All four of these tools promise the same thing in their marketing: hand over a spreadsheet, ask questions in plain English, get answers and charts back. What actually differs is where the work happens — a chat window, a live spreadsheet, inside Excel itself, or a dashboard — and how each vendor counts your usage. That counting is where the real price hides, so that is what this comparison focuses on.
Plus plan, billed annually ($20/mo monthly). Usage is metered in credits — see the warning in the comparison table.
Plus plan, billed annually ($8/user/mo monthly). A spreadsheet first, with an AI analyst built in.
Starter plan, billed annually ($18/mo monthly). Works as a web app and as Excel / Google Sheets add-ons.
*Basic plan as listed — but Polymer's own pricing page currently shows conflicting plan tables. Read the pricing warning below before budgeting.
| Julius AI | Rows | Formula Bot | Polymer | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Asking one-off questions of a file without writing code | Teams whose reports live in a spreadsheet and refresh on a schedule | Excel / Sheets users who want formulas and analysis without leaving their workflow | Marketers who need a shareable dashboard, not another spreadsheet |
| Where the work happens | Chat workspace (upload files or connect a database) | Inside a Rows spreadsheet, with connectors pulling live data in | Web chat plus add-ons inside Excel and Google Sheets | Auto-generated dashboard / web app built from your data |
| Free option | Yes — free plan with a daily credit allowance (exact amount not published on the current pricing page) | Yes — 5 AI tasks/month, manual imports only, 1 MB import cap | Yes — 10 chat messages and 25 AI Actions/month, 1 file per chat, 5 MB uploads | Not confirmed — current site advertises a 7-day trial; older listings of a free plan could not be verified on the live pricing page |
| Paid plans from | Plus $20/mo monthly, $16/mo billed annually | Plus $8/user/mo monthly, $6/user/mo billed annually | Starter $18/mo monthly, $13/mo billed annually | Basic listed at $10/mo monthly, $5/mo billed annually — see pricing warning |
| How usage is counted | Credits: Plus 2,000/month, Pro 5,000/month. How many credits one analysis costs is not published | AI tasks: Plus 200/month, Pro 1,000/month | Messages + AI Actions: Starter 250 messages and 2,500 Actions/month; Max has unlimited messages but Actions stay capped at 5,000 | Datasets and rows: support docs cite under 5,000 rows on Free, up to 50,000 on the mid tier, up to 500,000 on the top tier; AI chat replies are also capped by plan |
| File / data limits to know | Plans are gated by RAM (16 GB Plus, 32 GB Pro) rather than a headline file size; paid plans list 7-day file storage | Import cap: 1 MB (Free), 5 MB (Plus), 100 MB (Pro). Refresh: manual → daily → every minute | Uploads: 5 MB (Free), 200 MB (Starter), 500 MB (Max), 1 GB (Enterprise); files per chat rise from 1 to 20+ | Row-based rather than file-size-based; large or messy multi-table data is not its home turf |
| What happens to your uploaded data | SOC 2 Type II. Julius says personal information is not used to train its own models, but its policies allow content to be shared with AI technology providers for evaluating and improving their models; opting out means emailing the privacy team | Vendor's security docs: data is not used to train AI models; stored in European data centers, SOC 2 and GDPR compliant | Vendor states user data is not used to train AI models; encrypted in transit (TLS) and at rest (AES-256). Free-plan chats and files inactive for 60 days are deleted | Help center: uploads are treated as confidential, encrypted in transit and at rest (AES-256), private by default. We found no explicit public statement about AI training use — ask the vendor before uploading sensitive data |
| Trade-off to know | Credit metering you cannot predict in advance, and a steep jump from Pro ($45) to Business ($450) | Pro adds a $79/month platform fee on top of per-user pricing; the company has joined Superhuman, so check the current product status before committing | "Unlimited messages" on Max still leaves AI Actions capped; older, cheaper plan listings online are an outdated pricing structure | The vendor's own pricing page shows conflicting plan tables — do not budget from any single number without confirming it on the live page |
Prices are USD, before tax, as published by the vendors in November 2026. Two honesty notes. (1) Julius AI moved from message-based quotas to credits during 2026, so reviews quoting "15 free messages" or "250 messages on Plus" describe the old system. (2) Polymer's pricing page currently displays more than one plan table with different numbers (entry tiers variously shown from $10 to $50/month); we list the most detailed current set we could verify and flag it everywhere it appears. Plans change — always confirm the current price, limits and data policy on the vendor's site before you buy.
