Power BI vs Tableau - Find Your Perfect Match for a BI Tool

Power BI vs Tableau Comparison- Understand the pro’s and con’s of Tableau and Power BI from a technical and high-level perspective as a user.

Power BI vs Tableau - Find Your Perfect Match for a BI Tool
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Global data generation will expand to 63 zettabytes (ZB) by 2025. Business Intelligence (BI) offers excellent ways to gain data insights and use them in data-driven decision-making. BI market will grow to $39.35 billion in the next five years. It is essential to pick the right BI tools to obtain the most out of the BI technologies. We have compared the two most popular BI tools viz. Microsoft Power BI and Tableau. 


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Tableau vs Power BI comparison will allow you to select the right tool as per your business requirements. But let’s put first things first and understand what Power BI and Tableau have on offer for users so they can choose the right business intelligence tool.

 

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Power BI bs Tableau - What’s the Difference?

power bi vs tableau

What is Power BI?

Power BI is the product of Microsoft, and it provides cloud-based BI services to end-users. Power BI offers data visualisation, analytics, and warehousing capabilities utilising the existing Microsoft platforms and services, such as Azure, SQL, etc. It currently captures 36% of the current BI market share and is a leading business intelligence tool. 

What is Tableau?

Tableau is the visual analytics platform capable of managing the entire data landscape of a business firm. The analytics platform specialises in showcasing engaging data visuals with a primary focus on the corporate environments. Open-source/free and subscription-based/paid are the two versions of the tool for the end-users. Tableau also has low-price/free non-profit tools and similar options for academic settings. 

Power BI vs Tableau - Features Comparison Table 

Power BI Tableau

Real-time dashboards 

Real-time data analytics

Online analytical processing 

Interactive dashboards

Navigation plan

Data blending

Trend indicators

Compatibility with mobile devices and platforms 

Compatibility with all Microsoft products and services

Data collaboration

Ad-hoc and customised reports 

 Toggle View

Extensive data visualisation tools

Custom Notifications

Content packs 

Dashboard Commenting

Q&A feature

No-Code Data Queries

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Power BI vs Tableau - Products

Power BI Products

Power BI Desktop is the primary publishing tool. It allows several features to develop new models and reports. Power BI Service is the SaaS cloud service to host Power BI models, reports, and dashboards. Data collaborations and exchange occurs over the cloud using Power BI Service. 

Microsoft Power BI Data Gateway is the tool to connect with the on-premise data sources and the cloud resources. BI Admin can install the tool to connect to direct/live queries. Power BI Report Server is a product to host the data reports for desktop and mobile versions of the tool. It lets you generate customised and ad-hoc reports. It also has many mobile apps compatible with mobile operating systems as Android, iOS, and Windows. 

Tableau Products

Tableau Desktop is an essential product with a rich feature set. It enables the users to create charts, reports, and blend the data to generate customised dashboards. The tool also offers the option to share dashboards publicly or locally. Tableau Desktop Personal comes with access control options. Workbooks in this product are kept private, and it is primarily applicable in small businesses or teams working from a single location. Tableau Desktop Professional is another version with an option to publish the workbooks online or on the Tableau Server. 

Tableau Public is the cost-effective version offering public access to the files and workbooks to all the users. The tool does not offer any form of access control. 

Tableau Server shares the data visualizations and workbooks in the entire organization. Tableau offers the feature of sharing the dashboards. You can publish the workbooks in Tableau Desktop and then share the dashboards using Tableau Server. Only licensed users can access visualisations and workbooks shared using the server. For cloud hosting, Tableau offers Tableau Online. It comes with easy and multiple file-sharing options. 

Tableau Reader is the open-source tool to view the data visualizations and workbooks with read-only access. Privacy and security controls are not present in this version. 

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Power BI vs Tableau - Cost Comparison

Power BI offers multiple versions and options. These include Desktop, Pro, and Premium. The desktop version is the open-source version and comes free of cost for individual users.  Power BI Pro has monthly charges of $9.99 per user. It offers desktop and mobile app access with a 1 GB model size limit. Under this plan, a user gets to connect to more than 100 data sources. The version is free for organisations with an active subscription to Microsoft 365 ES.  Power BI Premium version comes with monthly charges of $20 per user. It includes advanced AI features, effective application lifecycle management, 100 TB data storage, XMLA endpoint read/write, and a lot more. 

Power BI Premium per capacity plan has monthly charges of $4,995 with dedicated cloud computing and storage. It includes all the features of Power BI Premium with additional features, such as 400 GB model limit, auto-scaling, on-premise reporting, Bring Your Own Key, BYOK, etc.  

