Business Intelligence battle ground | Power BI Vs. Tableau

If you are looking for a Business Intelligence or data visualization solution, chances are you have come across Power BI and Tableau.  

Founded in 2003, Tableau is often regarded as the gold-standard in data visualization and has been so for a long time. With intuitive data exploration capabilities, Tableau makes a strong case of data visualization. Power BI, on the other hand, debuted in 2013, it is Microsoft’s BI option. It’s strong integrations with the Microsoft ecosystem enable performance and support productivity. 

Through this blog, I intend to provide a concise yet comprehensive guide to help you decide which should suit your requirements better.  

From the research undertaken for writing this article (which I can say is substantial), we can assure you that ultimately it all comes down to business requirements. What problem are you looking to solve and how much are you willing to pay for it. We will discuss these two products one-on-one on three parameters: Functionality, Deployment Options and Cost. Next, we will briefly touch upon Gartner’s magic quadrant report, 2019 and what it means, and finally we will wrap up. 

Functionality 

Tableau is a sophisticated product built to explore data visually. It provides a wide range of data representation, dashboard design, and user functionalities. It works very well with users with large datasets from multiple data sources. You can ask a question about your data and get insights almost immediately. Tableau is available for both cloud and on-premise. Its no-code powerful drag and drop analytics makes it very popular among the users. It has a large community and quality customer service. 

Image source: www.tableau.com

Power BI with its common foundation as Excel provides a familiar experience to Excel users. One of the biggest selling points of Power BI is integration with the Microsoft environment. Power BI integrates natively with Azure data services. Power BI also offers unique experiences for business users like Natural Language Query and custom visualizations. The Power BI community is not as strong as Tableau and customer service is just okay. Power Bi comes in two different variants, Power BI Basic and Power BI Premium, the basic version does not address on-premise analytics.  

Image source: powerbi.microsoft.com

Bottom line: Tableau is the best tool when it comes to Data Visualization (seeing and exploring data) whereas Power BI focuses more on predictive modeling and reporting. For processing large data sets from multiple sources, you can go for either Tableau or Power BI premium, the basic version does not address on-premise analytics. 

Deployment

Power BI’s deployment option are limited. It is available as a SaaS (software as a service) model and on-premise; on-premise is only supported by Power BI Premium licensing flexibility. Tableau, on the other hand, is much more flexible in its deployment and is available both on-premises and cloud.

Bottom line: Tableau is flexible offers both on-premise and cloud service. If the SAAS model works for you then you can have Power BI basic for free with Microsoft 365. Also, if you are invested in Microsoft technology, then Power Bi may still be profitable from a deployment perspective. 

Cost

Both the products offer a subscription-based licensing model. While both these products offer comparable services, Power BI is way cheaper to Tableau. Power BI premium does increase the cost considerably. If you have a small budget (less than $30 per user) Power BI is your product you will settle for.  It is easy to use and does not require a power user. However, if you are looking for a data visualization option for your analysts looking to leverage data, Tableau totally justifies its price.

To have a better picture here is a pricing break down for both:  

Features	Power BI	Tableau
Authoring and data preparation	Power BI Desktop ​ Free	Creator ​ $70 user/month
Self-service BI, sharing and collaboration	Power BI Pro ​ $9.99 user/month)	Tableau Server ​ $35 user/month​ or​ Tableau Online ​ 42 user/month)
Viewing and Interaction	Power BI Pro ​ $9.99 user/month​ or​ Power BI Premium ​	viewer ​ On-premise or Public Cloud ​ 12 user/month ​ Or​ SaaS​ or $15 user/month​

Tableau publicly available pricing here. Power BI publicly available pricing here. 

Bottom line: On of the biggest advantage Power BI has over Tableau is its rock bottom price. It’s a cost-effective BI product. Tableau, on the other hand, is a sophisticated product and justifies its bigger price tag. 

Gartner’s Magic quadrant 2019 

In 2018, Power BI tied with Tableau in terms of functionality but strongly outplaced it in “completeness of vision” because it is embedded with the Microsoft stack. This year, however, Microsoft has left Tableau marginally behind, thereby improving on the ‘ability to execute’ axis. No surprise there considering the value for money and ease of use. That being said, Tableau is still placed comfortably among the leaders and is still popular among its users with strong customer ratings.  

As the saying goes, the most challenging part of buying a BI solution is figuring out which one meets your needs. I hope it will help you decide on a BI solution. If you are a Microsoft 365 user, I would suggest you go for Power BI and if you are not satisfied you could always upgrade to Tableau.  

Data Visualization solutions: Exploration and Presentation

Digitization led to big data which by 2020 will have 44 trillion gigabytes of data. We are in a position where we have access to masses of data, but our ability to effectively use this data for competitive advantage is a constraint. The reason being most of this data is unstructured and scattered across multiple sources. Did you know that only 1% of the data we have access to is analyzed? This is a massive underutilization of data which is not free. Data is helmed as the new age gold and if you are planning to become data rich you should invest in Data Visualization. Data visualization has been around for centuries and evolving constantly. From primitive maps to visualizing data in mixed reality visual representation of data has come a long way. Visualization makes it easier to process and comprehend data. As they say,

“A picture tells a story better than 1000 words could” 

Data visualization can be used at different levels across an organization and there are several used cases. One thing to consider while going for visualization is to have a clear objective whether you want it for exploring the data or mere presentation of data.

Data Exploration is used by a data analyst who is trying to match patterns, get insights, make a forecast, etc. These usually require dashboards, multi-layer graphs, etc. Data exploration is used by many businesses to get actionable business insights into their data and plan the next steps.

On the other hand, data presentation is to represent the findings of data exploration in a very basic form, usually some form of storytelling. You would not want your investors or higher management to spend time understanding the graphs and charts or worse not understanding them at all.

We at i2e consulting offer data visualization to help get actional business insights and PPM solutions. Here we list a few of our many customized data visualization solutions that hugely benefit organizations.

Data Exploration in R&D: We created dashboards for a pharmaceutical giant who wanted to get insights on the research and development happening around their organization. They wanted these dashboards to drug lifecycle management. Our dashboards helped R&D productivity to newer heights through complete data integration and cross-departmental data utilization.

Interactive mixed-reality PPM dashboards: One of our clients came with a unique requirement wherein they wanted their board meetings to be interesting. They wanted the entire top management to be involved, focused and attentive. We suggested and eventually created data visualization with Microsoft HoloLens. AR/VR is highly engaging, informative and unique (well for now it is) which makes it ideal for presenting information. The holographic imaging enabled them to interact and play around with their data. This newly found perspective not only made the meeting interesting but also enabled better insights for better forecasting.

Resourcing Dashboards: Resource planning is one of the key concerns for many organizations because of the nature of the information involved. When one of our clients, requested a dashboard to optimize scheduling and resources precisely. We offered a dashboard solution to minimized resource planning challenges. The dashboard showed resource availability based on skillset, level of expertise that helped with resource availability forecast. Besides, it also showed FTE scores of resources and made the company audit-ready.

Wrapping it up, in the age of big data analytics data visualization is the only way to harness information. If you are planning to invest in it, do have a clear objective because these tools do not come cheap. If you are looking for any data visualization solution, we at i2e consulting are ready to answer your queries. Just fill in the below form.