Tableau vs Power BI: Key Differences

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.

In this tutorial, you will learn:

• What is Tableau?
• What is a Power BI?
• Features of Tableau
• Features of Power BI
• Tableau products
• Power BI Products
• Tableau vs. PowerBI
• Advantages of Tableau
• Advantages of Power BI
• Disadvantages of Power BI
• Disadvantages of Tableau

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 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

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

Tableau products

Here are various types of Tableau products:

Tableau Desktop:

Tableau Desktop offers a rich feature set and allows you to code and customize reports. Begin by creating the charts, reports, to blending them all together to form a dashboard to all the necessary work is created in Tableau Desktop. The workbooks and the dashboards created here can be either shared locally or publicly.

Tableau Desktop Personal:

The development features are similar to Tableau Desktop. Personal version keeps the workbook private and offers limited access. The workbooks cannot be published online. Therefore, it should be distributed either offline or in Tableau Public.

Tableau Desktop Professional:

It is pretty much similar to Tableau Desktop. The difference is that the work created in the Tableau Desktop can be published online or in Tableau Server. Also, in the Professional version, there is full access to all sorts of the datatype.

Tableau Public:

It is the Tableau version specially build for cost-effective users. Filed saved in Tableau’s public cloud, which can be viewed and accessed by anyone.

There is no privacy to the files saved to the cloud as anyone can download and access the same. This version is the best for the individuals who want to learn Tableau BI.

Tableau Server:

Tableau server is used to share the workbooks and visualizations that are created in the Tableau Desktop application across the organization. To share dashboards in the Tableau Server, you must first publish your work in the Tableau Desktop.

Once the work has been uploaded to the server, it will be accessible only to the licensed users. However, It’s not necessary that the licensed users need to have the Tableau Server installed on their machine.

Tableau Online:

As its name suggests, it is an online sharing tool of Tableau. Its functionalities are similar to Tableau Server, but the data is stored on servers hosted in the cloud, which are maintained by the Tableau group.

There is no storage limit on the data that can be published in the Tableau Online.

Tableau Reader:

Tableau Reader is free to use tool which allows you to view the workbooks and visualizations created using Tableau Desktop or Tableau Public. However, the security level is zero in Tableau Reader as anyone who gets the workbook can view it using Tableau Reader.

Power BI Products

Here are some important Power BI tools:

Power BI Desktop

Power BI Desktop is the primary authoring and publishing tool for Power BI. Developers use it to create brand new models and reports from scratch.

Power BI Service

Power BI service is an online Software as a Service (SaaS) where Power Bl data models, reports, and dashboards are hosted. Administration, sharing, and collaboration happens in the cloud.

Power BI Data Gateway

Power BI Data Gateway works as the bridge between the Power Bl Service and on-premise data sources like Direct Query, Import, Live Query. It is Installed by Bl Admin.

Power BI Report Server

It can host paginated reports, mobile reports, & Power Bl Desktop reports. The users can modify Power Bl reports other reports created by the development team.

Power BI Mobile Apps

Power BI mobile app is available for iOS, Android, Windows. It can be managed using Microsoft Intune. The tool allows you to view reports and dashboards on the Power Bl Service Report Server.

Tableau vs. PowerBI

Here, are major differences between Tableau vs. PowerBI

Tableau	Power BI
Tableau BI can handle a huge volume of data with better performance.	Power BI can handle a limited volume of data.
Tableau platform is known for its data visualization functionality. The users can use 24 different types of visualizations in Tableau.	PowerBi offers numerous data points to offer data visualization. lt is offering more than 3500 data points for drilling down the dataset.
Tableau has excellent customer support. It has a large community forum for discussions.	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.
Tableau works best when there is a vast data in the cloud.	Power Bl doesn’t work better with a massive amount of data
Analysts and experienced- users mostly use for their analytics purposes.	It is used by both naive and experienced users.
Tableau is a little difficult.	Power BI Interface is very easy to learn.
The information can be stored by using the Tableau server.	Power BI concentrates more on reporting and analytical modeling but not for storing the data.
Suitable for medium & Large type of Organisation.	Suitable for Small, medium & large type of organization.
Tableau deploys MDX for measures and dimensions.	Power BI uses DAX for calculating and measuring columns.
Tableau can connect to numerous data sources.	Power BI connects limited data sources while increasing its data source connectors in monthly updates.
Embedding report is a real-time challenge in Tableau	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.

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.

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).