Tableau follows a different pricing model with subscriptions as per the user's needs. The versions include Creator, Explorer, and Viewer. The users can subscribe for the per-user model or monthly/annual billing models. Tableau plan rates are as shown below. 

Plan

Cost (per user per month)

Creator

$70

Explorer

$35 for on-premise and $42 for cloud deployment 

Viewer

$12 for on-premise and $15 for cloud

Tableau Viewer needs a minimum of 100 viewers to be eligible to purchase the plan. Users can have access to a 14-day free trial before they complete their purchase.  Power BI, on the other hand, offers a 60-day Pro trial. In terms of the costs, Power BI is an affordable option. 

Power BI vs Tableau - Pros and Cons

Parameter

Power BI

Tableau

Pros

  • Real-time dashboards 

  • Hybrid configuration to meet varying requirements 

  • Supports natural language query

  • Regular updates and security patches

  • Automated and scheduled refreshes after publishing the data 

  • Integration with R and Python 

  • A broad range of visualisation options 

  • Use of R and Python to perform complex table calculations 

  • Effective customer service and support

  • Low training costs 

  • Data cleaning options 

  • Ability to handle and manage huge data volumes

Cons

  • Inability to accept files larger than 1 GB

  • Users should have the same email domains to share dashboards/reports

  • Dashboards do not accept/pass user or account or any other entity parameters

  • Higher costs 

  • Lack of versioning and change management

  • No support to AI and Machine Learning features 

  • Suitable mainly for larger businesses to manage the licensing costs

Power BI vs Tableau - Integrations and Key connections

Power BI is a Microsoft product offering seamless integration and compatibility with all Microsoft products. It also has API access and easy integrations with Salesforce, Google Analytics, and other latest technological tools. You can easily sync the tool with the existing services in the organisation. A brief authorisation process will enable you to get fully connected. You can then build the visualisations accordingly. 

Tableau also offers integrations with some of the widely used enterprise tools. However, the connection interface is more on the complex side for Tableau in comparison with Power BI. You can look at all the connections in sync with the account as soon as you log in to the tool. 

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Power BI vs Tableau - Dashboards, BI Reporting, and Productivity

Power Bi offers real-time dashboards and real-time data analytics to the end-users. The tool also comes with great drag and drop features to enhance the user experience. The users need not have the extensive technical expertise to use its powerful data analytics and data discovery features. 

Real-time data access enables the business teams to keep track of the ongoing business changes with collaboration from all the departments. Live data access provides Power BI with an edge over Tableau and other business intelligence tools. 

Power BI generates alerts on the changes. It also enables users to add the data visualisations directly to their blogs, websites, or mobile apps. Users can also educate themselves using guided learning, webinars, YouTube channel, and documentation. The natural language query tool in Power BI adds to the user experience and engagement levels. You can put your queries and questions using this feature to receive a response immediately. 

Tableau also offers power dashboard and reporting features; however, some of these features are a little less intuitive. Users may have a hard time navigating to the options hidden behind the menus and sub-menus. Live query capabilities in Tableau are helpful from an analysts’ perspective. Along with query-based visualisation, the Tableau BI tool also has easy-to-use drag & drop features. You may have to spend some time studying the UI and the feature set of Tableau to use all the options effectively. 

Customer service and support is the strength of Tableau with comprehensive support tools for the users. You can access these tools to gather information on the basic to advanced features of the tool. Tableau also offers data access and data manipulation functionalities through the mobile app. It, however, does not support natural language queries. 

Power BI vs Tableau - Data Visualizations 

Users can select several visualisations as blueprints in Power BI and can insert the data using the sidebar. Natural language queries also assist in creating the visualisations as per the requirements. The tool, however, has a 3,500 datapoint limit on the datasets to perform analysis. 

Tableau has various forms of baseline visualisations. Some of these include line charts, heat maps, and others. The tool does not demand the user to have specialised coding skills to develop and access complex visualisations. Users can include unlimited data points while conducting the analysis. 

Both the tools have numerous options when it comes to data visualisations. These options can assist the users in discovering data patterns and making data-driven decisions. Tableau scores better on the number of data points for analysis as Power BI has a limit on the same. 

Power BI vs Tableau - User Interface

Power BI has an intuitive and self-explanatory user interface. Seamless integration with other Microsoft products with a rich UI makes this tool a compelling choice. The visual appeal of the user interface is high, enabling the users to operate effectively. You can customise the views by selecting either of the three options as report, data, and model view. 

