Adaptive Insights vs Tableau comparison

Workday and Salesforce are both solutions in the Reporting category. Workday is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.2, while Salesforce is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.6. Workday holds a 0.4% mindshare in RT, compared to Salesforce’s 23.4% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Workday users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of Salesforce users who would recommend it.

Adaptive Insights

Read 18 Adaptive Insights reviews

356 Views
249 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Tableau

Read 295 Tableau reviews

12,476 Views
10,551 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Adaptive Insights

Tableau

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Tableau and Adaptive Insights are products competing in business analytics and financial planning. Tableau appears to have the upper hand in data visualization capabilities, while Adaptive Insights is preferred for financial forecasting.

Features: Tableau provides advanced data visualization, easy integration with numerous data sources, and a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface for building reports. Adaptive Insights offers robust budgeting tools, real-time financial forecasting, and integration capabilities with various ERP systems.

Room for Improvement: Tableau could improve its setup cost and simplify deployment. Enhancing forecasting capabilities would benefit users. Adaptive Insights might enhance data visualization features, improve real-time data connectivity, and lower the complexity of its interface for new users.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Tableau requires robust integration, which can complicate deployment. Customer service is adequate. Adaptive Insights offers a smoother deployment experience, especially for financial teams, and receives positive customer service feedback.

Pricing and ROI: Tableau's initial cost is higher, but it offers a significant ROI for data analytics. Adaptive Insights delivers strong ROI with a predictable pricing model, focused on financial planning accuracy and efficiency.

To learn more, read our detailed Adaptive Insights vs. Tableau Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Adaptive Insights vs. Tableau

March 2025

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Helped 842,592 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Adaptive Insights

Ranking in Reporting

12th

Ranking in Data Visualization

11th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Business Performance Management (8th), Financial Performance and Strategy Management (2nd), ESG Reporting Software (4th)

Tableau

Ranking in Reporting

2nd

Ranking in Data Visualization

1st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.4

Number of Reviews

295

Ranking in other categories

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (2nd), Embedded BI (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of Adaptive Insights is 0.4%, down from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tableau is 23.4%, up from 22.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Reporting

Featured Reviews

Andrew Rosenberg

Adaptive Planning Manager at Alight

Adaptive scales well, simple to create new budget versions and models

For the organization I used to work at, it streamlined the process of creating budgets. It's very simple to create a new version and do some more modeling based on your need for planning things like headcount, other expenses, and revenue, everything is configurable within Workday. So that made it easy. Reporting was pretty easy to set up as well. It streamlined the amount of time it took to do the budget as well as kind of making it simple to implement a rolling forecast process. So, it really was more just a productivity increase and time shortening for the budgeting and forecasting process.

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ROMIL SHAH

Deputy General Manger - Information Technology at Nayara Energy

Provides fast data access with in-memory extracts, makes it easy to create visualizations, and saves time

When it comes to visualizations, Tableau has a limitation as compared to Power BI. It has a limited set of visualizations. Power BI has the entire marketplace, so you can connect and import many visualizations and use them, whereas Tableau has only 10 or 15 visualizations. There should be more visualizations, and there should also be data integration with more cloud providers. Tableau has recently launched a paid version for the documentation. So, documentation has become a little bit challenging when it comes to Tableau development because we do not have any tool to export the data out of it. It is a license-based feature that you need to purchase to prepare documentation. So, on the documentation front, for preparing clear documentation for any dashboard, it would help if we get an embedded option, rather than buying a license for each user for the documentation. To document anything, if I have to connect to each workbook and see what has been written as a formula and then document in the Word document, it is pretty time-consuming. We have the Microsoft stack, and we are currently evaluating Power BI because Tableau has a limitation of 50 columns for a drill-down report. If we want more than 50 columns, we have found a hack, but there is no ready-made option for doing it. So, we have to use another tool in case we need a drilled report with more than 50 columns. There are many instances where users need 80 or 90 columns for their analysis, and switching between two technologies becomes a challenge. It is not a cost-effective approach for us. Their support should be improved. We are not happy with their support. Whenever we raised queries, we were pointed to a few blogs, and we didn't get a proper solution from them. Their licensing should also be improved. They want us to purchase a Tableau Creator license for business users, whereas Power BI Desktop is free for business users. They should come up with a basic license with one or two connectors that our business users can use for preparing their visualizations. Tableau also charges us per user for users who want the data only through email.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"It's very stable."

"The integration with our payroll system to complete staff modeling during our budget and forecast processes."

