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Helical Insight has announced that its entire business intelligence platform is now free and open source, with no per-seat fees and no paid enterprise tier. The company says the move removes the "open-core" model, in which features such as single sign-on, row-level security and white-label embedding typically sit behind commercial licenses, and describes itself as the only completely free open-source BI platform with a full suite of enterprise-grade features.
What the Free Platform Includes
According to the company, the platform combines modern visual analytics and AI capabilities with legacy reporting in one environment. The free release includes:
- Drag-and-drop interactive dashboards with drill-down visualizations for self-service analytics across data sources
- Pixel-perfect paginated reports for formatted invoices, financial statements and compliance documents, with automated report bursting and scheduled email delivery
- API-first embedded analytics that lets SaaS companies and product teams embed white-labeled dashboards without per-viewer licensing
- Enterprise security, including SSO integrations (SAML, OAuth, JWT and Okta), multi-tenancy, row-level security and role-based access control
Helical Insight argues that open-source BI tools have historically behaved like extended free trials, because teams moving to production often have to engage a sales team to unlock capabilities such as multi-tenancy, embedding and governance.
Bring-Your-Own-LLM AI
The platform's AI module offers conversational analytics, letting users ask questions in plain English and receive generated SQL queries and charts. Rather than routing data through a vendor-managed AI cloud, Helical Insight uses a bring-your-own-LLM approach: organizations plug in their own API keys for models such as OpenAI or Anthropic's Claude, or run locally hosted open-source models through Ollama.
Because the software is deployed within the customer's own virtual private cloud, the company says confidential business data does not have to leave the organization's infrastructure. It positions that as relevant for sectors such as healthcare, defense and finance, where sending schema data to third-party servers can raise compliance concerns.
Getting Started
Helical Insight says developers can pull the code from GitHub, deploy with Docker containers in minutes and connect to data warehouses, SQL databases or flat files. The company says there are no credit card requirements, mandatory sales calls or time-limited trials, and that the platform is free to run in production indefinitely. The code is available on GitHub, with more information at helicalinsight.com.
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