Microsoft Power BI vs Tableau comparison

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20,317 views|17,415 comparisons
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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jul 30, 2023

We compared Microsoft BI and Tableau based on our users reviews in six parameters. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:

  • Ease of Deployment

    Users generally find the initial setup for Microsoft BI to be simple and effortless, requiring minimal time and effort. In comparison, Tableau's setup process can range from uncomplicated to more intricate, depending on specific circumstances and requirements.

  • Features

    Microsoft BI is highly regarded for its impressive capabilities and adaptability, as well as its capacity to retrieve data from diverse origins and create personalized visuals. On the other hand, Tableau is commended for its ease of use, intuitive design, and proficiency in managing substantial volumes of data.

  • Room for Improvement

    Both Microsoft BI and Tableau have areas where they can improve. Microsoft BI could enhance its user-friendliness, support, graphical and analytical features, cost, performance, integration, metadata management, visualization capabilities, stability, security, compatibility, data management process, support for product management and customer services, and documentation. On the other hand, Tableau could focus on improving its compatibility, performance, memory data concept, architecture, charting and calculations, modeling techniques, visualization options, integration, customization process, report creation, forecast instrument, GIS features, support for business insights and trend analysis, interface, licensing options, automation, write-back capabilities, drill-down functionality, security measures, workflow, and data modules.

  • Pricing

    Microsoft BI has a potentially high setup cost, particularly for enterprise-level usage. While some users find the pricing reasonable for desktop use, it becomes costly for larger-scale implementations. In contrast, Tableau's pricing is diverse, with opinions ranging from expensive to cheap. Some users perceive Tableau as expensive, especially for smaller firms, while other tools like Power BI are seen as more affordable. Generally, there is a consensus that Tableau's pricing could be enhanced to maintain competitiveness.

  • ROI

    Microsoft BI has been highly praised for its return on investment, with users giving it a perfect rating. It is projected to generate substantial revenue growth and achieve breakeven in a relatively short period of 2-3 years. In contrast, Tableau's specific ROI is uncertain, but it is presumed to be impressive based on existing data. Customers have observed a return on investment within a quicker timeframe of 5-6 months.

  • Service and Support

    The opinions on customer service for Microsoft BI are divided, with some users finding it satisfactory while others believe it needs improvement. On the other hand, Tableau's customer service has had a range of experiences, with some customers having positive ratings and others encountering limitations and difficulties in contacting the right people.

Comparison Results

Microsoft BI is praised for its ease of setup and powerful features, but users find it difficult to learn and use, with weaker graphical and analytical features compared to Tableau. The cost is considered high, and users desire better support, a more user-friendly interface, and improved performance. On the other hand, Tableau's setup can range from simple to complex, but it is highly valued for its user-friendliness and customization options. However, Tableau lacks compatibility with certain tools, has performance issues with large data, and needs improvement in visualization options and integration capabilities. Pricing is also a mixed opinion, with some finding it expensive. Customer support for both products has mixed reviews.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Power BI vs. Tableau Report (Updated: March 2024).
763,955 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Q&A Highlights
Question: Business users moving from Tableau to MS Report builder
Answer: Rich- What is it that current leadership perceives as lacking in the current reporting tool set? Why change if the only benefit is features or a products capabilities? Can the products features and capabilities be exploited? By who and when? How does that make money for the company? Increased profit? Cost reduction? Increased resource utilization? Fewer days for order to cash? Reduced collections? Better on time shipping? Faster production? Increased gross margin? Reduced inventory? You get the picture. It's the people that make the difference. Not the tool! What is it that we need to know to grow our business constantly and continuously? Every tool mentioned can do really great "stuff". But what "stuff" does your company need? I wish you the best.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The most valuable feature of Power BI is its ability to provide customized visualizations and insights tailored to specific business needs.""Its visualizations and dashboards are most valuable. Power BI is great in terms of visualizations and dashboards. The reports that we previously had were not very nice in terms of visualization. It also provides the ability to play with the data.""The most valuable feature is shareability, where we can publish work to the cloud and share it with team members.""It gives you an edge if you are on the Microsoft platform. If you have been using Microsoft products for a long time or if you have the Microsoft infrastructure, this is the right tool for you. It has seamless integration with Microsoft SQL Server and other sources, and you get the best of the three things (SSIS, SSAS, and SSRS) in one suite.""Microsoft BI was very helpful for me because I had a huge variety of connections. It is very convenient to build reports, even if somebody has no experience using BI tools or data visualizations. Additionally, the performance is very good when generating reports.""You don't need much support with Microsoft Power BI because it has such a large base of users who can answer your questions on their forums. There are also many video tutorials and webinars available online that offer solutions to whatever problems you may have.""It integrates with all of the Microsoft tools.""It ingegrates nicely with Office 365."

