I've seen this one play out many times, and honestly the platform matters far less than what you're feeding it. If your data warehouse has inconsistent naming, messy definitions, or no governance structure, any dashboard tool will become a full‑time maintenance job. It's like buying a high‑end kitchen but never cleaning the pots - the equipment isn't the problem.
Power BI often comes out ahead when the whole organisation is already on Microsoft and cost control is top of mind. Tableau still shines for exploratory visual work, but it can get pricey and administrative heavy as you scale. Looker is excellent if you want a proper semantic layer and consistent metrics across the business - just be prepared for a heavier upfront modelling lift. Domo works well for business users who want something quick, though I've watched teams hit a wall when they need deeper warehouse‑first control.
For marketing reporting specifically, I'd look closely at connector reliability, how it handles blended data, permission granularity, scheduled exports, and how painful it is to update a single metric definition across fifty dashboards. The real tradeoff usually reveals itself later: you can have something easy and fast now, or something governed and scalable further down the line - rarely both right away.
