Tableau vs. Power BI – All You Need to Know

October 6, 2022
Jhansi Rani
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Published On October 6, 2022

You can create dashboards using Power BI or Tableau services, but the most significant difference lies in how you gain and experience insights after analysis. The primary goal of your analysis is not to create a dashboard but to better understand your data. Tableau enables you to dig deeper into an anomaly or repeat your analysis without disrupting the flow.

Tableau services provide a fully integrated and extensible platform that leverages your current data strategy to offer the greatest flexibility, deployment choices, and data source connections, without any hidden costs or limitations.

Powerful Analytics

You can use Tableau Reporting to inform your workforce and enable business users to drill down effectively into multiple layers of your business data. It leads to savings in operational costs and better decision-making.

Tableau users can analyze data for insights and answer new questions without needing support from the IT department or Tableau services specialists. Power BI users must rely on technical staff to write code and perform the custom analysis, often requiring third-party software add-ons.

Flexible Deployment Options

Tableau’s data-agnostic approach reduces the risk of redeploying or reconfiguring systems over time due to changes in data strategy, leadership changes, or the addition of new data source assets.

Tableau services offer a data agnostic solution for your business and helps drive your analytics strategy irrespective of your existing data sources. In contrast, Power BI focuses on migrating customers towards Microsoft’s proprietary solutions and technology stack.

Effective Governance

Customer feedback shows that Power BI requires significantly more hardware to gain scalability and performance comparable to Tableau Server. Tableau’s visual interface and robust governance mechanisms allow Tableau Server admins to seamlessly manage permissions, allowing your organization to deploy and adopt analytics at scale.

The ability to deploy, adopt, govern, and scale analytics according to best practices is critical to leveraging analytics capabilities fully. Tableau Business Intelligence is easier to deploy than Power BI and offers greater transparency, extending to its governance and scalability approach.

Global User Community

Tableau’s global user community is unparalleled in this space. It sets the global industry standard for engagement and enablement through user groups, roadshows, online training, and the availability of skilled resources in the marketplace. It allows organizations to maximize the return on their analytics investment by overcoming obstacles that hinder analytics adoption across the enterprise.

Tableau reporting comes with low licensing costs, and the wide support network ensures lower spending on skilled resources. These two key elements of deploying analytics at scale help you build a data-driven organization with adequate support for your employees.

Understanding the Key Differences

Tableau	PowerBI
Proprietary technology that enables people to explore data graphically	Successful analysis requires learning two different programming languages (DAX and M)
Allows experimenting and testing analytic hypotheses with immediate results	Requires several steps and takes time to show results
Easily customize visualizations using a simple calculation language	Even simple analyses often require IT support due to multiple query languages and structural complexities
Offers a fluid and consistent user experience, focusing on analytics flow	A focus on coding means that new visuals require specialized coding by third-party vendors
Flexibility to leverage your existing investments - runs on Windows or Linux, on-premises, IaaS, or SaaS	Public cloud deployment is limited to Azure and requires on-premise data gateways unless the data is in the cloud
Consistent interface and functionality regardless of deployment	Different interfaces for analytical content based on your deployment model or data strategy
Unlimited data connectivity allows you to toggle between in-memory and live connections with one click	Limited analytics capabilities based on whether data is imported or connected live
Easy to administer with centralized site roles and permissions	Administration is spread across different technologies with complex integration
Holistic data management capabilities with integrated data preparation and data catalog	Requires additional solutions and technical resources to achieve similar functionality
Allows customization of architecture to fit your needs and resources	Limited control over how the software is installed or configured
Allows a trial run before purchasing	Purchasing decisions based on a generic calculator, leading to inaccurate cost estimates
Active global user community of over 220,000 users to help accelerate adoption	Developer-centric community focused on custom coding and integration
Wide range of training options and community resources to empower users	Business users have to rely on technical experts for advanced analysis
One of the fastest growing analytics skill sets in the marketplace	Limited talent pool of Power BI specialists, resulting in a skill shortage