Power BI VS Tableau: Which suits best for your use case?

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Here’s the decisive comparison of Power BI VS Tableau in the aspects of which suits best for your use case!

Power BI	Tableau
Small, medium & large enterprises who wish to kick-start & attain success over end-to-end data analytics	Medium & large enterprises who has analytics maturity
Suitable for anyone from beginners to experienced users.	Suited for data analysts, advanced users, and who have experience with BI software.
Usability on interactions is excellent. If your user base includes common stakeholders, then Power BI is a wise choice.	Requires user adoption training to understand interactions. If there is no proper training, data gets filtered and users will not understand what is happening behind the screens.
Super user functionality such as easy drag & drop templates with pre-built charts. Anyone who has hands-on over Excel can leverage Power BI.	Requires training to achieve even basic functionalities.
Budget-friendly	Expensive
Ideal for democratizing data with self-service capabilities & advanced security practices.	Limited self-service capabilities
Perfect fit for organizations that have adopted Microsoft Office 365 & Azure cloud platforms. On top of it, connectors are available for products in AWS, GCP and on-prem products.	Limited support on direct connectors for cloud platforms. On-prem connectivity gateway is not reliable & stable with regards to Tableau.
Has advanced AI & ML capabilities with proprietary Azure Cognitive Services & Azure Machine Learning	Swirls around Salesforce Einstein Analytics and model builder for basic data modeling functionalities
Power BI shines on cloud data analytics.	Tableau’s fan base resides in on-premises deployments.
Provides flexibility of inbuilt and external toolsets for data engineering operations with native connectors and data points.	For organizations with existing data strategy built on external tools & resources, Tableau works optimal.
Ideal for real-time streaming & ad-hoc visualizations.	Realtime streaming in Tableau has limitations with many connectors.
Highly scalable cloud solutions. As backups are performed in matured cloud platforms such as Azure Synapse, Microsoft Power Platforms, and Google Cloud Platform.	Lack of scalability in cloud and has limited vertically scalability in on-prem infrastructure. Tableau is less matured in the aspects of data platforms as they’re just launching their allied product suite.
Easy to govern using Microsoft Purview	There are no orchestrated governance policies & features.
External applications can be easily integrated & backed up by Azure Embedded Capacity	Limited integrations and is reluctant to scalability.
Includes advanced administration features such as accessibility controls, data sharing and usage.	Only basic administration support is provided.
Easy to recruit skilled resources to accomplish the basic Power BI tasks.	Hard to find the expertise in the market.
Building complex dashboards requires skilled data modeler with multi-dimensional expertise.	Huge limitations on customization of dashboards or data model with less features.
Global community available for support and new features released every month.	Global community do exist. But there are no periodical or frequent feature upgrades as like Power BI.
User training videos are available in Microsoft & YouTube channels as free resources. This helps your team to understand the basic and features of Power BI seamlessly.	User training videos are available only in tableau site. Also, very less educational content is shared on Tableau in social media channels.

If you’re a c-level executive, sales head, marketing, or operations manager, hope these facts would help you decide on whether Tableau or Power BI suits best for your use case.

However, if you want to still dig deeper into the differences between Tableau & Power BI, let’s jump on to the technical aspects!

Power BI VS Tableau- Comparison with in-depth technical aspects

1. Data Visualization

Power BI has easy drag-and-drop data features and pre-built dashboards that make the kickstart of a data-driven culture hassle-free. It renders around 3500 data points for drilling down to granular details across the data model. When it comes to real-time streaming and ad-hoc visualizations, Power BI has a leg up in the BI space with native connectors for SaaS products.

Tableau is built for data scientists with advanced visualization experience based on the patented VizQL engine. This tool can sense data from live and in-memory data sources catering to diverse devices. Enterprises looking for bulk data processing & advanced customizations in data visualizations can opt for Tableau.

Winner: Depends on the data size & use case

2. Deployment

Power BI is specific to Azure cloud platform and the product suite encompasses desktop, mobile, pro, premium, embedded & report servers. Depending on your organizational model, you can pick the right licensing to achieve analytics maturity. Power BI has limitless on-demand scalability in horizontal and vertical scaling options.

Tableau has its wings spread across both on-premises and cloud landscapes. The tool offers a myriad of deployment options in the on-prem, cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP, Tableau) & platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac) with diverse data sources.

Tableau has a messy licensing model that includes creator, explorer, and viewer models. Depending on the use cases, IT teams must plan and purchase licenses for the individual users. In the aspects of on-demand scalability, Tableau has definitive sizes and offers only vertical scaling options.

Winner: Draw- Tableau for its myriad of options / Power BI for cloud analytics

3. Data wrangling

Power BI has inbuilt toolsets as well as native connectors for data engineering, modeling, and end-to-end analytics. The tool support Data Analysis Expressions (DAX), M language for data manipulation & modeling, Azure data factory, Azure cognitive services, Azure machine learning, and R language integrity using Microsoft Revolution Analytics for enterprise users. If required, Power BI users can connect on-prem data sources by leveraging Power BI data gateway.