Julius AI is a chat-style analyst: you upload a CSV, Excel file or spreadsheet (or connect Google Drive and, on higher tiers, a database such as Postgres, BigQuery or Snowflake), describe what you want to know, and it writes and runs code behind the scenes to return tables, charts, forecasts and written summaries. Pricing is now credit-based. The free plan carries a daily credit allowance whose size is not stated on the current pricing page. Plus ($20/mo monthly, $16/mo billed annually) includes 2,000 credits a month and 16 GB of RAM; Pro ($45/mo, $37/mo annually) raises that to 5,000 credits and 32 GB of RAM; Business ($450/mo, $375/mo annually) jumps to 60,000 credits, up to 50 team members and live database connectors.
The number that matters most is the one Julius does not publish: how many credits a single analysis consumes. A simple question and a heavy multi-step analysis do not cost the same, and the vendor's public pages do not give a conversion rate. At list price a credit nominally costs about a cent on Plus ($20 ÷ 2,000), but your real cost per analysis cannot be worked out in advance — you can only watch the meter as you go.
Rows is a spreadsheet first and an AI tool second. Its cells can pull data directly from dozens of business tools — ad platforms, CRMs, analytics, databases — and its AI Analyst sits inside the sheet, answering questions, building charts and transforming tables from plain-English prompts. The difference from a chat tool is persistence: a report you build once can refresh itself on a schedule instead of being re-run by hand. The free plan includes 5 AI tasks a month, manual imports and a 1 MB import cap. Plus ($8/user/mo monthly, $6/user/mo billed annually) raises AI tasks to 200 a month with daily automated refreshes and a 5 MB import cap. Pro (a $79/mo platform fee plus $8/user/mo; $59 + $6 billed annually) offers 1,000 AI tasks, per-minute refreshes and 100 MB imports.
Two things to check before you commit. First, the Pro tier's platform fee means a solo user pays $87/month for 1,000 AI tasks — about $0.087 per task, worse per-task value than Plus at $0.04 — because what Pro really sells is refresh speed and audience size, not cheaper AI. Second, Rows has joined Superhuman; the product and pricing were still listed and on sale in late October 2026, but the long-term roadmap has not been spelled out publicly, so verify the current status on the official site.
Formula Bot started as a formula generator — describe the calculation, get back working Excel or Google Sheets syntax — and has grown into a chat-based analytics tool with dashboards, data cleaning and add-ons that work inside Excel and Google Sheets themselves. Its pricing is the easiest of the four to read, because the units are plain messages. The free plan includes 10 chat messages and 25 AI Actions a month, one file per chat and 5 MB uploads, with no credit card required. Starter ($18/mo monthly, $13/mo billed annually) includes 250 messages, 2,500 AI Actions, 200 MB uploads and up to 20 files per chat. Max ($29/seat/mo, $20/seat billed annually) makes chat messages unlimited and raises AI Actions to 5,000 per user; Enterprise ($149/seat/mo, $99 billed annually) lifts Actions to 15,000 and uploads to 1 GB.
Do the message math before you buy. One real analysis usually takes a handful of messages — the request, a couple of follow-ups, a chart fix — so at roughly five messages per analysis, Starter's 250 messages cover about 50 analyses a month (about $0.36 per analysis at the monthly price). Also note that "unlimited" on Max applies to chat messages: AI Actions — the meter for formula generations, enrichments and PDF conversions — remain capped. Some sources now show this product under the name "Better Analyst"; check which name the checkout page uses.