More Microsoft Power BI Pros →

"All features are valuable. It is very user-friendly, and it is mostly drag-and-drop. If we have the dataset available, then we can develop any dashboard very quickly.""Its performance is pretty good, and the development time is very low.""Since Tableau is on the cloud, we haven't faced any challenges around scalability.""Good data flow and management.""The data blending capabilities is a huge factor for our team.""From my perspective, it enables clients to better understand our data and make better decisions based on that information.""This solution has improved insights into quantitative data.""The solution has great features which nobody can beat, you can do a lot of customizations, such as use different dimensions and colorize them. Additionally, you can use the numeric values for the customization, which is an exceptional feature."

More Tableau Pros →

Cons
"Most clients have MacBooks. Therefore, they use Tableau as Power BI Desktop is not available for the MacBook right now.""Right now, their premium pricing is keeping us out of the premium market. The premium price per user just doesn't make sense for us, but we haven't reached the limit of 500 users to justify the premium.""In Microsoft Excel, you are able to have tabs. However, in Microsoft BI you do not have this flexibility.""Microsoft BI's visualization could be better. Though Power BI's visualization has steadily improved over the years, it's not on the level tools like Tableau and SAS or some of the more expensive products on the market.""They are improving it all the time. What would be nice is if they could respond to feature requests more quickly. They can provide faster support for new features.""One opportunity for improvement would be on the Power Query side. As a consultant, I know Power Query is not the main strength of Power BI. It is not where Power BI shines, but many customers use Power Query to do full ETL workloads for deliverable cookies.""There are some connector-related issues in their MSBA solution.""The UI is the main improvement that could be made. Specifically, there is something called DAX, in Power BI, which is complicated compared to calculated fields used in Tableau."

More Microsoft Power BI Cons →

"An area needing improvement involves the complexity of the product should you need to alter a lot of parameters. If you have technical servers, much interface, different providers and more serious processes, that will be time consuming.""We need big servers to perform the operations that we are doing. They should probably relook at its architecture.""We have products like Tableau, Power BI, Cognos, and QlikView in the data visualization segment. Compared to those, Tableau is quite costly.""I think Tableau could be improved with cheaper or more flexible licensing, though this is a generic improvement and applies for any product. It would be better if they had more flexible payment and licensing plans so that they could suit small- and mid-sized organizations.""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.""The pricing is a bit expensive.""The ability to use it on MAC machines. As far as I know, this is not possible.""If they could add global filters in the stories, more chart types, and default colours, it would help."

