Omni
BI platform that combines spreadsheet-speed exploration with a governed model.
why this verdict
Keep it — Google has not replaced it
Google's version overlaps, but does not finish the data & BI job, so this one is still worth keeping open.
- A named launch, not a vibe named, unlinked
- Gemini in BigQuery and Copilot in Power BI answering data questions inside the warehouse. Google, July 8, 2025 — no announcement link recorded yet.
- How much of the job it covers not the job editorial call
- Parts of it. The job still needs the tool to get finished.
- Is there a free way to do it? yes
- 2 of 3 listed replacements have a usable free tier: Hex and Metabase.
- What the call is worth nothing to cancel
- No paid entry tier tracked, so there is no subscription to cancel.
- Threatened by
- Since
- July 8, 2025
- List price
- free
- Per year
- —
The backstory
Omni was built by people from Looker and Stitch to fix the trade-off in business intelligence: governed tools are slow to change, and self-serve tools produce contradictory numbers. It lets an analyst explore in a spreadsheet-like way and then promote a definition into the shared model. Free AI querying in the warehouse is the pressure. Omni's counter is that an answer without governance is a liability, and the promotion path from exploration to canonical metric is the workflow that actually keeps a company consistent.
Escape hatches
Mature semantic modelling with Google integration
cloud.google.com open_in_newNotebook-first analysis with strong AI features
hex.tech open_in_newOpen-source BI that is simple to self-host
metabase.com open_in_new2 of 3 replacements have a usable free tier.