Forum Discussion

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 a...
cbailiss's avatar
cbailiss
Advocate 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.