Top 8 Advantages of Power BI over Tableau
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Is the debate of Power BI or Tableau occurring in your organization? If you are like many executives you have most likely heard enough discussion around the long debated topic. Given Power BI’s 2017 updates we believe it’s now time to act and take advantage of these decisive factors for switching.
It is now time to stop toggling between Excel Sheets for prepping data and sending it to a Tableau Platform for visualizations which inevitably leads to end users asking why they can’t get the back out. Let’s start empowering key stakeholders, and non-technical business users with user-friendly interfaces and data portability that blends with they way they work today.
Power BI is one of the most popular platforms to explore and visualize your data, but does this make it a perfect fit for your business? To help you make the right choice, we have outlined some important points below for you to consider.
Price
Power BI is priced at only $10 per user per month making it a pocket friendly choice for solopreneurs as well as SMEs. At just $10, users gain access to wide array of features such as real-time dashboard building capability, shared data collaboration, automatic data updating and much more. Power BI comes with a free version called Power BI desktop which helps users start their data visualization journey. Tableau is priced at $35 for similar features.
ETL/Data Discovery Suite
Power BI has a robust set of tools for ETL and data discovery when compared to Tableau. Data prep is 90% of any reporting requirement. Reporting datamarts can be directly built into Power BI without having to go to third parties.
Custom Visualisations
Data visualization is the key to providing actionable insights. Power BI lets you create your own custom visualization allowing you to explore and display your data in captivating ways. Apart from creating custom visualizations, you can also download visuals created by the community and by Microsoft. These visuals can be downloaded and used in your reports.
Tableau’s in-built visuals may be the best in their class, but even a market leader like Tableau does not allow you the flexibility to create your own custom visualizations.
MSFT Integration
Power BI is tightly integrated with the O365/Azure offerings and everything Microsoft, making it compelling for shops that run on O365 or Azure. This proves to be a huge advantage for analytics shops that are excel driven, but that need data from the same source as Power BI based reporting.
Q&A capability
Power BI is the only product that offers Natural Language Query capabilities. This Natural Language Query is surprisingly robust. You simply type a question and Power BI selects the appropriate visualization for you to explore. What’s even more amazing is that the visualization chosen may or may not have been created by the dashboard’s author. This is a game changing feature and will make data accessibility ubiquitous.
Visualization
Power BI offers a robust library of visualization types and its open framework allows users to add more visualizations to their collections via the office store. Advanced users can also implement d3.js and R visuals. Since it was developed on top of Excel, it shares many of the same controls.
Ease of Use / Adoption
Power BI has a higher adoption rate among newbies. This is because anyone who has ever used Microsoft’s products before will feel right at home in Power BI. Its user interface resembles that of Microsoft Excel making it easy to navigate for first-timers. Power BI has an intuitive learning curve and also utilizes Microsoft’s DAX query language which will be familiar to advanced users of Excel. While Tableau is easy to navigate once you become familiar with its layout, the marks menu takes time to master.
Ease of sharing reports
Power BI pro allows users to create and share rich interactive reports on the Power BI.com service. This makes collaboration among team members and colleagues easy. Tableau, on the other hand, has some in built sharing option which lacks customization capabilities when compared to Power BI.
Data is critical to any business’ success, but it is always an overwhelming process to extract meaningful insights. Power BI simplifies this data to insights cycle from both the adoption and cost perspective.
