What Power BI and Looker Studio do very well
They are powerful, proven visualisation tools: they connect to many sources, chart whatever they are asked to and let you explore data by filter, by period, by entity. For a management controller who searches, cross-checks and verifies, they are in their element.
They also have the advantage of being known. In a group, Power BI is often the standard imposed by the IT department, with its licences, its access rules and its skills already in place. We do not fight that: when your group requires it, we build with it.
Where they keep their promise is when the data arrives already clean, consistent and defined. The chart is the easy part; a visualisation tool only shows what it is given, and that is precisely the problem.
The problem is rarely the chart
When a leadership team argues about the month's margin instead of deciding, the dashboard is not at fault: three sources give three different figures for the same day, and two departments do not share the same definition of what they count. A visualisation tool placed on that data displays the contradictions faster; it does not resolve them.
The decisive work happens upstream: one record per client, one source for revenue, one written definition per indicator, what is counted, what is excluded, who answers for it. That is the indicator dictionary, the step everyone wants to skip and the one that prevents arguments about numbers in the middle of a meeting.
A dashboard on dirty data lies, whatever tool displays it. The question “Power BI or custom?” therefore almost always hides another one: “who cleans our data, and who holds the definitions?”
What a custom cockpit brings
A custom cockpit is first a foundation: your tools stay in place, accounting, bank, CRM, invoicing, advertising, spreadsheets; the connectors pull the data once, the base consolidates and cleans it, and every indicator carries a written definition. That foundation is refreshed every night and belongs to you, like everything we deliver.
It is then the decision screen: at most twelve indicators, each with its target, its trend and a named owner; thresholds that trigger alerts; views per team, sales, production, finance, with role-based access. The leadership meeting opens on that screen, and the slides stay in the drawer.
It is finally a foundation for what comes next: AI agents and automations work on the same clean data as the cockpit. A foundation built once serves dashboards, alerts and agents; it is the architecture of Stratedge OS, and of our clients' cockpits.
Cost and maintenance, on both paths
On the BI side, the visible cost is the per-user licences; the real cost is the person who builds and maintains the reports. The day they leave, the report nobody knows how to change becomes a frozen screen, then a screen nobody opens. Count that internal time honestly before comparing.
On the custom side, prices are public. The Cockpit Starter, at €3,000 excl. VAT, installs one view and ten automatically updated indicators with the standard connectors, spreadsheets, invoicing tools, common CRMs, analytics and advertising, in one to 2 weeks. The Cockpit Program, from €20,000 excl. VAT, builds the full cockpit: mapping of indicators, connectors and data model, views per team, alerts and exports, training and documentation.
What follows falls under Care, from €250 excl. VAT per month: monitoring, backups, fixes and small evolutions. And nothing prevents keeping Power BI or Looker Studio as the display layer on top of the foundation: the foundation does the work, your group's tool shows it.
How to decide in one meeting
Three tests are enough. Ask two departments for last month's margin: if they answer the same figure, your data is clean. Ask who fixes a broken report: if a person is named, available and not planning to leave, maintenance is covered. Look at an indicator in the red: if it triggered a decision at the last meeting, your tool steers.
Three positive answers: keep your BI tool, it does the job. One negative answer or more: the foundation comes first, and the display tool is chosen afterwards. In both cases, the interactive demo on this site shows what a complete management cockpit looks like, clickable, no email required.
When the prerequisites are met, the list of indicators, read access to the tools, one person who settles definitions, a first cockpit is in production in 3 to 4 weeks, main sources connected. When they are not, no tool, BI or custom, will make up for the delay.