"Automated reporting."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is its dashboard."

"The important feature is integration with source data. It connects to various ERP systems, including Workday, Intact, and others. It can also import actuals and compare them to PlanPoint quite easily."

"Changes to corporate structure, account codes are updated in all versions including prior years, hence "one-version of truth" as claimed."

"Forecasting changes that instantly flow through all financial statements."

"It helps develop a more unified work format throughout the company."

More Adaptive Insights pros

"It has been the best tool to work with from a self-service point of view."

"It gives us a new dimension to the way that we analyse our data."

"The UI part is the best. The end-users can easily get started with Tableau Desktop or Tableau Online because of its user-friendliness."

"I have found the solution easy to use and the interface is very good."

"The most valuable feature is the aggregation function."

"A valuable feature of Tableau is that it is a useful tool for small setups. I shuffle between Tableau and MicroStrategy, so I use Tableau for personal purposes more than enterprise. I like the light version of Tableau for personal usage and doing some use cases on my own. When it comes to something small, I use Tableau for setups, rather than any other tool."

"It allows us to basically understand and evaluate our numbers in an expedient manner."

"It is so easy to do a lot of things. There is a lot of flexibility and creativity in this product. In other products, you don't have this flexibility."

More Tableau pros

Cons

"The product's configuration process could be faster."

"It's a Workday product; they could do a little bit better to integrate a pure-play integration with Workday, which really doesn't do that."

"Their customer support team is slow to respond and not extremely confident."

"The upload feature exists, but isn't terribly useful."

"Being able to drill down when using OfficeConnect needs work."

"We tried Discovery and OfficeConnect at one point and found them too cumbersome, at the time."

"Discovery (the data visualization module): Needs to catch up with BI leaders, such as MS and Tableau. E.g., sorting by amounts in column charts and page slicers to control all visuals."

"Users continue to become more advanced and are looking for more advanced solutions."

More Adaptive Insights cons

"More integration with Python or something related to machine learning would be a good improvement."

"Implementation requires a technical background."

"The Hyper Extract functionality is not as strong as that provided by Microsoft SQL."

"When you're working on a dashboard, you can't select multiple components at a time and align them, so you have to go one by one. This is very cumbersome."

"We have products like Tableau, Power BI, Cognos, and QlikView in the data visualization segment. Compared to those, Tableau is quite costly."

"I have noticed that Tableau is not very compatible with ClickHouse. There's no direct connection to ClickHouse; you have to set up an ODBC connection."

"Creating empty extracts is not easy."

"I would like to have the product be more flexible in terms of creating online shared dashboards."

More Tableau cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Prior to purchasing licenses, make sure you understand which users will only need planning and which users will need both planning and OfficeConnect."

"It's affordable."

"Ensure that you have the proper pricing plan in place."

"Adaptive Insights' pricing is relative to its peer competitors. It's certainly competitive compared to a spreadsheet template that you build in Excel. It can be expensive if you need to have 100-500 budget holders giving input and building financial plans. However, in that case, it becomes an extremely good bargain. Compared to its competitors, it offers an excellent value."

"Everything is negotiable, but this solution is low cost compared to others."

"Pricing is in line with other cloud-based EPM tools. It is a subscription-based model based upon the number of users and site type if it's an admin or end-user type thing."

"Adaptive Insights' pricing is reasonable."

"Licensing seems to be worth the cost considering the efficiency Adaptive brings."

"The pricing for Tableau is the same as the other products in the market."

"Best advice on pricing is to anticipate the desire for more licenses once the results of this product are acknowledged in other parts of your company."

"I rate the product price in the Indian region a seven to eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price, and ten is a high price."

"Tableau is a little cheaper as compared to Power BI and other technologies that we have used in the past. However, if the business users in our organization want to make presentations, Tableau has been asking us to purchase a Tableau Creator license, and $35 per month is expensive for business users. Power BI is giving a free desktop version for business users to connect to any data source and build their own dashboards. That's why we have proposed to use Power BI for most of the business users in our organization."

"The licensing model of Tableau has changed since we initially purchased it three years ago and it is more complicated, and I have found it to be more expensive. They have lost market shares to Microsoft BI. My company will probably change solutions this year because of the increased pricing model."

"The solution is very expensive. If you have many users then it is going to cost your company a lot of money."

"At $70 per month, I think the price is a bit scary. I have a small consulting firm in Ghana, working in about 15 different African countries, and when it comes to our part of the world, $70 a month is a lot of money for software."

