AskYourDatabase alternative: chat with your database on your own key

AskYourDatabase vs Intellrise at a glance

• AI provider — AskYourDatabase: the platform supplies the model. Its security page lists the AI provider as "Anthropic by default, OpenAI as an alternative", and its plans sell model access (Claude and GPT usage included) rather than asking you to supply a key; we could not find a documented bring-your-own-key option outside the on-premise Enterprise tier. Intellrise: bring your own key on every tier — Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, MiniMax or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint.
• Pricing model — AskYourDatabase: its pricing page lists a Desktop App "Ultimate" plan at $69.99/month per seat, currently discounted to $49.00/month as a countdown promotion the page says is about to end, and a separate Website Chatbot product at $149/month (1,000 questions/month, up to 6 chatbots) and $329/month (1,500 questions/month, unlimited chatbots), plus custom Enterprise. Intellrise: flat plans — Free $0 and Pro $29/mo (about $24/mo billed annually) — and you pay your AI provider directly for tokens.
• Free entry — AskYourDatabase: its desktop page offers "No credit card required, we have free quota of small model"; no standing free plan is listed on the pricing page. Intellrise: every new account starts on a 14-day Pro trial with no card, then lands on a permanently free tier, and there is a public demo at intellrise.com/demo that needs no signup at all.
• Where your data sits — AskYourDatabase: the desktop app stores credentials locally and its gateway states "No Data Storage" for intermediate and conversation data; the cloud chatbot, by its own docs, does "store conversation records and your encrypted credentials". Intellrise: cloud-hosted with per-account isolation, credentials and AI keys encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM, and analysis running on your own key, so your business data is not stored or used to train a model.
• Databases — AskYourDatabase: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MongoDB, Snowflake, BigQuery and ClickHouse. Intellrise: 10 sources (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, Redshift, BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks, Google Sheets, CSV, Excel) with cross-source joins in a single query. Each list covers ground the other does not.
• Schema understanding — AskYourDatabase: describes a self-learning AI that "will learn from data and your feedback and improve over time". Intellrise: a self-maintaining semantic layer you can inspect and edit — AI Semantic Schema Learning, definitions learned from chat and saved permanently behind an accept/reject card, a manual table and column description editor, and a dbt mode that recognises your existing models.
• Transparency — AskYourDatabase: generates, executes and explains SQL, with fine-grained control over which tables and columns the AI can reach. Intellrise: a readable query plan in business terms with the raw SQL one click away, plus a read-only guard that blocks anything that is not a SELECT.
• Output — AskYourDatabase: natural-language dashboards, shareable by direct link and embeddable by iframe; its dashboard docs describe sharing rather than file exports. Intellrise: dashboards plus editable reports exported to PDF, DOCX, PPTX, Excel and CSV, with read-only share links and one-off email delivery on Pro.
• Best for — AskYourDatabase: teams who want credentials to stay on the desktop, who need Oracle, MongoDB or ClickHouse, or who want to embed a data chatbot for their own customers. Intellrise: analysts, analytics engineers, dbt users and consultants who need reproducible answers on live databases, cost control, and a file they can hand to a stakeholder.

1. Bring-your-own-key: cost and data control

AskYourDatabase bundles the model into the subscription. Its security documentation names the AI provider as "Anthropic by default, OpenAI as an alternative", its sub-processor list names OpenAI as the "AI language model provider for query generation and natural language processing", and its Desktop App plan advertises unlimited use of specific Claude and GPT models. That is a real convenience: you never touch an API key, and heavy use does not produce a second bill. The trade-off is that the model choice, the provider relationship and the per-seat price are all the platform's to set, and the desktop app lists $69.99/month per seat, currently discounted to $49.00/month as a promotion its pricing page says is about to end.

Intellrise inverts that. You connect your own provider key — Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, MiniMax or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint — and pay that provider directly for tokens. The subscription is flat: Free $0, Pro $29/mo (about $24/mo billed annually). There is no seat meter and no question quota between you and your model, so you can pick the model that fits your budget and accuracy bar, switch it from the in-chat model picker, and tune context, output tokens, temperature and reasoning level per key. Because the analysis runs on your key, your business data is not stored or used to train a model, and connection details and keys are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM under per-account isolation. For teams whose security review asks "whose account is our schema being sent through?", being able to answer "ours" is often the whole conversation.

It is worth being precise about the data-control comparison, because it is not one-directional. AskYourDatabase's desktop app is genuinely strong here: credentials stay on your machine and its gateway states that it does not store intermediate or conversation data. Its cloud chatbot is the opposite end, and its own docs say so plainly — it stores conversation records and encrypted credentials. Intellrise is cloud-hosted, so credentials are stored (encrypted) rather than kept on your laptop; what it gives you instead is control of the model layer, which is where your schema and your questions actually travel.

2. Reproducibility and a semantic layer you can read and edit

Both products understand that accuracy on a real database depends on the tool knowing what your columns mean, and both have an answer for it. AskYourDatabase describes an AI that "will learn from data and your feedback and improve over time". Intellrise's answer is a semantic layer that is also an artifact you can open: the AI auto-annotates tables and columns, and when you clarify a field in conversation it proposes saving that definition as an accept-or-reject card, which then persists and shapes every later query. You can edit those descriptions by hand in a UI, or switch on dbt mode and point it at your existing models, where it recognises fact, dimension and staging conventions.

