Why enterprise teams are choosing Lightdash over traditional BI

Over the past few months, I've had dozens of calls with enterprise data teams and one theme keeps coming up: traditional BI is starting to feel… old. It's slow. It's expensive. And it doesn't scale easily.

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So, enterprise data teams are moving on. But here's what's interesting: these teams aren't just shopping for a new BI tool, they're rethinking how analytics should work across their entire organisation.

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Here’s why more and more of them are choosing Lightdash.

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One semantic layer and one source of truth

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In large organisations, the biggest data problem is trust.

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"Revenue" means one thing to Finance, another to Product, and something else to Sales. The result? Three dashboards, three answers, and no clarity for leadership.

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This isn't because people are incompetent. It's because traditional BI tools make it nearly impossible to maintain consistent definitions at scale. Metrics get copied, modified, and reinterpreted as they move through different tools and teams.

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With Lightdash, your semantic layer lives in dbt. You define metrics once, store them in version-controlled code and reuse them everywhere. It’s a single source of truth baked directly into your workflow.

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Built with enterprise-grade security

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When you're handling sensitive data, sending it to a third-party cloud isn't always an option. So, enterprise data teams need to choose tools they can control completely.

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That’s why Lightdash offers full self-hosting. As an enterprise, you get complete control over your data, with the same full feature set whether you're running in your own cloud or using our managed service.

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Data never leaves your infrastructure, your security team stays happy and you avoid months of compliance reviews.

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The API-first imperative

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Enterprise data teams also expect programmatic access to everything because that's how you move fast with large teams. When your data team has 10+ people, clicking through a UI to set up dashboards doesn't scale. You need automation.

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Lightdash gives you full programmatic access via our API. Data teams can automate dashboard creation, bulk-update definitions, and integrate analytics into any workflow. It fits how modern teams actually work: scalable, repeatable, and code-first.

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A support model that actually works

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Here's another thing that surprised me: the biggest differentiator for enterprise buyers isn't always features. Sometimes, it's support quality.

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Large data teams don't just need help when things break. They need a partner who understands their specific use cases, helps them architect solutions, and sometimes builds features specifically for their needs.

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At Lightdash, enterprise customers get dedicated support that goes beyond troubleshooting. We provide direct access to our engineers, and even build features based on your roadmap.

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Pricing that encourages adoption

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Per-seat pricing is the norm right now and it made sense when BI was limited to a few power users. But when you're trying to democratize data across an organization, every new user becomes a budget line item and teams end up rationing access to their own data.

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With Lightdash, you get one platform fee with unlimited users, and unlimited visualisations. So your team can actually use your BI tool without stressing out your finance team.

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The best developer experience in the market

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The most successful enterprise data teams I work with have moved to what I call "analytics-as-code." They version control their metrics. They test changes before deployment. They roll back with Git, not with emergency meetings.

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But traditional BI tools weren't built for this. They assume analytics is a separate discipline with separate tools and separate processes. That separation creates the trust and consistency problems enterprises are trying to solve.

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Lightdash solves this. You define metrics in dbt, deploy with CI/CD and roll back with a commit. If you’re already building your data models like code, your BI should work the same way.

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What does this mean for you?

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If you're evaluating your BI strategy, the question isn't just what tool to use. It's: how should analytics work across your company?

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The shift away from traditional BI is about building a data foundation that will support your business as it grows. We built Lightdash for teams who want trustworthy metrics, scalable developer workflows, security, and predictable pricing.

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If you want to explore how Lightdash can support your enterprise BI strategy, start your 21-day trial here.