Sankey Diagram

What it does.

Business users frequently need to understand how values move and transform across multiple stages, customer journeys through a website, budget allocations across departments, conversion funnels from lead to sale. Power BI has no native Sankey visual, leaving users to either rely on external tools or fall back to bar charts and tables that lose the sense of flow and stage-to-stage transformation entirely.

Sankey Diagram solves this by rendering multi-stage data as connected nodes and proportionally sized ribbons, with colors that flow naturally from each node into its outgoing ribbons via automatic gradients, no manual recoloring required, though individual flows can still be overridden by hand. Conditional formatting rules can also drive flow colors automatically based on value thresholds, surfacing outliers and problem areas at a glance without manual styling.

The visual supports both Horizontal and Vertical layouts to match any report design, with full control over node alignment, width, and spacing. Clicking any node or flow highlights its complete upstream and downstream path while dimming everything unrelated, letting users trace a single journey through a complex diagram instantly.

Formatting options such as value and percentage labels, font styling, display units, and decimal precision apply independently to node labels and flow labels. The visual supports Power BI's native interactions, cross-filtering, right-click context menus, tooltips, keyboard navigation, and high-contrast theming, and its default colors draw from the report's own theme palette, so it stays visually consistent with the rest of the report.

The visual integrates naturally with Power BI and gives report authors a way to communicate complex, multi-step processes clearly, without needing a separate tool outside the report.