For businesses to survive and grow in today’s competitive market, enterprises have to understand the state of the current market by analyzing large datasets in real-time. Business intelligence helps one act accordingly and to track the performance of various teams working on different projects.
In this blog, we will be comparing two of the most popular BI and visual analytics platforms in various aspects.
What is Power BI?
Power BI is a business intelligence tool that allows users to extract and modify data from a multitude of sources, such as Excel files, images, videos, etc., into insightful reports and interactive Power BI dashboards. Data analysis and visualization have various techniques and methods of conveying information to users. Power BI is deployed for cleaning and integrating complex data and identifying underlying trends and patterns to run ad-hoc queries.
Check out this video on Power BI and start learning:
Enroll in Power BI Certification Training to become proficient in this BI tool.
What is Tableau?
Data-driven storytelling has become the new language for businesses. Tableau generates visualizations in the form of understandable dashboards, reports, and worksheets. the way for the easy reading of complex data without any technical knowledge and draws insights that are beneficial for the revenue and growth of businesses.
You can check out the Tableau Certification Course online to learn more about Tableau!
Key Difference Between Power BI and Tableau
| Tableau | Power BI |
| Tableau deploys MDX for dimensions and measures. | Power BI uses DAX for measuring and calculating columns. |
| Tableau can handle huge columns of data and still offer better performance. | Power BI is best for a limited volume of data. |
| Tableau has better data visualization. | Power BI offers many data points for data visualization. |
| Tableau works best with huge data. | Power BI is suboptimal with huge data. |
| Experts and experienced users use Tableau. | Power BI is used by beginners and experienced alike. |
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Top 10 Differences Between Power BI and Tableau
Every business has its own set of goals and targets to increase its revenue and driEvery business has its own goals and targets to increase its revenue and drive its growth in the right direction. We will discuss the difference between Tableau and Power BI in some important areas where there is a major contrast. Let us compare the two to know which is better between Power BI and Tableau.
1. Cost
Tableau is expensive when compared to Power BI. The Tableau Creator costs USD 70/month/user. The yearly subscription to Tableau Pro comes to over USD 1000.
Power BI is affordable compared to Tableau. The yearly subscription to the Power BI Pro version will be around USD 100. Startups often prefer Power BI over Tableau due to budget constraints and later switch to Tableau, depending on the need.
2. Data Visualization
Tableau is the industry-best at data visualization. It allows users to create customized dashboards catering to different devices.
Power BI offers easy drag-and-drop functionality to offer attractive visualizations inside reports and dashboards.
3. Deployment
Tableau comes first when considering deployment flexibility as it has more cloud-based and on-premises options. When huge data is stored in the cloud, Tableau works well.
Even though Power BI has both on-premises and cloud versions, it is limited to Azure in the cloud. This limits the level of flexibility that Power BI can offer.
4. Complex Data Handling Capacity
Tableau handles large data more efficiently than Power BI. Tableau works best when data is huge. That’s why Tableau is preferred when the use case has a huge data repository.
Power BI tends to lag when encountering heavy data. It lags in performance when there is a huge data repository.
5. Functionality
Tableau performs better as compared to Power BI when it comes to questions about data. This suggests that the depth of data that can be worked with is much more sophisticated with Tableau.
Power BI doesn’t offer that much functionality when compared with Tableau.
6. Integration
Tableau excels in integration, connecting with various databases including Hadoop. It automatically identifies resources and establishes connections seamlessly. On the other hand, Power BI lacks a native connector for Hadoop, but users can still connect through alternate methods like ODBC. Power BI integrates well with Google Analytics, Azure, and Salesforce, enabling data retrieval for analysis. In summary, Tableau offers broader database connectivity while Power BI provides strong integrations with specific platforms.
7. Programming Tools Support
Power BI and Tableau can blend smoothly with all major programming languages. R integrates much better with Tableau.
Power BI doesn’t have the best integration with R. It requires an external tool, called Microsoft Revolution Analytics, to connect to R; Microsoft Revolution Analytics is also only available for enterprise-level users.
8. User Interface
Tableau is usually used to create customized dashboards with sleek designs to enable a user-friendly interface. Both tools come with a good user interface that makes them easy to work with.
Power BI, on the other hand, is much simpler to learn and has a more intuitive interface than Tableau. So, businesses tend to prefer Power BI over Tableau because of its ease of use and simplicity.
9. Support and Community
The older the technology, the better will be its support community. Power BI is relatively new compared to Tableau. So, its user community is smaller than Tableau’s. This helps Tableau users network better.
Learn about Power BI with our Power BI Certification Course from London!