Tableau has an engaging user interface with an interactive dashboard. You can experiment with your data sets on the UI of Tableau and get corresponding outcomes. The workspace area in Tableau uses different toolbar and shelves with the status bar, cards, and sheet tabs. 

Power BI vs Tableau - Data Sources

Power BI has access and integrations with all the databases and storage options by Microsoft. Some examples are Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL Server, etc. The tool also offers access to Oracle database, MySQL, and IBM DB2. It has limited access to the other database options. 

Tableau scores better than Power BI in terms of the data sources and databases. It has access to Excel, Cloudera Hadoop, Dropbox, JSON, Google Analytics, and many others. 

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Power BI vs Tableau - Data Security

Data security is an important parameter to consider in the selection of BI tools because of the excessive security violations and attacks. Your BI tool needs to remain up-to-date with the security certifications, norms, and protocols. The BI tool shall offer a combination of security features to protect from different forms of security risks. 

Power BI follows the security standards and protocols of Microsoft and has strict security compliance criteria. A high level of security in Power BI is evident from the architecture of the software. Every deployment in Power BI has a web front-end and back-end cluster. Data exchange occurs between two clusters, and continuous authentication of the clients occurs to avoid any security compromise. Administrators get the option to select the desired authentication model. Access control options by Power BI are also extensive. You can opt for row-level and column-level security to improve the overall access control. The users can always set and modify their peer user and clients’ permissions while sharing the dashboards. Security features in Power BI are an amalgamation of network security, data security, and system security. The tool follows and implements multi-tenant environment security. 

Tableau offers a large number of authentication measures. Some of these are trusted authentication, mutual SSL, personal access tokens, Kerberos, and others. Advanced network security and encryption are also the security features of Tableau. You can also safeguard live data sources with Tableau by enabling database credentials in published view. Tableau administrators also have numerous options for keeping the data secure. These include authentication models, login accounts, and user filters. Role-based access control and permissions enable easier data access management. The tool also provides row-level security. 

Power BI vs Tableau - IoT Analytics

Power BI offers easy integration with Microsoft Azure Stream Analytics to perform IoT analytics. Azure Stream Analytics is a real-time event-processing engine capable of analysing massive volumes of data streams. The tool can also integrate easily with Azure Event and IoT Hub to gather and analyse data from multiple sources. Internet of Things, IoT applications, and services rely significantly on real-time data and analysis. Power BI offers the ability to develop real-time dashboards and alerts as per spatial/temporal patterns. 

Tableau can collect data from multiple IoT sources and can visualise the data to gain insights. You can also build dashboards from IoT data and identify the trends and patterns. 

Power BI vs Tableau - Customer Support

Power BI has extensive support resources and documentation. The tool has guided learning to provide information on the specific features, workflows, and options. Users with paid accounts receive a quicker response on the customer support tickets. 

Tableau offers direct customer support by phone and email. The users can also log in to the customer portal and raise a support ticket. Support resources and documentation is also available online. The community forum and training events are the other mediums for customer service and support. 

Tableau offers better customer support and direct contact compared to Power BI. Users with a free account on Power BI can face complexities in receiving customer support. 

Power BI vs Tableau vs Qlikview

Power BI has an edge over Tableau compared to the two tools in the section above. Qlikview is also an extremely popular BI tool. It is a product of Qlik Technologies and provides a wide range of data discovery and analytics features. The following table provides a comparison of all three tools across different parameters. 

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Power BI vs Tableau vs Qlikview - Comparison Matrix

Parameter

Power BI

Tableau

Qlikview

Data Security

Excellent

Good

Good

IoT Analytics

Best

Good

Good

Natural Language Processing

Yes

Limited

No

Free Trial

60 days 

14 days

30 days

Reporting

Ad-hoc and customised reporting, easy

Custom reporting with easy options to choose from

Custom reporting with easy options to choose from

Share dashboards

Yes

Yes

Yes

Data Visualizations

Yes

Yes

Yes 

Augmented and Embedded Analytics

Yes

Limited

No 

Finding Your Perfect Match for a Business Intelligence Tool

Power BI emerges as a winner out of the three tools because of the reasonable pricing of the tool, excellent visualisation and analytics options, seamless integrations, better data security, and ease of usage. Tableau and Qlikview also have abundant options and features, making them leading BI tools currently available. While making the selection, you must effectively analyse your business requirements and then map your needs with the offerings of the BI tool.  Security, budget, functionalities, usability, and customer support are aspects you must consider in detail while making the selection. 

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