Microsoft Power BI vs Tableau |Which one is best?
By: Kartika Panwar
Tags: Towards Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Life, Data, Data Science

Microsoft Power BI vs Tableau is always a crucial battle for data analyst. Power BI provides plenty of features, likewise maps, support, coding language, etc. On the other hand, Tableau is well focused on to offer excellent data visualizations.

In past years both the Power BI and Tableau are becoming the key performers in the business intelligence tools. In the old era, Tableau was the only most reliable business intelligence tool. But later on, the Power BI come into existence.

And soon it became the close competitor of Tableau. Both of these tools provide a variety of features, strength, and also have their own merits and demerits. But these tools are growing faster as the tools for gathering data insights.

Do you know that in the old aged era, the business professional depended on the IT department to generate any report through the internet or computer system? But after the evolution of Tableau and Power BI, the business professionals are now able to create any report.

The Power BI takes it to the next level. In Power BI, the end-users can access the data from various sources, clean it as per their needs. And finally, generate the report in the friction of seconds.

As I mentioned above, both of these tools are faster growing in Business intelligence. They are also the front runners in the business intelligence and data visualization industry. No other tools are near about these tools. Let’s have a basic comparison of these tools.

Basic Comparison of Power BI vs Tableau

Tableau is the best data visualization tool. It provides a variety of visualization tools to make data more approachable for the users. It also allows you to leverage any number of data points for conducting analysis.

On the other hand, Power, BI is not as powerful as Tableau. But it is the best fit for small business. Any small business can afford it, and it offers enough functionality for its operations.

It has the user-friendly interface which allows you to create powerful dashboards. Let us understand the comparison by having a look at their definitions.

Power BI

Power BI is a part of the Microsoft Corporation. It is one of the best cloud-based business analytics and business intelligence platform. It provides you the full overview of most crucial data for the business.

Power Bi primary focus is to provide the best business intelligence and interactive visualizations. As I mentioned above, it is a cloud-based service and also offers the desktop-based interface.

It is a complete business intelligence tool because it is offering Various warehouse capabilities like data discovery, data preparation, and interactive dashboards.

You can also connect all your data sources with Power BI. It is also offering the scalable dashboards that make it easy for you to choose various visualizations. Such as blueprints, then drag and drop the data from navigation into the visualization.

Features Of Power BI

Content packs

Print Dashboard

Get data source

Custom visualization

Natural language Q&A

Tableau

Tableau is the leading visualization tool in the world. It is widely used in the business intelligence industry. The best part of Tableau is, it has the capability to convert the raw data into an understandable format without any coding and technical skills.

You can also do data analyzation at a rapid pace in Tableau. You can search for data visualization in both worksheets and dashboards. Tableau also offers you to get actionable insights and create awesome dashboards. It is one of the best business intelligence tools.

We can use it to generate reports, dashboards, and analysis of the huge data from multiple sources. As I mentioned above, this is the most excellent data visualization tool. It offers interactive data visualization to understand the data and make insights. It is quite useful for all types of organization and business users.

Tableau is offering simple drag and drops features. It is quite easy to analyze the key data, share critical insights across the enterprise. It also uses to create innovative visualization and reports with ease. You can also embed the dashboard of your existing business applications such as SharePoint with Tableau.

Features Of Tableau

Data Blending

No need of technical knowledge

Real-time analysis

Data Collaboration

DAX Analysis function

Let’s talk about the significant difference between PowerBI vs Tableau

Power BI vs Tableau

1. Data Access

Power BI is not the most influential business intelligence tool. Thus it does not allow you to connect your application with the Hadoop database. But you can connect it with some of the less powerful and small in size database like Salesforce and google analytics.

On the other hand, Tableau is the most influential business intelligence tool. You can connect it with the Hadoop database. It also can identify the resource automatically. You can connect it with an enormous database.

2. Visualizations

Both Tableau and Power BI offer the business managers to set up sophisticated visualizations. This visualization helps in spot patterns, reduce costs, speed up processes, and generate consensus. PowerBI offers numerous data points to provide data visualization.

It is offering more than 3500 data points for drilling down the dataset. There is no need to have any coding knowledge to work with the Power BI. It also helps you to create visualization by asking queries with natural language. It is done with the help of personal digital assistant Cortana in Power BI.

On the other hand, Tableau is known for its data visualization functionality. The users can 24 different types of baseline visualizations in Tableau. These visualization includes heat maps, line charts, and scatter plots. You can use it without having the coding knowledge to develop sophisticated and complex visualizations.

3. Customer Support

Power BI provides limited customer support to its users with a free Power BI account. All you can have the support in Power BI but the paid users will get faster support as compared with the free one. It also offers best support, resources, and documentation. It includes guided learning of a user community forum. Besides, it also provides a sample of how partners use the platform.

On the other hand, Tableau has excellent customer support. It has a large community forum for discussions. It has also categorized online support into an online desktop and server. Tableau also has over 150,000 active users participating in over 500 global user groups in their community. You can get the direct support on the phone, email as well as logging into the customer portal.

4. Deployment

Power BI is based on Saas model, ie. Software as a Service. On the other hand, Tableau is available in both the options i.e., the cloud-based and on-premises installation. It works best when there is a vast data in the cloud. On the other hand, Power, BI doesn’t work better with a massive amount of data.

5. Pricing

Power BI offers three subscriptions to its users. It is divided into Desktop, Pro, and Premium. The desktop is free for a single user. Pro subscription starts at $9.99 per user per month. Pro subscription offers additional features like data governance and content packaging and distribution.

You can also avail the 60-day free trial of the pro package. The last but not the least premium subscription starts at $4,995 a month. Premium subscription is based on per dedicated cloud compute and storage resource

On the other hand, Tableau also offers the three kinds of subscription offering to tailor the user needs. The subscription is as follows Creator, Explorer, and Viewer. All the prices are listed as per user, per month. But the bill charges annually.

Let’s explore the subscription one by one. The creator plan costs you $70 per user per month. You need to pay the same amount for the on-premise or cloud platform. The Explore plan costs you $35 for on-premises and $42 for the cloud deployment.

Note that Tableau Viewer should have at least 100 viewers to purchase the plan. You can also get the 14 days free trial from Tableau. In this way, you can test it before you buy it. It also offers the $500 per user, per year packages for the more in-depth level of usage with no data limit.

Conclusion

Now you have get a clear picture on the comparison between Power BI vs Tableau. At the end, I would like to suggest these tools on the basis of your requirements and budget. If you’re having a small business, then Power BI is the best option for you. It is quite cheaper and provide all the necessary features to fulfill the small and medium business needs.

On the other hand, if your business is large enough then you should about for Tableau. Because it is most powerful business intelligence tool that can work at any scale of business. It is also expensive then the Power BI. But if you have a large business, you should use Tableau. It is value for money product for the large enterprises.