Tableau and Power BI are two popular data visualization tools enabling companies to collect, analyze and represent important business information.
Tableau and Power BI combine various capabilities to effectively ease the collection, storage, analysis, and visualization of different data types from multiple sources.
Despite enabling organizations to gain insights from their data, the tools have some differences and similarities. Each has strong capabilities and limitations, as seen in the Tableau vs. Power BI comparison.
Before we look at the differences, let us briefly overview each, including its capabilities and key features.
Overview of Tableau and its key features
Tableau is a popular self-service analytics and reporting tool that enables users to create powerful visualizations. The powerful, feature-rich business intelligence solution can collect and combines various data types from several sources.
It then turns the data into easy-to-understand visual representations that users can access using a shared dashboard or other means. Generally, Tableau equips users, across the organization, with the ability to get more from the data, share insights and make informed business decisions.
Main features of Tableau
Tableau equips businesses with the right tools to discover, analyze and visualize data while providing detailed and shareable insights. With a drag-and-drop feature, companies do not require highly skilled employees to master and use Tableau. Besides these, below are some of the key features of Tableau.
Intuitive dashboard and advanced visualizations
Tableau allows users to create dashboards, graphs, tables, charts, maps, and stories that make it easier to analyze and visualize data hence improving the decision-making processes. Usually, the tool presents its results in easy-to-understand formats suitable for business, technical and non-technical users.
Its dashboards easily represent data in various formats, including text, visualization, and more. Additionally, users can have various views, layouts, formats, filters, and other customization options.
Connects to many data types and sources
The flexible and scalable tool can connect to many data types from various sources. It can connect to data sources such as databases in different servers such as Microsoft SQL Server, Tableau server, etc. Additionally, it connects to a wide range of file types, including but not limited to text, excel, pdf, JSON, and more.
Data sharing and collaboration
Tableaus allow users to instantly and securely share data from different sources in appealing visualizations, dashboards, charts, sheets, and other formats.
For example, businesses can easily and quickly share and collaborate using visualizations or dashboards based on data from several data sources – in on-premise, cloud, and hybrid environments. Consequently, this supports quick feedback, reviews, and making data-driven decisions.
High user and data security
Tableaus have strong authentication and role-based permissions structure that ensure the system’s security, users, and data. Additionally, you can integrate with other security protocols such as Kerberos, Active directory, etc.
Querying data in natural language
The Ask Data feature allows users to query for data using a natural or common language. The tool automatically provides the most relevant answers using easy-to-understand text or visuals.
Predictive analysis
Tableau has a dynamic front end and powerful backend that allows users to create forecasts or trend lines easily. All a user needs to do is use the drag-and-drop feature to set specific scenarios or options. The tool will then provide the data predictions based on the selected parameters.
Microsoft Power BI and its key features
Power BI is a Microsoft product comprising multiple data virtualization capabilities in one solution. The tool enables businesses to create data-driven reports and insights, opening up various opportunities to improve decision-making, performance, and revenues.
It collects and collates data from multiple sources in the cloud, on-premise, emails, social networks, and other channels. It then analyses that data and then creates appealing visualization that is easy to understand.
Additionally, depending on your objective, you can visualize the data as little or as much as necessary. The intelligent business tool lets you securely share insights with internal and external users.
Key features of Microsoft Power BI
Microsoft Power BI allows users to quickly connect to a wide range of data sources, prepare, visualize, and provide new insights. Some of its key features are highlighted below.
Attractive visualizations
Power BI has a wide range of visualization to provide detailed and visually appealing data representations. The users can create various simple to complex visualizations to create dashboards and reports representing the data under analysis.
Customizable and shareable dashboards
Power BI has customizable dashboards that allow the user to create desired visualizations that provide insights or information based on their goals. The tool has a variety of detailed and appealing visualization, including but not limited to bar carts, column charts, area charts, combo charts, etc. Users can also share and print the dashboards, making collaboration easier.
High informative and shareable reports
Power BI provides reports that combine various dashboards. Each of the dashboards may have a different visualization based on the customization and objective of the analysis. The accounts provide a summary of the data that it can present in different ways while offering insights. Additionally, users can share the reports among themselves.
Get Data feature
The Power BI Get Data feature allows the users to collect data from various sources, whether on-premise, cloud, or hybrid infrastructure. It also allows them to obtain relevant information from either structured or unstructured sources.
Datasets filtering
Power BI users can filter the datasets from single or multiple data sources before visualization. The filtration ensures that the tool works with smaller subsets containing more relevant data with the objective. Ideally, Power BI has several in-built data connectors, including but not limited to SQL database, MailChimp, Azure, Oracle, Salesforce, Facebook, and more.
