Tableau vs Power BI: Major Differences

The world of data visualization and analytics is growing very fast with new players hitting the market and established brands absorbing smaller up and comers every day.

To stay at the forefront of the data analytics field, a tool must have that special mix of power, ease of use, brand recognition, and price.

Both of these tools have this secret sauce, which is why many teams find themselves comparing Microsoft Power BI vs Tableau when looking for the perfect data analytics tool.

What is Tableau?

Tableau is a powerful and fastest-growing data visualization tool used in the business intelligence industry. It allows you to simplify raw data into a very easily understandable format.

Data analysis is very fast with Tableau, and the visualizations created are in the form of dashboards and worksheets. This helps professionals to understand the data that is created using Tableau at any level in an organization.

Features of Tableau

Here are important features of Tableau:

Data blending
No need of technical knowledge
Real-time analysis
Data collaboration and data notifications
DAX analysis function
Patented technology from Stanford university
Toggle view and drag-and-drop
List of native data connectors
Highlight and filter data
Share dashboards
Embed dashboards within
Mobile-ready dashboards
Tableau reader for data viewing
Dashboard commenting
Create “no-code” data queries
Translate queries to visualizations
Import all ranges and sizes of data

What is a Power BI?

Power BI is a Business Intelligence and Data Visualization tool which helps you to convert data from the various data source into interactive dashboards and BI reports. It also provides multiple software connectors and services.

Microsoft Power BI is a business intelligence tool that helps you to handle data from different sources and provides visualization after the cleaning and integration process. It also offers a feature of Adhoc report generation, which helps in the analysis of the data.

Features of Power BI

Here, are essential features of Power BI

Customizable dashboards
Datasets
Reports
Navigation pane
Q&A question box
Help & feedback buttons
Ad Hoc reporting and analysis
Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)
Trend indicators
Interactive reports authoring
Complete reporting & data visualization tools
Real-time dashboards that help business owners solve problems as they occur
Offers Power BI embedded, azure service that allows applications to interact with Power BI
Q&A feature of Power BI allows users to ask questions using natural language to get answers in a specific graphical form.
Content Packs: for sharing dashboards with team

Differences between Tableau vs. PowerBI

Tableau

Tableau BI can handle a huge volume of data with better performance.
Tableau platform is known for its data visualization functionality. The users can use 24 different types of visualizations in Tableau.
Tableau has excellent customer support. It has a large community forum for discussions.
Tableau works best when there is a vast data in the cloud.
Analysts and experienced- users mostly use for their analytics purposes.
Tableau is a little difficult.
The information can be stored by using the Tableau server.
Suitable for medium & Large type of Organisation.
Tableau deploys MDX for measures and dimensions.
Tableau can connect to numerous data sources.
Embedding report is a real-time challenge in Tableau

Power BI

Power BI can handle a limited volume of data.
PowerBi offers numerous data points to offer data visualization. lt is offering more than 3500 data points for drilling down the dataset.
Power Bl provides limited customer support to its users with a free Power Bl account. However, the paid version users will get faster support compared with the free version.
Power Bl doesn’t work better with a massive amount of data
It is used by both naive and experienced users.
Power BI Interface is very easy to learn.
Power BI concentrates more on reporting and analytical modeling but not for storing the data.
Suitable for Small, medium & large type of organization.
Power BI uses DAX for calculating and measuring columns.
Power BI connects limited data sources while increasing its data source connectors in monthly updates.
Embedding report is easy with Power BI.

Advantages of Tableau

Here, are pros/benefits of using Tableau BI:

Less cost of training
Very fast and easy to create visualizations
Good customer support
Data Interpreter Story-telling ability
Tableau offers a feature of visualization
It helps you to combine shape & clean the data for analysis.
It helps you to handle a large amount of data.
Uses scripting languages like R & Python to avoid performance for complex table calculations.
Allows users to create reports, dashboards, and stories using Tableau Desktop.

Disadvantages of Tableau

Here, are cons/drawbacks of Tableau

Relatively high cost
No change management or versioning
It is expensive, BI, when compared to other tools.
Importing custom visualization is a bit difficult.
Not offers easy methods for embedding reports to other applications.
Tableau is suitable only for a large organization which can pay for licensing cost.
The tableau does not offer support for artificial intelligence and machine learning.
There is integration with other Microsoft products like Power Apps , Dynamics 365, Office 365, and Microsoft Flow, which uses Single Sign-On (SSO).

Advantages of Power BI

Here, are pros/benefits of Power BI

Offers pre-built dashboards and reports for SaaS Solutions
Provide real-time dashboard updates.
Secure and reliable connection to your data sources in the cloud or on-premises
Power BI offers quick deployment, hybrid configuration, and a secure environment.
Data exploration using natural language query.
Feature for dashboard visualization
New features frequently added that are great for excel users.
Extensive database connectivity capabilities Q&A feature publish to the web.
integration with both Python and R coding to use visualizations.
Power Query provides many options related to wrangling and clean the data.
Post publishing the data into Power BI web service can schedule refresh without manual intervention.
Power BI backed by the superpower of with artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Disadvantages of Power BI

Here, are cons/drawbacks of Power BI

Dashboards and reports only shared with users having the same email domains.
Power Bl will never mix imported data, which is accessed from real-time connections.
Power BI can’t accept file size larger than 1 GB.
Dashboard never accept or pass user, account, or other entity parameters.

Major Differences

Tableau deploys MDX for measures and dimensions while Power BI uses DAX for calculating and measuring columns.
Tableau platform is known for its data visualization functionality whereas Power BI offers numerous data points to offer data visualization
Tableau BI can handle a huge volume of data with better performance while Power BI can handle a limited volume of data.
Tableau works best when there is a vast data in the cloud but Power Bl doesn’t work better with a massive amount of data
Tableau is used by analysts and experienced- users mostly use for their analytics purposes and Power BI is used by both naive and experienced users.
Tableau is a little difficult whereas Power BI Interface is very easy to learn.