Is Hex BI?

There are only a few big, roaring category rivers in software — but new fish always want to carve out smaller streams they can swim in while they grow.

This has been especially true in data analytics, where the “modern data stack” Cambrian explosion saw a branching of products and niche sub-categories, which are now flowing into each other through natural selection and consolidation. It’s the way of life.

For Hex, a big question from the beginning has been how we define our own swimlane? We had a clear vision of a product we wanted to build — but weren’t sure what to call it. Notebook? BI? Some new thing? “Category” looms large as a term for companies doing something new.

As we come into a new era of analytics — and Hex — I thought I’d share some reflections on this.

Where we’ve been

Today, Hex contains multitudes — but we started with a notebook.

Before Hex, notebooks were used for data work — but it was very technical, with a very high barrier for entry. Step 1: learn computers, install a bunch of local packages, and learn the entire Pandas syntax… and very few people made it that far. We made it much better!

But we never thought “notebook” made sense as a standalone category. Our vision was much bigger — we wanted to take on the full gamut of analytics workflows teams were doing, and bring them together in one place. Calling ourselves just a “notebook” would have pigeon holed us in a niche.

The other “obvious” alternative was to embrace the mantle of being a “BI tool.” But… BI tools have a lot of baggage. Folks think of them as mostly for dashboards, because they’re built to go one level deep — a query and chart on top — not to get into the more complex questions that really matter.

In fact, we built Hex specifically because we hated these limitations — so calling ourselves “BI” would have been inaccurate, and a sure-fire way to invite erroneous head-to-head comparison with legacy solutions that we weren’t trying to replace 1-for-1.

Of course we also considered the vaunted “category creation” strategy… maybe we’re the world’s first Integrated Analytics Platform (IAP)? Or Decision Intelligence Platform (DIP)? What about Collaborative Analytics Workbench (CAW)? Do any of these stir your soul? Yeah…

Where we’re going

But now, in 2025, things are changing. We have magic computers that can talk to us and do tasks — and we can re-think how all software is supposed to work.

Hex’s new agentic Threads feature is proof-positive of this. The same core job-to-be-done people used to go to traditional BI tools for — “I want to know what’s going on with this thing” — is now possible just by asking.

Not only is it orders-of-magnitude lower friction to get started with a question — it makes it easy to go deeper, ask next questions, and look at things differently. This is a re-think of what these workflows look like, not a re-packaging of what you could do with legacy BI dashboards.

But as of this writing, I think Hex is by far the best solution for true self-serve analytics on the market. It gives you an agentic, natural-language entry point, full-blown point-and-click exploration tools, and a governance and modeling layer connecting the data team with the rest of the org – and it all works together.

Building and integrating all of these things is really hard! It’s taken us years of iteration to get it really working. And that’s despite being told this wasn’t possible, or that other people had tried it and failed.

Ok… so, can we call Hex a “BI” tool now?

If you want to – sure! You can 100% use Hex to build dashboards, point-and-click, and make pretty viz. If that’s BI for you, then Hex is BI.

But the whole point of Hex is that those are pieces — tools, really — in a broader platform that also brings together deeper analysis, data science, and data apps, with a powerful agent layer that truly revolutionizes the way you can accomplish the jobs-to-be-done.

We are convinced that these integrated, agentic systems will be the future of the analytics market, and it’ll look very different than what came before. And we’re working hard to to invent that future — and if we’re successful, maybe this will just be the new definition of “BI.”

Your next BI tool shouldn’t just be a BI tool

Hex isn’t for everyone. If you’re mostly concerned with replacing your old tool’s functionality 1-for-1 — honestly there might be better solutions.

But if you’re interested in re-thinking the way analysis, collaboration, and insight work in this new world — that’s what we’re focused on, and we’d love to share it with you.