10. Features of Power BI and Tableau
Here are some of the important features to compare between Power BI and Tableau:
Tableau Features:
- Tableau Dashboards: Dashboards in Tableau have a variety of filters, layouts, and formats, and they can present the data in the form of stories. They enable users to apply a custom filter and copy them or their elements from one report to another.
- Data Sources in Tableau: Tableau offers a variety of data sourcing options to fetch data from multiple sources, including relational and non-relational databases, data warehouses, on-premises and on-cloud data, big data, and more. We can establish a secure connection with data sources and get a combinational view of the data to create visually interactive reports.
- Data Connectors: Tableau supports many data connectors, such as SQL Server, Salesforce, Google Sheets, Presto, Hadoop, Amazon Athena, Cloudera, Dropbox, etc.
- Advanced Visualizations: Tableau provides a variety of visualizations that users can add to reports as per their requirements. In Tableau, visualizations range from basic pie or bar charts to advanced treemaps, boxplots, histograms, motion charts, Gantt charts, bullet charts, donut charts, advanced charts, and more.
Learn more about Tableau from this Tableau Tutorial!
Power BI Features
- Customizable Dashboards: A typical dashboard in Power BI consists of multiple tiles and visualizations. A tile is a single chart or visual created by analyzing data. A Power BI report is generated by combining one or more of these dashboards.
- Power BI Service: It enables users to share reports or dashboards, on both cloud and on-premise servers, with other users. With Power BI Service, we can add more connectors, create workspaces where our partners can work with us on any reports and dashboards, and enable AI features, such as Power Query, for a smooth data flow, making it easy for users working on Power BI projects.
- Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) Functions: Data Analysis Expressions in Power BI are a set of predefined codes used to perform operations on data. Currently, there are more than 200 DAX functions in the Power BI function library that can be used to make business data analysis more efficient.
- Natural language Question Box: Power Q&A is by far one of the best features of Power BI. Power Q&A allows users to search for data, transform it, and create visuals by asking questions in natural language. Users need to double-click on the dashboard, write down the variable that they want to add, select the desired graph or chart name, and Power Q&A will create the visual.
Go through our Power BI tutorial to learn more about this Microsoft BI tool.
Advantages of Power BI and Tableau
Here is the list of advantages of these business intelligence tools before concluding this debate on Tableau vs. Power BI:
Power BI Advantages
Price
Power BI provides all the features and services for US$10 per user per month. With Power BI Pro, the user can access the whole range of Power BI components, along with Microsoft Services such as Cortana for running voice-based queries.
MSFT integration
Power BI can easily integrate with Azure/O365 and anything else that Microsoft has created, which proves to be a huge advantage for the user by smoothly running all operations on Microsoft.
Ease of Use
For a newbie, Power BI provides an intuitive learning curve, and the interface resembles that of MS Excel, which makes it easier to navigate. In Power BI, we can take advantage of DAX query language and execute the queries on datasets in natural language.
ETL/Discovery Suite
When compared to Tableau, Power BI has a robust set of tools for implementing ETL capabilities. Data preparation is more than 90% of any reporting requirement, and Power BI can directly build these reporting data marts without involving third-party software.
Check out these Power BI interview questions if you are preparing for a job interview.
Tableau Advantages
High Performance
Tableau provides high visualization and data transformation capabilities to the user. Also, it operates faster on big datasets with better efficiency. This high-performance feature gives Tableau an edge over other data analytics toolkits.
Multiple Data Source Connections
Tableau can establish connections with more data sources, such as Hadoop, DB technologies, SAP, and Google BigQuery. This improves the quality of data analysis and enables the user to create informative reports. Reports with such connections deliver accurate information about the situation and help the user make better decisions. Tableau uses languages such as Python and R for complex table calculations and avoids any performance drops.
Thriving Community and Forum
Through collaboration and sharing, Tableau fans provide useful insights and resources in the community that help newbies increase their knowledge of data parsing and reporting. By sharing their experience with the software, forum visitors help any user settle their issues.
Mobile-Friendliness
With mobile apps, Tableau enables users to keep all the statistics at their fingertips. Tableau apps are available for Android and iOS devices and support all the functions that Tableau Desktop has.
Prepare yourself for the industry by going through these top Tableau Interview Questions and Answers!
Disadvantages of Power BI and Tableau
We have discussed the best parts of using these tools. Let’s now focus a bit on the disadvantages or downsides of these tools.
Power BI Disadvantages
Table Relationships
Power BI is prone to running into difficulties while handling data that has complex relationships with tables. In many cases, data models need to be carefully created with unique fields for the sole purpose of joining tables together.
User Interface
Power BI has a cluttered interface with many icon options obstructing the view of reports and dashboards. Additionally, Tooltip in Power BI also has limited functionality.