More Tableau Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "There is room for at least 45% discount as compared to the initial price."
  • "MS BI comes with all the tools and it is, to the best of my knowledge, the most affordable solution."
  • "All in all, for the price, this is an excellent tool for helping your organization turn mounds of data into useful insights."
  • "I would advise that Microsoft BI products are rightly priced and the licensing is easy to follow and to fulfill."
  • "Remove the cost of a licence to show a dashboard within SharePoint. Why should readers of a dashboard have to pay to view? ​"
  • "Make it low in cost. It is a no-brainer!"
  • "Globally, we evaluated a number of products, including Salesforce's product, Microsoft won on the ground of simple functionally and cost."
  • "Paid for itself in the first month."
  • More Microsoft Power BI Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "For big business, Tableau could be expensive as having a lot of Tableau server users (entering with a browser to reports) could be a bit expensive."
  • "Best advice on pricing is to anticipate the desire for more licenses once the results of this product are acknowledged in other parts of your company."
  • "Paying for users you never setup or buying expensive desktop licenses for users who can solve their users with web editing on the server are the two biggest expenses."
  • "Buy 50 at a time. Project your use base every three months, and project your requirements forward."
  • "Tableau can be costly (but this can be indefinable, such as user experience vs. cheaper etc.)"
  • "I wish there was more of a subscription model with the pricing when it comes to Tableau, so you can get all the latest version upgrades/features if you pay monthly/annually."
  • "The cost is high."
  • "Deployment of dashboards to viewers and unit supervisors can be prohibitively expensive."
  • More Tableau Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Guillermo (Bill) Cabiro
    I do use both Tableau and QlikView. Although very different, I really like both solutions. They belong to the new BI generation known as Interactive Visual Analytics In my opinion, QlikView has a more intuitive interface for regular users or executives that are not technical experts but the development side is a little more complex. Up to version 12 QlikView did not provide drag & drop features. If a user wanted to see something not included in the application the new object had to be created by a power user or developer because Qlikview's scripting has somewhat of a learning curve. On the positive side, QlikView's scripting is a great asset as it functions as an ETL allowing the integration of hundreds of different data sources into the same visual app. Another feature that’s extremely useful is Qlik’s proprietary Associative Model that allows the users to visualize data relationships that exist as well as those that do not. Tableau on the other hand is a lot easier to use for developers, analysts or power users who need to connect, manipulate and visualize data rather quickly. While this makes Tableau a better fit for the more analytical crowd, it may not be as appealing or intuitive to the regular or casual business users as QlikView is. Tableau has full pivot, drag & drop and drill down capabilities that are great for developers or power users. They can rotate measures and dimensions and graph them instantly using visualization best practices as suggested by the… Read more →
    Answers from the Community
    Anonymous User
    it_user89082 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user89082 (Manager of Data Analytics with 1,001-5,000 employees)
    Vendor

    Sorry to hear you have to move to Report Builder. Tableau is superior by a long shot! Find another gig. Don't go backwards. Move forward with Tableau !

    it_user5394 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user5394 (Consultant with 51-200 employees)
    Vendor

    Tableau is more suitable for somebody that is not developer and it's very easy to use and to create great visual presentation. For developers Report Builder would be more domestic.

    it_user82776 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user82776 (Chief Executive Officer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees)
    Consultant

    It is really the outcome and target goals that are achieved with the right set of BI solutions,people using it to add more efficiency and productivity at all fronts is the kind of result you want to see. Tools include human and technology bonded together to produce results, After all it is the function of both parties to work together, collaborate and share resources together. In the human perspective we look at the training and how best we can create solutions . With the BI solution it is the way we distinguish between the existing solutions that will to the best of its capability serve our business interests and requirements.

    it_user79746 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user79746 (Consultant at a energy/utilities company)
    Vendor

    Current business leadership include the VP of Finance, so determining a business case was and is a problem for him and those directly under him.  So is a no my problem.
     
    Thanks,
    Rich

    it_user77358 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user77358 (Director of IT at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees)
    Vendor

    Rich- What is it that current leadership perceives as lacking in the current reporting tool set?
    Why change if the only benefit is features or a products capabilities?
    Can the products features and capabilities be exploited?
    By who and when?
    How does that make money for the company?
    Increased profit?
    Cost reduction?
    Increased resource utilization?
    Fewer days for order to cash?
    Reduced collections?
    Better on time shipping?
    Faster production?
    Increased gross margin?
    Reduced inventory?

    You get the picture. It's the people that make the difference. Not the tool!
    What is it that we need to know to grow our business constantly and continuously?

    Every tool mentioned can do really great "stuff".
    But what "stuff" does your company need?

    To answer the initial question: Every change is difficult without buy-in from the stakeholders.
    People love change. What they don't like is change without benefit. Perceived or real.
    I hope this helps you a little to better meet the challenges you're facing.