Natural Language Question and Answer
Power BI comes with a Natural Language Q & A box that enables users to ask questions in natural language.
Tableau vs. Power BI differences
Below are some of the major differences between Tableau and Power BI.
Ease of learning
It is much easier to learn and use Power Bi compared to Tableau. Conversely, Tableau does not have a very intuitive interface; hence a bit difficult to understand and use by users with limited data analysis skills.
Data capacity
Power PI has a lower data capacity of up to 10GB that it can handle from local databases. However, businesses can put their data in the Azure cloud if they need to work on more significant amounts beyond this limit. Power Bi does not import the data for local databases but pulls it from the database.
Tableau can handle higher capacity without degrading performance. It has a columnar-based structure that only stores unique values from each column. The feature allows it to efficiently fetch billions of rows, hence providing analysis of large amounts of data from multiple sources.
Power Bi vs. Tableau cost
Tableau is costlier than Power BI. The Tableau Pro version costs over $35 per month per user. However, Microsoft Power BI is cheaper since its professional version is $27.50 per month per user.
Customer support
Tableau has better support due to its larger customer base and community forum. Besides the forums, Tableau offers support via email, phone, or customer portal. On the other hand, Microsoft Power BI has limited customer support. However, users can still submit support tickets to Microsoft.
Supported data sources
Tableau can access a wide range of servers and databases compared to Power BI. Additionally, it can connect to numerous data sources and types. For example, it can access data from text files, excel, pdf, JSON, and more. The list of servers and databases is much bigger compared to Power BI.
Power BI has a limited number of data sources it can access. These servers and databases include SQL Server Database, SQL Server Analysis Services database, IBM DB2 database, Oracle Database, Redshift, Google Big Query, snowflake, SAP Business Warehouse Application Server, etc.
Tableau vs. Microsoft Power BI performance
Tableau provides faster and better performance, including when handling bulk data.
On the other hand, Power BI provides fast and good performance but only when working with low volumes of data. But, it performs slower when handling bulk data.
Below is a comparison of the major differences between Tableau and Power BI.
| Feature/Option | Tableau | Power BI |
| Type of tool | Business intelligence and data analysis tool that provides great visualization and reports | Business data analytic tool that provides valuable insights. |
| Cost | Costlier – Over $35 per month per user | Cheaper at $27.50 per month per user |
| Speed | Tableau is faster and scalable, with the capacity to quickly handle large volumes of data. | Power BI is fast, but only when handling small amounts of data. |
| Customer support | Better support | Limited support |
| Language support | Supports R language and Python | Supports R language-based visualizations |
| Embed options | Difficult to embed reports in different environments | Easy embedding reports |
| Data sources | It supports more data sources and types | A smaller number of data sources |
| Ideal target users | Experienced users | Inexperienced and experienced users |
| Performance | Faster and good performance at all times | Fast and good performance, but only when handling smaller amounts of data |
| Ease of Learning | Difficult | Easy |
Each of the above visualization tools has great features, benefits, and limitations depending on the business needs. Each has features that make it more suitable for specific business applications. For instance, Tableau is good for its speed and capabilities, while Power BI is affordable and easy to learn and use.
What makes Tableau better than Power BI
- Powerful data discovery and exploration features -: The tool enables a user to analyze data quickly and thus get better insights and answers to various business-related questions.
- Connects to many different data sources and types: – ability to connect to a larger number of different data sources and types compared to other tools.
- Highly scalable and able to handle large volumes of data: – Besides connecting to a wide range of data types and sources, Tableau can handle large amounts of data compared to Power BI.
- High speed and performance: Tableau offers data analysis and visualization faster, with high performance and reliability -features vital when dealing with massive amounts of data.
What makes Power BI score higher than Tableau
- User-friendly interface: – Power BI is easy to learn and use and does not require high technical skills.
- Better customization of the data visualization: – It is much easier to create custom visual representations using Power BI than in Tableau.
- Lower costs. The Microsoft Power BI costs less than Tableau.
- Local and cloud deployment options: – Power BI allows the use of either the desktop version, cloud service, or a combination of both, depending on the requirements. The local installation makes it easier to connect to business data, analyze it and create reports. Users can then use the Power BI cloud service to share reports online and collaborate with others.
Conclusion
Power BI provides business intelligence to the general audience while helping companies improve their data analysis. Due to its lower cost, ease of learning, and use, Power BI is suitable for businesses with limited budgets and data science skills. It is ideal for individuals, midsize companies, and large enterprises who want to analyze limited amounts of data.
On the other hand, Tableau has more features and capabilities that provide more in-depth insights. Generally, it targets advanced users with data analysis skills. It is more suited for handling complex data at scale hence ideal for medium and large businesses with adequate budgets and skilled users.