We performed a comparison between SAP analytics cloud vs. Tableau based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Tableau users say the best feature is the ease of use, which allows anyone to use the platform. The visual capability helps users explain the data more straightforwardly. On the downside, users say Tableau could improve its data management and ETL features, especially in the Tableau Prep feature.
Comparison Results: SAP Analytics Cloud seems to be a superior solution because of the multiple features. Although the support is slow, it is still better than Tableau’s standard support. Tableau’s upgrades are also challenging to install.
"One of the most outstanding features is being able to use the dashboard with a touch screen."
"The visualizations have been the most valuable feature."
"I would recommend this solution for companies that are SAP dependent with users working in this environment."
"We mainly use Analytics Cloud because it integrates with other SAP solutions. Our ERP is an SAP product, and our back-end is SAP Business Warehouse, so integration is an essential factor."
"The most valuable features are on the application side, where you can design applications into your analytics on the platform."
"The most useful feature of SAP Analytics Cloud is planning because it helps users with making predictions and forecasts. Clients can forecast, make data allocations, and other actions. The solution is useful for planning."
"In the data warehouse, you're free to make changes. You can make everything text, meaning it's always a string. Even numbers appear as text, giving you the flexibility to work with all columns."
"The features that I have found most valuable with SAP ERP products are their good user interface, stability, functionality, and good interface options."
"It is a stable solution."
"From my perspective, it enables clients to better understand our data and make better decisions based on that information."
"It's intuitive and highly mature"
"Since Tableau is on the cloud, we haven't faced any challenges around scalability."
"It's very easy to use and users don't need any IT support to access it as the information is right there."
"One of the most valuable features of Tableau is that it's a visual analytics solution, not just a dashboarding solution. Compared to Power BI, which is a dashboarding solution, there are no limitations with Tableau. For example, when you add a chart or a map to Power BI, it has a 3,000-point limitation. When you try to track your whole vehicle on the map, you only see the first 3,000 rows on the map, and Power BI doesn't tell you which part of the data is shown on the map. But Tableau doesn't have any limitations, which means that you can see five million data points on a map. It starts the project by creating the visuals that directly converts to SQLs. In that way, all the components have no limitations. When we compared Tableau to Power BI, we also found Tableau to be more fancy. Fancy means you can create more visual graphics and more visual dashboards. With Power BI, this isn't so—it's just some tables and some simple charts together. Tableau is more for business users who want to analyze data. Tableau can directly connect the analytics systems, like R or Titan, and get the results in screen, so it's a good solution for analytics scientists. It has some predefined capabilities to understand the data."
"The solution helps users create dashboards and analyze data without relying on IT or product teams."
"Tableau has many different connectors for different databases. It's very easy to connect to MySQL, SQL Server, Amazon EMR, Presto, Redshift, BigQuery, and so on."
"SAP could add some more visualization features to Analytics Cloud, like charts and analytics. I would also like to see some more data cleaning and ad hoc functions added to this solution."
"Live Data Models are very slow and the setup can be improved, with tools such as Cloud Connector being inbuilt into SAP Analytics Cloud. Likewise, we need to write application code from scratch, rather than tweaking existing code, as we might with Excel macros. Moreover, when using responsive pages, the widgets get adjusted according to the mobile screen. As a result, when I place two or three KPI tiles, they can only be viewed tile-by-tile. We want to see the full dashboard on the mobile screen and zoom in to click on a particular section of the dashboard and go further into that. But displaying tile-by-tile makes it very annoying and the upper management using this dashboard might not be aware there are any more tiles to view."
"SAP Analytics Cloud requires a lot of coding and I would like the coding to be somewhat minimal."
"SAP Analytics cloud needs better exporting options."
"SAC, which is the cloud version, lost some good features from the previous planning product, like BPC or BPS."
"Some algorithms are complex and can't be processed by just tagging the data and expecting results."
"Its integration or connectivity with non-SAP systems, big data, and social media, such as YouTube, LinkedIn, et cetera, can be improved. This is where SAP has limited features as compared to other solutions."
"In the live connection model, we can't create calculated dimensions, however, in the import model we can create them."
"We would like a report model, because currently there is no schema that we can create in the tool."
"The data processing in Tableau is pathetic compared to Qlik."
"It's already using 32 gigabytes of memory, but the performance is not so good. It's very heavy."
"The charts need to be improved. The drawings and the visualization need to be more accurate."
"When there are millions of records, scaling up is quite difficult."
"The SQL programming functionality needs to be improved."
"If you wanted to create something without making it an extra column in the data set, you can't just rename it to a more user-friendly short name."
"Tableau is an end-to-end analytics platform, and it is doing a pretty good job in terms of connecting to the data and analyzing it. It can, however, do better in terms of data management and the ETL features, which are not on the advanced analytics or machine learning side. Tableau Prep is where users would want to see more advancements. They can improve Tableau Prep, which is an analytic platform tool for data cleansing. People who work with data spend most of their time curating the data. Cleaning up the data and getting it ready for analysis is what takes the most time. If Tableau can invest more time in improving the Tableau Prep platform, it would be great. Previously, Tableau didn't have the functionality for writing to a database. So, you couldn't really alter the database tables and write to your database, but they fixed that in one of the very recent releases. However, it isn't really advanced and should be improved."
SAP Analytics Cloud is ranked 5th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 60 reviews while Tableau is ranked 2nd in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 293 reviews. SAP Analytics Cloud is rated 8.0, while Tableau is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of SAP Analytics Cloud writes "Good for reporting but needs to improve its predictive analytics features". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Tableau writes "Provides fast data access with in-memory extracts, makes it easy to create visualizations, and saves time". SAP Analytics Cloud is most compared with SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, IBM Planning Analytics, Microsoft Power BI, Anaplan and IBM Cognos, whereas Tableau is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Amazon QuickSight, Domo, SAS Visual Analytics and Qlik Sense. See our SAP Analytics Cloud vs. Tableau report.
See our list of best BI (Business Intelligence) Tools vendors.
We monitor all BI (Business Intelligence) Tools reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
In case you are working for a small accounting firm, Tableau or Power Bi may cover all your needs. It is important, what kind of ERP system do you use. Are you running SAP S4/Hana, stay in SAP word. If you run other product look to other options. Does not make sense to use SAP AC only, far too expensive and will be hard to utilize fully. Solutions like Tableau or Power Bi are easy to use and will give you great result. On the other side it is not so much about the system, but about data quality, this is the key.
Tableau is a fantastic product. It works really well and is remarkably easy to use. SAP Analytics Cloud is also a good product. Both are quite inexpensive. Personally, I prefer Tableau for its ease of use and quick results.