    I wish you the best.

    it_user83559 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user83559 (Database Expert at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees)
    Real User

    Reading through the responses from all you knowledgeable persons out there is so very enlightening. It's like sitting in a room and getting your experiences on these tools first hand. Thanks a lot for your inputs, which will help in putting pros and cons for the company to make a trade off and choose over the two.

    it_user77358 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user77358 (Director of IT at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees)
    Vendor

    Rich- What is it that current leadership perceives as lacking in the current reporting tool set?
    Why change if the only benefit is features or a products capabilities?
    Can the products features and capabilities be exploited?
    By who and when?
    How does that make money for the company?
    Increased profit?
    Cost reduction?
    Increased resource utilization?
    Fewer days for order to cash?
    Reduced collections?
    Better on time shipping?
    Faster production?
    Increased gross margin?
    Reduced inventory?

    You get the picture. It's the people that make the difference. Not the tool!
    What is it that we need to know to grow our business constantly and continuously?

    Every tool mentioned can do really great "stuff".
    But what "stuff" does your company need?

    To answer the initial question: Every change is difficult without buy-in from the stakeholders.
    People love change. What they don't like is change without benefit. Perceived or real.
    I hope this helps you a little to better meet the challenges you're facing.

    I wish you the best.

    it_user79746 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user79746 (Consultant at a energy/utilities company)
    Vendor

    I wouldn't feel too sorry, it is a very good group to work with.  After a lot of years working in IT both in the US and Europe one of the things I find interesting is that Americans in business, especially with regard to software,  feel they must have the latest, greatest and most feature rich everything when very often being a little behind the bleeding edge gets the job done and costs less.  The real issue is to look at the problem being solved and find good enough while keeping an eye on where you are going. 

    Having said that took a brief look at the link you indicated and I like the fact that it runs on Linux.  Thumbs up on that aspect.

     
    Thanks,
    Rich

    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I would recommend as follows:  1) If you have legacies of SAP, Oracle  - look for SAP… more »
    Top Answer:Power BI is an advanced visualization tool oriented to big data with a very complete set of widgets to visualize information, control users accessing information, the configuration of governance… more »
    Top Answer:Oracle OBIEE is great in allowing design and creativity per the individual needs of the organization. Dashboards are fully customizable and very user-friendly. This solution is very stable. Oracle… more »
    Top Answer:It depends on the Data architecture and the complexity of your requirement Some great tools in the market are Qlik Sense, Power BI, OBIEE, Tableau, etc. I have recently started using Cognos… more »
    Top Answer:Both tools have their positives and negatives. First, I should mention that I am relatively new to Tableau. I have been working on and off Tableau for about a year, but getting to work on it… more »
    Top Answer:Tableau is easy to set up and maintain. In about a day it is possible for the entire platform to be deployed for use. This relatively short amount of time can make all the difference for companies… more »
    Ranking
    1st
    out of 50 in Reporting
    Views
    20,317
    Comparisons
    17,415
    Reviews
    19
    Average Words per Review
    555
    Rating
    8.1
    2nd
    out of 50 in Reporting
    Views
    17,947
    Comparisons
    15,259
    Reviews
    19
    Average Words per Review
    620
    Rating
    8.6
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    SSRS, SSAS, MSBI, MS Reporting Services, Microsoft BI Tools, Microsoft Big Data, Power BI Pro, MS BI
    Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online
    Learn More
    Overview

    Microsoft Power BI is a powerful tool for data analysis and visualization. This tool stands out for its ability to merge and analyze data from various sources. Widely adopted across different industries and departments, Power BI is instrumental in creating visually appealing dashboards and generating insightful business intelligence reports. Its intuitive interface, robust visualization capabilities, and seamless integration with other Microsoft applications empower users to easily create interactive reports and gain valuable insights.

    Tableau is a tool for data visualization and business intelligence that allows businesses to report insights through easy-to-use, customizable visualizations and dashboards. Tableau makes it exceedingly simple for its customers to organize, manage, visualize, and comprehend data. It enables users to dig deep into the data so that they can see patterns and gain meaningful insights. 