Compatibility with iOS
Power BI does not have a compatible option for desktop Mac users. Power BI cannot be directly installed on iOS; a virtual machine needs to be installed to run Power BI Desktop.
Limited Excel integration
Excel integration is a major advantage of Power BI, but only data of up to 150,000 rows can be downloaded, which can be very limiting at times.
All in all, Power BI is an excellent tool for data analysis and visualization, and the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages.
Check out our blog on Top MSBI Tools Advantage over Other BI Tools!
Tableau Disadvantages
High Cost
Tableau is not very expensive if we compare it with BI giants such as IBM and Oracle. However, the license is more expensive when put in the same bucket as other competitors like Power BI. It will not be an issue for big organizations but will be a considerable disadvantage for small or medium companies where money is the central focus of all decisions made.
Besides, Tableau requires proper implementation, maintenance, and staff training for effective analysis. Therefore, it is best for the organizations that can pay for the licensing cost.
Steep Learning Curve
In light of the learning curve, Tableau is quite steep, as the user has to get proper training in data analysis and acquire decent skills in R and Python programming. Also, the process of data extraction, transformation, data modeling, and visualization is pretty manual, which means that we might face data incompetency while connecting our data sources with Tableau.
In Power BI, on the other hand, if we know the interface well, we need to write our queries in our language using Power Query or drag and drop our data columns onto the visuals.
Time- and Resource-Intensive Staff Training
Tableau does not require technical knowledge to run basic operations. However, like the way Power BI maintains user friendliness for complex operations, Tableau does not. Tableau users need to undergo comprehensive employee training to perform such operations. Not only does this take more time, but it also adds up to expenses, which is quite detrimental for small businesses.
Hard to Integrate with Microsoft BI Solutions
Microsoft has many BI solutions and cloud-based services used by multiple organizations. When Power BI can easily integrate with them and provide better efficiency with features such as Power Q&A and Power BI Service, on Tableau, integration with products such as Dynamics 365, Microsoft Flow, and Office 365 is a bit exhausting because of the single sign-on process.
Do you want to get certified in Power BI? Here is the Best Power BI Training in Bangalore you are looking for.
Tableau products
Here are various types of Tableau products:
Tableau Desktop
Tableau Desktop offers a comprehensive set of features. It allows you to code and customize reports. You can share the dashboards and workbooks locally or publicly.
Tableau Desktop Personal
This is a personal version of Tableau Desktop. Workbooks created here cannot be published online. They can only be distributed in two ways: offline or in Tableau Public.
Tableau Desktop Professional
It’s similar to Tableau Desktop. There’s full access to all sorts of data types.
Tableau Public
Tableau Public is built with affordability in mind. Anyone can view or access the files present in Tableau Public. There’s no privacy in that.
Tableau Server
It’s used to share the visualizations and workbooks created using Tableau Desktop across organizations. Only licensed users will be able to access the files or the work uploaded to the server.
Tableau Online
It’s Tableau’s online sharing tool with functionalities similar to Tableau Server. The data is stored on cloud platforms maintained by Tableau.
Tableau Reader
This is a free-to-use tool that will enable you to view the Tableau Desktop or Tableau Public generated workbooks and visualizations.
Learn how to use these products by enrolling in Tableau Training in Bangalore.
Power BI products
Here are various types of Power BI products:
Power BI Desktop
It’s the primary tool to author and publish in Power BI. Developers use it to generate new models or reports.
Power BI Service
It’s an online Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) used to host Power BI reports, data models, dashboards, etc.
Power BI Data Gateway
As the name suggests, it functions as the bridge between Power BI Service and on-premise data sources like Direct Query, Live Query, etc.
Power BI Report Server
This product from Power BI can host paginated reports, Power BI Desktop Reports, and mobile reports. Using this tool, users can modify Power BI Reports generated by the development team.
Power BI Mobile Apps
This app is available on Android, iOS, and Windows. This app allows you to view reports and dashboards on the Power BI Service Report Server.
Conclusion
Clearly, from the above Microsoft Power BI vs. Tableau discussion, you can tell which tool will serve you better, considering our requirements. A user who is not a data analyst will prefer Power BI over Tableau, as the latter is not as intuitive and requires more effort to learn. So, Power BI triumphs in terms of ease of use and simplicity. However, when it comes to speed and capacity to handle complex data, Tableau is the sought-after one. There is a guarantee on the quality of visualizations users can generate with Tableau, especially for medium-to-large enterprises that have no limitation on spending.
Here, we have brought to you only the Power BI vs. Tableau pros and cons. There are other options to choose from as business intelligence tools for your enterprise. However, you have gained enough knowledge to choose either Power BI or Tableau according to your needs.
Check out Intellipaat’s Business Intelligence Community to post and clear your doubts.