Tableau relies on external toolsets and programming languages for data transformation, machine learning, and other operations. Tableau creators must have expertise in multi-dimensional expressions (MDX), R language, Python programming & machine learning, and Salesforce Einstein Analytics to outperform competitors. Data visualization reports can be implemented using C, C++, Java & Python in Tableau.

Both Tableau and Power BI support a diverse range of data sources with native connectors. Here’s the list of compatible data sources.

Data Source	Power BI	Tableau
Adobe Analytics
Amazon Redshift
Alibaba Data Lake and Analytics
Excel
Facebook
Google Analytics
Google Ads
BigQuery
Hadoop
IBM DB2
MySQL
Oracle
PostgreSQL
R Script
Python Script
Salesforce Report
Spark
SQL Server
JSON
Azure SQL
Text File
APIs

Winner: Power BI for inbuilt tools and native connectors for third-party SaaS products

4. Self-service Capabilities

Power BI is undoubtedly the winner in self-service capabilities with advanced functionalities and intuitiveness. Power BI has paramount features such as easy drag and drop, intuitiveness, pre-built templates, report-sharing features, and much more in its bag to support the data-driven culture in an organization. Any individual having a grip over excel can easily create intuitive, visually appealing dashboards, and share them with their teams by leveraging Power BI.

Tableau has basic self-service capabilities compared to Power BI and requires intensive user adoption training. With lots of limitations in licensing model and a steep learning curve, Tableau has a lot more gaps in achieving data democratization. However, Tableau users believe that in the upcoming upgrades, the team- would make it easier for data visualizations.

Winner: Power BI for user-friendliness & self-service capabilities

5. Innovations

Power BI releases monthly feature updates to its services. Some of the recent additions are AI-infused experiences, natural query processing, anomaly detection, smart narratives (NLG), Q & A feature, composite models, mobile formatting, cross-tenant data sharing, and much more. Another recent enticing feature update of Power BI is the inbuilt visual for Power Automate & Power Apps.

Here’re the capabilities of Power Automate & Power Apps you can leverage in combination with Power BI.

• Power Automate– Create workflow, alert notifications based on criteria, send emails, push notifications, follow-ups, and much more with predefined templates.
• Power Apps– Embed Power BI reports & dashboards with applications, review the underlying dataset, update them, and burst emails on achieving threshold limits or criteria to a group of people or individuals.

Tableau releases feature upgrades annually and are currently focusing on features that swirl around Salesforce products such as ask data in slack, Einstein discovery in slack, model builder, and so on.

Power BI for never-ending cognitive solutions

6. Cost

Power BI is budget-friendly and is the go-to choice for start-ups and mid-sized organizations for its affordability. Power BI pro version costs around $10/month/user which is around $100 when billed annually. With dedicated cloud compute and storage resources, Power BI premium is billed $4995/month.

Microsoft Power BI offers free of cost licenses for various user groups. Here’s the detailed list of Power BI pricing.

Power BI Premium$20/month/user | @240/year/user

Tableau is highly expensive and has stringent policies in terms of use cases too.

Winner: Power BI

7. Security

Power BI has plethora of out-of-the-box Microsoft identity features for advanced data security implementations. From implementing single-sign-on to row-level & object-level security, it has all-encompassing features to attain analytics maturity and data democratization across the organization.

Tableau connects with the active directory and the security level of Tableau reader is near zero as anyone who views the workspace can get access to it.

Winner: Power BI with advanced OOTB features

What’s next? – Find the right business intelligence tool for your organization!

“Around 70-80% of business intelligence projects fail.” – Gartner

Ranging from picking the right tool to user adoption, you need an expert business intelligence partner to make your analytics efforts win!

Both Power BI & Tableau offers trial versions to kick-start your business intelligence journey. The best one for your organization is defined by use case, organizational model, analytic needs, existing human capital, data sources, cloud investments, and much more factors.

We help you in finding the appropriate business intelligence tool for your organization with your first POC dashboard in 48 hours!

Wondering how we can deliver your POC dashboard in 48 hours? Here’s our business intelligence journey & intellectual assets along the way!

• Delivered 100+ successful data visualization solutions
• A team of 250+ data architects, data engineers, data scientists, and ML experts.
• 100% delivery, 90% repeat customers, 1100+ team with an in-house team for cloud, DevOps, user experience, identity management, mobility, server maintenance, etc.
• Intellectual assets & best-in-class business intelligence practices
• • Off-the-rack industry-specific dashboard library
  • A hybrid data model for enhanced scalability options & reduced TCO
  • End-to-end DataOps pipelines for data extraction, transformation, visualization, report busting, alert notification, and much more
  • Dynamic page & app navigation with cutting-edge customization
  • Industry excellence in M365 for automation, hourly refresh, DevOps, and security implementation.

Bang your dilemma on Power BI or Tableau! We’re just a tap away!