Polymer takes the opposite approach to the chat tools: instead of answering your questions one at a time, it converts a spreadsheet or a connected source — Google Sheets, Excel, CSV, Shopify, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Google Analytics and others — into a filterable, searchable dashboard, suggesting charts and surfacing patterns automatically, with a chat layer (PolyAI) for follow-up questions. It is the only one of the four whose output is primarily a thing you share with stakeholders rather than an answer you read yourself. Its limits are expressed in rows rather than messages: the vendor's support documentation cites datasets under 5,000 rows on the free tier, up to 50,000 rows on the mid tier and up to 500,000 rows on the top tier, which at least makes capacity planning straightforward.
The problem is price transparency. Polymer's own pricing page currently shows more than one plan table with different numbers: the most detailed set we could verify in November 2026 lists Basic at $10/mo ($5/mo billed annually), Starter at $50/mo ($25 annually), Pro at $100/mo ($50 annually) and Teams at $250/mo ($125 annually), with API access from $500/month and a 7-day trial — while other sections of the same page show lower figures for similarly named plans, and a permanent free plan could not be confirmed. Treat every Polymer price in this guide as provisional and confirm the exact plan, row limit and AI chat allowance on the live checkout page before paying.
An answer to a question → Julius AI or Formula Bot. A spreadsheet that stays alive and refreshes itself → Rows. A dashboard other people open → Polymer. Most disappointment in this category comes from buying a chat tool when the team actually needed a shared, always-current view.
Estimate your analyses per month, then multiply by roughly five messages per analysis (request, follow-ups, chart fixes). Check that against Formula Bot's 250 messages or Rows' 200 AI tasks. For Julius AI, accept that credits cannot be pre-counted — budget a month of Plus as a meter-watching trial rather than a fixed cost.
Rows' free and Plus tiers cap imports at 1 MB and 5 MB; Formula Bot starts at 5 MB and one file per chat; Polymer thinks in rows (5,000 / 50,000 / 500,000); Julius gates by RAM and keeps paid-plan files for 7 days. If your monthly sales export doesn't fit the tier, the tier doesn't fit you — whatever the headline price says.
You are uploading business data. Rows and Formula Bot publicly commit to not training models on it. Julius allows sharing with AI providers for model improvement unless you opt out by email. Polymer's public pages we checked don't state a training policy. If the data is sensitive, that paragraph matters more than any chart type.
Often, yes — if you already pay for a general chatbot with file upload and data analysis, try your real file there first. These dedicated tools earn their price in specific ways: Rows keeps a report refreshing itself on a schedule, Formula Bot works inside Excel and Sheets, Polymer produces a dashboard for other people, and Julius is built around analysis workflows and, at higher tiers, live database connections. If none of those is your bottleneck, you may not need another subscription.
The meter. Every tool here charges in a different unit — credits (Julius AI), AI tasks (Rows), messages plus AI Actions (Formula Bot), or datasets and rows (Polymer) — and the unit decides your real monthly cost more than the headline price does. A $20 plan with an opaque credit meter can cost more in practice than a $29 plan with unlimited messages. Always price the plan at your expected usage, and re-check the vendor's current pricing page, because these structures change often.
Treat every output as a draft that needs a human check. These tools generate code and summaries from your prompt; a wrong column assumption or a misunderstood filter can produce a confident-looking wrong number, and no vendor here guarantees the correctness of an analysis. Spot-check totals against a pivot table or a calculation you trust before anything leaves your desk — this guide makes no accuracy claims for any of them, because we compiled it from published specifications rather than benchmark testing.
On published policies alone: Rows and Formula Bot both state that user data is not used to train AI models, and Rows adds EU data centers with SOC 2 and GDPR compliance. Julius AI is SOC 2 Type II compliant but its policies allow content to be shared with AI technology providers to evaluate and improve their models, with an opt-out by email. For Polymer we could not find an explicit training statement in its public pages. None of this replaces your own review — if the data is regulated or client-confidential, get the vendor's current data-processing terms in writing first.
Because this guide is compiled from the vendors' published pricing, limits and policies, not from hands-on testing we didn't do. Where a judgment appears — for example, that Rows Pro is poor per-task value for a solo user — it is arithmetic on the published prices and limits, shown next to the claim so you can redo the math yourself.