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L33's avatar
L33
Frequent Visitor
9 years ago

PowerBI & Tableau together in one org.. Any examples?

Doing a Google search for "PowerBI Tableau", returns on the first page no less than 27 instances of the characters "vs". Does it have to be this way?

 

My company is currently looking to a hybrid approach, where PowerBI is deployed to the "masses", effectively a place for people to rustle up good-looking reports instead of Excel, but also keeping Tableau back for a select and relatively smaller number of BI specialists. 

 

Does anyone on here have any experience of effectively deploying both of these great tools in to their enterprise? Any advice on how to do it and the sorts of things we need to be considering and so on would be most gratefully received.

 

Thanks

Lee

9 Replies

  • Greg_Deckler's avatar
    Greg_Deckler
    Icon for Community Champion rankCommunity Champion
    9 years ago

    It certainly doesn't have to be that way but Power BI and Tableau are pretty much direct competitors, they essentially fulfill the same use case. I don't think that deploying Power BI and Tableau together really changes anything in terms of deployment strategy, etc. In fact, most organizations have multiple analytics and visualization BI tools deployed within their organization. All that being said, the question I would have is why do you feel that you need Tableau? What is Power BI not providing?

    • L33's avatar
      L33
      Frequent Visitor
      9 years ago

      Hi  -  thanks for the response. 

       

      My managers' (at a new company I have just joined)  feel that Tableau is a more "polished", more stable and more developed product. It's difficult for me personally to say what the gaps are to PowerBI as I've only started using Tableau (not extensively) since I joined. But I am still arguing that Microsoft are great at catching up and over-taking competitors and any shortcomings the product may currently have will be short-lived. (One manager mentioned "parameters" open to end-users for scenario testing as being a gap - but I reckon that'll be plugged soon enough). 

       

      I have been tasked with finding out how we may best deploy use of both types of service. A central repository is required where all BI reports can be obtained.

       

      I don't think we'll have Tableau Server/Online so my first feeling is that we'll simply be using a SharePoint document repository to store the .twb workbook files for consumers to download and use Tableau Reader as and when required. But I suspect that the PowerBI Online space will interact better with SharePoint - ie. links on this SharePoint 'central BI' page will navigate directly to Dashboards and/or Reports in PBI. 

       

      I'm not sure what my questions even are - I'm just thinking out loud and seeing if anyone has any advice!

      • Greg_Deckler's avatar
        Greg_Deckler
        Icon for Community Champion rankCommunity Champion
        9 years ago

        SQL Server Reporting Services 2016 also allows uploading PBIX files to it if you need to keep things on premises. That being said, I don't think that it will support Tableau files so you may have to use SharePoint or something similar.

  • v-qiuyu-msft's avatar
    v-qiuyu-msft
    Icon for Community Support rankCommunity Support
    9 years ago

    Hi L33,

     

    I'm not familiar with Tableau, but I think both Tableau and Power BI have their own advantages. For Power BI, it provides data modeling, vivid visuals, embed report in application, share report in a organization or outside of the organization, etc. You can get started about Power BI from this online document: Power BI Documentation.

     

    Though there might have some features doesn't support in Power BI, you can post you idea here and PG will consider to develop this feature if it has large amount of votes.

     

    If you have any concern about Power BI product, please feel free to let us know. Your feedback enables Microsoft to make Power BI better and better. :smileyhappy:

     

    Best Regards,
    Qiuyun Yu

  • cbailiss's avatar
    cbailiss
    Icon for Advocate II rankAdvocate II
    9 years ago

    Our organisation uses both.

     

    They both have their relative strengths and weaknesses.  I would urge you not to necessarily think of Tableau as better.  For some things, Power BI is stronger.

     

    Tableau receives generally better feedback in our organisation on the quality of its visualisations.  They tend to look nicer/more professional, have more styling options, better support data driven formatting, etc.  I know some of that is subjective, but it is the feedback we consistently have (and I generally agree).  Power BI is obviously a newer tool (so perhaps will catchup in time) but one of the few disappointments we've had with Power BI is generally the lack of improvements in the core visualisations.

     

    The querying and modelling capabilites in Power BI are generally stronger than those in Tableau.  Again, not in every area, but it's the experience we've had.  Tableau does support Google Big Query, which Power BI doesn't, so for those people needing that in our organisation, Tableau is the go to tool.

     

    On price, Power BI is much cheaper.

     

    So, the bottom line is it does depend and I wouldn't say one is better than the other in every area.  

     

    • L33's avatar
      L33
      Frequent Visitor
      9 years ago

      Many thanks to all for your responses.

       

      I've now been using both Tableau and PowerBI for the last week or so. I'd definitely agree with you about the shaping and modelling capabilities inherent in PowerBI - there's a lot in there, and for someone coming via the Excel route, it's fairly straightforward to pick up. Some aspects of Tableau aren't quite as intuitive as a long-time user might think, especially when you've gotten used to PowerBI.

       

      However, what I didn't realise about Tableau is it's ability to let you 'play' and discover - it's got great visuals, sure, but what BI vendor's software these days doesn't? For the analyst Tableau's got the edge as it's actually the ease with which you can uncover "unknown unknowns" that they like.

       

      With PowerBI I think you still need to have an idea of what you're trying to show - with Tableau you can stumble over something, so for an analyst it's a powerful tool. (Having said that, the "SandDance" plugin for PowerBI is touching on this sort of ease of discovery, and I'll certainly be bringing that up.)

       

      Again - many thanks for the assistance on this topic.