    Make data-driven decisions with confidence thanks to Tableau’s assistance in providing faster answers to queries, solving harder problems more easily, and offering new insights more frequently. Tableau integrates directly to hundreds of data sources, both in the cloud and on premises, making it simpler to begin research. People of various skill levels can quickly find actionable information using Tableau’s natural language queries, interactive dashboards, and drag-and-drop capabilities. By quickly creating strong calculations, adding trend lines to examine statistical summaries, or clustering data to identify relationships, users can ask more in-depth inquiries.

    Tableau has many valuable key features:

    • Tableau dashboards provide a complete view of your data through visualizations, visual objects, text, and more.
    • Tableau provides convenient, real-time options to collaborate with other users and instantly share data in the form of visualizations, sheets, and dashboards. 
    • Tableau ensures connectivity to both live data sources and data extraction from external data sources as in-memory data. This gives users the flexibility to use data from more than one source without any restrictions. 
    • Tableau gives many data source option, ranging from spreadsheets, big data, on-premise files, relational databases, non-relational databases, data warehouses, and big data, to on-cloud data. 
    • Tableau has a lot of pre-installed information on maps, such as cities, postal codes, and administrative boundaries. 
    • Tableau has a foolproof security system based on authentication and permission systems for data connections and user access. Tableau also gives you the freedom to integrate with other security protocols.

    Tableau stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Some of these include its fast data access, easy creation of visualizations, and its stability. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

    Romil S., Deputy General Manager of IT at Nayara Energy, notes, "Its visualizations are good, and its features make the development process a little less time-consuming. It has an in-memory extract feature that allows us to extract data and keep it on the server, and then our users can use it quickly.

    Ariful M., Consulting Practice Partner of Data, Analytics & AI at FH, writes, “Tableau is very flexible and easy to learn. It has drag-and-drop function analytics, and its design is very good.

    Sample Customers
    Accenture Adidas Aetna AIG Airbus Alibaba Allstate Amazon American Express Aon AT&T Audi Bank of America BASF Bayer Berkshire Hathaway Boeing Coca-Cola Comcast Cisco Coca-Cola Dell Disney Emirates Equinix FedEx Ford GE Google H&M Home Depot Honda IBM Intel JPMorgan Chase Kellogg's Kroger L'Oréal McDonald's Merck MetLife Microsoft Nike Oracle P&G PepsiCo Procter & Gamble Prudential Financial SAP Siemens Snapchat Spotify Starbucks Target Toyota T-Mobile Unilever Visa Walmart WeWork World Bank Xerox
    Accenture, Adobe, Amazon.com, Bank of America, Charles Schwab Corp, Citigroup, Coca-Cola Company, Cornell University, Dell, Deloitte, Duke University, eBay, Exxon Mobil, Fannie Mae, Ferrari, French Red Cross, Goldman Sachs, Google, Government of Canada, HP, Intel, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Macy's, Merck, The New York Times, PayPal, Pfizer, US Army, US Air Force, Skype, and Walmart.
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Manufacturing Company13%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Energy/Utilities Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization35%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Computer Software Company8%
    Government5%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Computer Software Company12%
    University7%
    Healthcare Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization34%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Computer Software Company8%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business39%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise45%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business14%
    Midsize Enterprise41%
    Large Enterprise45%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business32%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise50%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business14%
    Midsize Enterprise39%
    Large Enterprise47%
    Buyer's Guide
    Microsoft Power BI vs. Tableau
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Power BI vs. Tableau and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    763,955 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Microsoft Power BI is ranked 1st in Reporting with 22 reviews while Tableau is ranked 2nd in Reporting with 18 reviews. Microsoft Power BI is rated 8.0, while Tableau is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Microsoft Power BI writes "User friendly, easy to set up and great for analyzing data". 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". Microsoft Power BI is most compared with Amazon QuickSight, KNIME, Domo, Oracle OBIEE and MicroStrategy, whereas Tableau is most compared with Amazon QuickSight, Domo, SAS Visual Analytics, SAP Analytics Cloud and Databricks. See our Microsoft Power BI vs. Tableau report.

    See our list of best Reporting vendors and best BI (Business Intelligence) Tools vendors.

    We monitor all Reporting 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.