Tableau vs. Power BI: Key Differentiators and Similarities
Power BI and Tableau are two popular business intelligence (BI) tools for collecting, integrating, analyzing, and presenting business data. They both assist in performing data analysis, data manipulation, and data visualization to understand and derive conclusions from various data sets. Power BI has a larger market penetration due to its Microsoft family lineage and its ease of use, familiarity with the best-selling analytic application of all time Excel, and overall affordability. But let’s look at some critical differences and similarities between the two.
User Interface
Power BI features a simple user interface and can easily be integrated with other Microsoft products. The Power BI interface is simple to learn and use. Report view, data view, and model view are the three views available with Power BI Desktop.
Tableau is an easy-to-use user interface that lets you create and customize dashboards to match your requirements. It features a clean and straightforward workspace that invites you to explore data and deliver intelligent solutions.
Coding Support
Power BI supports the Data Analysis Expression and M languages (M stands for Data Mashup or Data Modelling) for data manipulation and modeling. Although only enterprise customers can access this feature, Microsoft Revolution Analytics can link to the R programming language.
Tableau works with the R language significantly better than Power BI. Tableau Programming Development Kit is available in four different programming languages: C, C++, Java, and Python. By connecting to these computer languages, you can develop in-depth visualizations.
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Speed
It’s simple to use Power BI. It is faster and works better when the amount of data is minimal. When working with large amounts of data, Power BI tends to lag.
Tableau is capable of processing massive volumes of data quickly. It’s faster, and it includes a lot of data-display choices. Tableau doesn’t limit the number of data points in visualization or impose row or size constraints so that you can see your data from all sides.
Price
The Tableau software costs more than Power BI. Power BI’s professional edition is less than $10 per month per user. A yearly subscription to the Professional edition will cost you around $100. Power BI Premium costs $4,995 a month and is licensed through dedicated cloud computing and storage resources.
Tableau is more expensive, with the commercial edition costing more than $35 per user per month. A yearly subscription to the service costs roughly $1400. Tableau Creator is around $70 per month, and Tableau Viewer is around $12 per month. If you’re a small business or a start-up, you may start with Power BI and subsequently upgrade to Tableau as needed.
Tableau vs Power BI Comparision
- Tableau BI can handle huge volumes of data with better performance.
Power BI can handle only a limited volume of data. - The data/information can be stored in the Tableau server.
PowerBI is not for storing data, as it focuses more on reporting and analytical modeling. - Tableau platform is predominantly known for its data visualization functionality. In Tableau, users can use 24 different types of visualizations.
PowerBi offers many data points to offer data visualization. lt is offering more than 3500 data points. - Tableau performs best when there is a large amount of data in the cloud.
Power Bl doesn’t work better with large amounts of data. - Tableau is difficult, to begin with, or learn.
Power BI’s Interface helps users to adopt and is easy to learn. - Tableau can connect to various data sources.
Power BI connects limited data sources. - Suitable for medium & Large types of organizations.
Suitable for organizations of all sizes. - It is used by Analysts and experienced- users for their analytics purposes.
Both experienced and naive users use PoweBI. - Embedding report is a real-time challenge in Tableau.
Embedding report is easy with Power BI.
Conclusion
Business Intelligent tools play an important role in making business decisions. When it comes to Power BI vs Tableau, each tool has its own set of capabilities, benefits, and drawbacks. If your business needs to analyze limited amount of data with limited capability, Power BI is the way to go because it is less expensive than Tableau. However, when dealing with large amounts of data from numerous sources and the need to do any statistics or create stunning data visualisations, tableau offers a wealth of functionalities and choices. As a result, it is largely dependent on the size and scope of the firm. The Power BI vs Tableau tools both deliver excellent results, so we would not be able to conclude only one tool is superior to the other.
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Authored by: Sritharan Chellachamy