The practical difference is auditability. A learned layer you cannot see is difficult to correct when it learns something wrong, and difficult to hand over when someone else inherits the workspace. A semantic layer you can read, edit and version alongside dbt is a thing your team owns. It is also why the same question tends to keep returning the same answer: the definitions are not re-derived per session, they are stored.

Intellrise adds transparency at query time on top of that. For anything non-trivial it shows a readable query plan first — sources, fields, joins, filters, groupings and aggregation in business terms, with the exact SQL collapsed one click away — and you confirm before it runs. A read-only guard blocks anything that is not a SELECT, so the tool cannot modify data even if you ask it to. When a number ends up in a board pack, being able to point at the plan that produced it is what makes it defensible.

3. End-to-end: question, dashboard, and a file you can send

Both tools build dashboards from plain English, and AskYourDatabase's sharing story is well suited to its embedding use case: dashboards share by direct link and drop into a website with iframe code. Its dashboard documentation describes that sharing model rather than file exports.

Intellrise is built around the other half of the analyst's week — the deliverable. Ask for one and it produces a report artifact by type: a table becomes Excel or CSV, a deck becomes a 16:9 PPTX, a document becomes PDF or DOCX. It appears as a draft in a side panel, you edit it in place (rewrite a section by telling the AI what you want, toggle chart or table or insight blocks, edit the SQL and regenerate), and you save it to Reports when it is right. Dashboards and reports can go out as read-only share links, and Pro can send one by email.

This is the "end-to-end" half of the positioning, and it is the mundane part that decides whether a tool survives contact with real work: the question, the chart, the dashboard it gets pinned to, and the file that lands in someone's inbox all live in one place, instead of ending at a chart you then screenshot into a slide.

Connectors: where each one covers more ground

Neither connector list is a superset of the other, and it is worth checking yours before anything else. AskYourDatabase lists PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MongoDB, Snowflake, BigQuery and ClickHouse. If your data lives in Oracle, MongoDB or ClickHouse, Intellrise does not support those today and AskYourDatabase is simply the tool that can answer your question.

Intellrise connects 10 sources — PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, Redshift, BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks, Google Sheets, CSV and Excel — and adds something a single-connection tool cannot: a DuckDB federation layer that joins across them in one query. Joining a Postgres orders table to a Google Sheet of targets and a CSV export from a system nobody has connected yet is a routine analyst request, and it is the reason the spreadsheet and file sources are treated as first-class rather than as an afterthought.

When AskYourDatabase is the better fit

No tool wins on every axis, and there are several jobs where AskYourDatabase is clearly the better answer.

• Your data is in Oracle, MongoDB or ClickHouse. Intellrise does not connect to those; AskYourDatabase does.
• You want a customer-facing data chatbot. Its Website Chatbot is a separate product built for exactly that — embed it in your own app so your customers can query their own data, with access control scoping each customer to their own rows. Intellrise has no equivalent; it is an internal analyst tool.
• Credentials must not leave the machine. The desktop app keeps database credentials on your own computer and its gateway does not store conversation data. If a policy forbids storing credentials with a vendor at all, that architecture answers it directly and Intellrise's cloud model does not.
• You need on-premise, including the model. Its Enterprise tier documents on-premise deployment with the option to run open-source models such as Llama 3 or Mistral on your own server. Intellrise is cloud-hosted only.
• You would rather not manage an API key. Bundled model access means one bill and no provider setup. That is a real advantage if nobody on the team wants to own a key — and it is the honest weak point of a bring-your-own-key product for non-technical users.
• You want unmetered heavy use at a predictable number. If your team asks thousands of questions a month and you prefer one fixed per-seat price to a token bill you have to watch, a bundled plan is easier to budget.

Who Intellrise is for

Intellrise is the stronger fit when the same question needs to return the same answer next quarter, when you want the model layer under your own account, and when the work does not end at a chart. Analysts, analytics engineers, dbt users, data consultants and technical founders tend to feel the difference first: a semantic layer they can read and correct, a query plan they can audit, cross-source joins over live databases and spreadsheets, bring-your-own-key economics at $29/mo flat, and reports they can actually hand to a stakeholder in PDF, DOCX, PPTX, Excel or CSV.

It is also the easier tool to justify to a security reviewer for one specific reason: you choose the AI provider, the key is yours, and your data is not stored or used to train a model.

Try it on your own data

The honest way to choose between two tools like these is to run one of your own questions against your own data and look at what comes back — and at how it says it got there.

Intellrise makes that cheap to test. Every new account starts on a 14-day Pro trial with no card, and there is a public demo at intellrise.com/demo — a five-table dataset, the queries verbatim, and the charts they return — that needs no signup or AI key, so you can see real output on real data before you decide whether to set anything up. After the trial the free tier stays free: one database source plus Google Sheets, three dashboards, and unlimited reports and exports. Connect a read-only user, ask a real question, and judge the query plan and the semantic layer for yourself.