Sema vs Xophia AI Headless BI
Sema
semalayer.comXophia AI Headless BI
xophia.aiSide by side
| Figure | Sema | Xophia AI Headless BI |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $49/mo | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 0 |
| Spec score · Semantic Layer Software | 8.7 (#4) | 6.7 (#28) |
| Audience | Sema describes itself as built for enterprise and regulated teams, and its About page says it is designed for warehouses with thousands of tables. | Xophia positions Headless BI for teams that calculate the same KPI differently and want shared metrics across dashboards, products, and agents. |
| Deployment | Sema says it can run in the customer’s VPC or its own environment; its self-hosted Kubernetes deployment uses a Helm chart and customer-provided Postgres and object storage. | Xophia offers managed cloud and customer-VPC deployment patterns according to scope; region, data flows, and retention are documented for the deployment. |
| Integrations | Sema describes its capabilities as MCP tools for use with Claude, Cursor, or an in-house agent, and supports OAuth2/OIDC identity providers including Okta, Entra, Auth0, and Google Workspace. | The product page lists Snowflake, BigQuery, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, dbt, Power BI, Looker, Tableau, REST/GraphQL, and MCP, while noting the exact adapter set is scoped during implementation. |
| Security | Sema says it uses TLS in transit and encryption at rest, role-based access, restricted-column masking, workspace isolation, and an append-only log of queries, plans, and configuration changes. | The managed-cloud description specifies TLS 1.2 or higher in transit and AES-256 at rest. |
| Support | The Pro plan includes email support, Business includes priority support, and Enterprise includes a named customer success manager. | The site invites prospective customers to a 30-minute working session with engineering to map systems and scope an initial deployment. |
Plans
In their own words
Sema
Sema is a semantic layer for enterprise AI that connects databases and answers business questions in plain English, with governance controls. It maps tables, joins, metrics, and business terms into a typed graph; verified inferred joins can be reused in later answers. It can ask clarifying questions, show the SQL and graph nodes behind an answer, and select a chart. Users can save and schedule reports for email delivery and set metric alerts for thresholds or deviations. Available connectors include PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite, and SQLAlchemy URIs; ClickHouse and Amazon Redshift are in beta, while SQL Server, Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, and dbt metadata are on the roadmap. Sema can run in a customer VPC or its own environment; self-hosting uses Kubernetes and Helm with customer-provided Postgres and object storage. The free Sandbox costs nothing and limits use to one connector, one user, 100 monthly chat queries, and five saved reports, without scheduled delivery or alerts. Pro costs $49 a month per user, with a three-seat minimum and a 14-day trial.
Xophia AI Headless BI
Xophia AI Headless BI has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.