Microsoft Power Bi vs Tableau: A Data Viz Duel

Nowadays, with the rapid rate of technology development, business intelligence tools are becoming more competitive. Microsoft Power BI and Tableau Software, with their high-tech features, and functionality are leading this competition.

POWER BI

As stated on it’s website, Power BI is a business analytics service by Microsoft. It aims to provide interactive visualization and business intelligence capabilities with an interface simple enough for end users to create their own reports and dashboards. Power BI provides cloud-based BI (business intelligence) services, known as “Power BI Services”, along with a desktop based interface, called “Power BI Desktop”. It offers data warehouse capabilities including data preparation, data discovery and interactive dashboards. One main differentiator of the product is the ability to load custom visualizations. It is, by all means, no exhaustive definition of this instrument. The comprehensive set of features enables easy to use data import from a variety of files, simple to handle data transformations, beautiful visualisations with interactivity, and even more.

The key components of the Power Bi ecosystem are;

Power BI Desktop — The Windows-desktop-based application for PCs and desktops, primarily for designing and publishing reports to the Service.

Power BI Service — The SaaS-based (software as a service) online service. This was formerly known as Power BI for Office 365, now referred to as PowerBI.com, or simply Power BI.

Power BI Mobile Apps — The Power BI Mobile apps for Android and iOS devices, as well as for Windows phones and tablets.

Power BI Gateway — Gateways used to sync external data in and out of Power BI and are required for automated refreshes. In Enterprise mode, can also be used by Flows and PowerApps in Office 365.

Power BI Embedded — Power BI REST API can be used to build dashboards and reports into the custom applications that serves Power BI users, as well as non-Power BI users.

Power BI Report Server — An On-Premises Power BI Reporting solution for companies that won’t or can’t store data in the cloud-based Power BI Service.

Power BI Premium — Capacity-based offering that includes flexibility to publish reports broadly across an enterprise, without requiring recipients to be licensed individually per user. Greater scale and performance than shared capacity in the Power BI service.

Power BI Visuals Marketplace — A marketplace of custom visuals and R-powered visuals.

Features of Power BI

• Customizable dashboards
• Datasets
• Reports
• Navigation pane
• Q&A question box
• Help & feedback buttons
• Ad Hoc reporting and analysis
• Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)
• Trend indicators
• Interactive reports authoring
• Complete reporting & data visualization tools
• Real-time dashboards that help business owners solve problems as they occur
• Offers Power BI embedded, azure service that allows applications to interact with Power BI
• Q&A feature of Power BI allows users to ask questions using natural language to get answers in a specific graphical form.
• Content Packs: for sharing dashboards with team

TABLEAU

Tableau Desktop is a powerful data discovery and exploration application that allows you to answer pressing questions in seconds. This video shows how you can use Tableau’s drag and drop interface to visualize any data, explore different views, and even combine multiple databases together with ease. Tableau products query relational databases, online analytical processing cubes, cloud databases, and spreadsheets to generate graph-type data visualisations. The software can also extract, store, and retrieve data from an in-memory data engine. Tableau’s product capabilities have been implemented in such a way that the user should be able to ask a question of their data, and receive an answer almost immediately by manipulating the tools available to them.

Tableau offers three primary product;

Tableau Desktop — Tableau Desktop is considered by many to be the gold standard in data visualization tools. Its power and ease of use encourage data exploration. It includes interactive workbooks and dashboards to help users uncover insights as questions or hunches arise and to make discovery easy via visual patterns.

Tableau Server — Tableau Server enables users to publish the dashboards they created in Tableau Desktop. It makes it easy to securely distribute interactive workbooks to the right stakeholders (integration with Active Directory, Kerberos, OAuth), thereby making sharing and collaboration simple and decision making more participatory.

Tableau Online — Tableau Online is the Tableau analytics platform hosted in the cloud so that there is no hardware or server to maintain. It can be accessed via browser or mobile app. Users can publish dashboards and share “vizzes” with coworkers, business partners or customers and discover hidden opportunities using interactive visualizations and exactly the same data.

Features of Tableau

• Data blending
• No need of technical knowledge
• Real-time analysis
• Data collaboration and data notifications
• DAX analysis function
• Patented technology from Stanford university
• Toggle view and drag-and-drop
• List of native data connectors
• Highlight and filter data
• Share dashboards
• Embed dashboards within
• Mobile-ready dashboards
• Tableau reader for data viewing
• Dashboard commenting
• Create “no-code” data queries
• Translate queries to visualizations
• Import all ranges and sizes of data

So what makes them special and how should an enterprise decide on which business intelligence tool to use? Its pros and cons and reason why one is preferred in any scenario can be easily determined from a critcal comparison. Here’s a detailed comparison of these most popular tools!

1. Functionality and Visualization

Tableau has a more interactive functionality than Power BI. Tableau is more intuitive in designing and refining visualizations. As Tableau has developed more different types of visuals and employs, it can be considered as visualization design artificial intelligence. Then it leads to the ideal visualization given the dimensions and measures which are selected. Tableau can handle a huge volume of data with better performance. Power BI can handle a limited volume of data.

2. Integration and Sharing

The advantage of Power BI is being integrated into the Microsoft Office 365 Suite. That means it is highly compatible with all Microsoft Office applications such as Excel, even SharePoint or SharePoint Online. You don’t need much time to adapt as they already made sure all involved analytic mechanisms can be easily understood.

3. Cost

As a cloud-based solution, Power BI has a very simple pricing structure while Tableau categories are quite complicated.

4. Data Handling

Tableau can handle a huge volume of data with better performance. Power BI can handle a limited volume of data. But unlike Tableau, Power BI offers about 3500 data points for drilling down the dataset. Tableau platform has only 24 different data points. This inturn makes the Tableau software a better option for medium and & Large type of Organisation. PowerBI on the other hand can be used across any number of working hands.

5. Customer Support

Tableau has excellent customer support. It has a large community forum for discussions. Power Bl provides limited customer support to its users with a free Power Bl account. However, the paid version users will get faster support compared with the free version.

6. Data Warehousing

Tableau deploys MDX for measures and dimensions. Power BI uses DAX for calculating and measuring columns.

7. Ease of Use

Tableau is a little difficult. Power BI Interface is very easy to learn. A level of experience is required to use Tableau as only analysts and experienced- users mostly use it for their analytics purposes. PowerBI is used by both naive and experienced users because of how easy it is to navigate.

8. Reports

Embedding report is a real-time challenge in Tableau as it does not offer easy methods for embedding reports to other applications. Embedding report is easy with Power BI.

9. Information Storage

Information can be stored by using the Tableau server. Power BI concentrates more on reporting and analytical modeling but not for storing the data. Although high-scale deployments tend to require many instances of Tableau Server but updates were added to assist with more extensive global deployment administrative capabilities.

Unfortunately, the internet is full of auto-generated and biased pages regarding which product trumps the other. The truth is, the best product depends more on you, your organization, your budget, and your intended use case than the tools themselves. It is easy to nit-pick at features like the coding language that supports advanced analysis, or the type of maps supported — but these have a minimal impact for most businesses. Both these tools have their own strengths and weaknesses that are common when comparing BI solutions. The most important part to make a decision between Power BI vs Tableau is whether your business seeks for data visualization as the prime focus of the analytics or not. In this case, Tableau is a perfect choice. But if you look for a broad analytic capabilities platform regarding modeling, optimization, and reporting, you should go with Power BI.

In my opinion, Tableau with its full functions is still the best BI tool in the market, however from a business side, Power Bi is probably much more efficient.