, Tableau Embedded Analytics, and Basedash full-app embedding all sign users in from your backend. The customer-facing analytics comparison goes deeper.

Your clients are marketing agency customers. Purpose-built client reporting tools such as AgencyAnalytics and Whatagraph often fit better; see the client reporting tools comparison.

Whichever tool you pick, the security steps are the same: scope the data, set an expiry, disable exports you don’t need, and review active links regularly. Our guide to sharing dashboards outside your company securely has a pre-send checklist.

Frequently asked questions

How do BI vendors differ in licensing when you share dashboards externally with clients?

BI vendors use three licensing models for external viewers. Per-viewer tools such as Power BI, Tableau, and Sigma require each client who logs in to hold a paid license, for example a $14 per month Power BI Pro license or a Tableau Viewer license. Capacity models, such as Power BI Fabric F64 and above, Tableau Viewer Blocks, and Domo’s credit pricing, remove per-viewer charges but have a high floor: an always-on F64 is about $8,400 a month pay-as-you-go, and Tableau and Domo quote capacity through sales. Link-based sharing in Data Studio, Metabase guest embeds, and Basedash public links needs no viewer license because the viewer has no account at all.

Can I share a Power BI report with external users without buying them a Pro license?

Yes, in three cases. If the report sits in a workspace on Fabric F64 or larger capacity (or Premium P1 and above), guests need only a free license. If the guest’s own company already assigned them Pro or Premium Per User, they can use that license in your tenant. Or you can use Publish to web, which requires no license from viewers but makes the report public to anyone with the link and cannot be used with row-level security. For confidential client data, the capacity route is the only license-free option Microsoft supports.

What dashboard software supports fine-grained access controls and secure external links?

Metabase, Sigma, Omni, Domo, and Basedash all support external links or embeds where your server signs a token that locks filter values or user attributes, so each viewer sees only their own rows. Metabase calls these guest embeds with locked parameters, Domo calls them private embeds with programmatic filters, and Basedash calls it secure filtering. Sigma and Omni use JWT-signed secure embeds tied to user attributes. Tableau supports the same pattern through connected apps with on-demand access, but requires an Embedded Analytics or Viewer Blocks license.

Is it safe to share a dashboard with a public link?

A public link is safe only for data you would be comfortable publishing. Anyone who has the URL can open it, the link does not identify the viewer, and forwarded links keep working until you revoke them. Microsoft warns that Publish to web exposes the report’s underlying data, not only what the visuals show. If the numbers belong to one client, use a signed link that locks the client’s filter values and expires, or a named guest account with row-level security.

Which BI tools let clients view dashboards without creating an account?

Data Studio (link sharing), Metabase (public links and guest embeds), Sigma (public embeds), Domo (public and private embeds), Basedash (public and secure-filter links), and Power BI (Publish to web) all let people view dashboards without an account in the vendor’s product. Tableau Cloud and Omni route account-free viewing through embedding, which means building a host page that signs requests. Account-free viewing is simpler for clients, but it moves the job of proving who the viewer is onto your link or your application.

What is the cheapest way to give each client a live dashboard of only their own data?

The cheapest options are Metabase guest embeds, which work on the free open-source edition, and Data Studio’s filter by email, which is free but requires every client to sign in with a Google Account. Basedash secure-filter links need no seats for viewers, with the plan starting at $1,000 per month for up to 25 internal users. All three avoid per-client licenses; the Metabase and Basedash options need a small server-side function to sign tokens.

Should external clients get a guest account or an embedded dashboard?

Give a guest account when the relationship is ongoing and small, such as a handful of vendors or partners who need several dashboards and an audit trail. Sigma guest accounts and Power BI B2B guests fit this. Use embedding when many clients each need their own view inside a portal you already run, because your application handles login and passes each client’s scope to the BI tool. Embedding costs more engineering up front, but avoids licensing and managing hundreds of individual accounts.