"There is a license required, we pay an annual license which is priced fair."

More Tableau pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user6330

Product Manager at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

May 2, 2013

MicroStrategy vs. Tableau

After a recent presentation, several attendees asked me about the applications of Visual Insights and Tableau. Many companies are investing in both tools and are trying to figure out the right tool for specific applications Tableau has found its sweet-spot as an agile discovery tool that analysts…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Real Estate/Law Firm

Legal Firm

Educational Organization

44%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Adaptive Insights?

It's very simple to create a new version and do some more modeling based on your need for planning things like headcount, other expenses, and revenue, everything is configurable within Workday.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Adaptive Insights?

12 years ago, it was very affordable. Workday has definitely increased its price since it acquired Adaptive a few years ago. So, it's affordable. But there are other more affordable solutions that ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Adaptive Insights?

The integrations could be simpler. It takes quite a bit of internal and IT know-how to set up. So, there could be room for just improving the integrations, making it easier to integrate outside sys...

See all answers

Seeking lightweight open source BI software

It depends on the Data architecture and the complexity of your requirement. Some great tools in the market are Qlik Sense, Power BI, OBIEE, Tableau, etc. I have recently started using Cognos Enter...

See all answers

Tableau vs. Business Objects - Which is a better solution for visualization and analysis?

Both tools have their positives and negatives. First, I should mention that I am relatively new to Tableau. I have been working on and off Tableau for about a year, but getting to work on it consta...

See all answers

Which would you choose - Tableau or SAP Analytics Cloud?

Tableau is easy to set up and maintain. In about a day it is possible for the entire platform to be deployed for use. This relatively short amount of time can make all the difference for companies ...

See all answers

Comparisons

IBM Planning Analytics vs Adaptive Insights

Compared 15% of the time

Planful vs Adaptive Insights

Compared 13% of the time

Oracle Hyperion vs Adaptive Insights

Compared 12% of the time

Microsoft Power BI vs Adaptive Insights

Compared 10% of the time

Anaplan vs Adaptive Insights

Compared 10% of the time

More Adaptive Insights Competitors

Microsoft Power BI vs Tableau

Compared 20% of the time

Domo vs Tableau

Compared 13% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs Tableau

Compared 7% of the time

Databricks vs Tableau

Compared 6% of the time

SAP Analytics Cloud vs Tableau

Compared 4% of the time

More Tableau Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Adaptive Insights

March 2025

Download Adaptive Insights product report

Buyer's Guide

Tableau

March 2025

Download Tableau product report

Also Known As

Workday Adaptive Planning, Adaptive Discovery , Workday Adaptive Planning

Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online

Overview

Adaptive Insights is a cloud-based financial planning and analysis software that helps businesses streamline their budgeting, forecasting, and reporting processes.

With its intuitive interface and powerful analytics, it enables organizations to make data-driven decisions and drive business performance.

Workday

Tableau is a tool for data visualization and business intelligence that allows businesses to report insights through easy-to-use, customizable visualizations and dashboards. Tableau makes it exceedingly simple for its customers to organize, manage, visualize, and comprehend data. It enables users to dig deep into the data so that they can see patterns and gain meaningful insights.

Make data-driven decisions with confidence thanks to Tableau’s assistance in providing faster answers to queries, solving harder problems more easily, and offering new insights more frequently. Tableau integrates directly to hundreds of data sources, both in the cloud and on premises, making it simpler to begin research. People of various skill levels can quickly find actionable information using Tableau’s natural language queries, interactive dashboards, and drag-and-drop capabilities. By quickly creating strong calculations, adding trend lines to examine statistical summaries, or clustering data to identify relationships, users can ask more in-depth inquiries.

Tableau has many valuable key features:

Tableau dashboards provide a complete view of your data through visualizations, visual objects, text, and more.
Tableau provides convenient, real-time options to collaborate with other users and instantly share data in the form of visualizations, sheets, and dashboards.
Tableau ensures connectivity to both live data sources and data extraction from external data sources as in-memory data. This gives users the flexibility to use data from more than one source without any restrictions.
Tableau gives many data source option, ranging from spreadsheets, big data, on-premise files, relational databases, non-relational databases, data warehouses, and big data, to on-cloud data.
Tableau has a lot of pre-installed information on maps, such as cities, postal codes, and administrative boundaries.
Tableau has a foolproof security system based on authentication and permission systems for data connections and user access. Tableau also gives you the freedom to integrate with other security protocols.

Tableau stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Some of these include its fast data access, easy creation of visualizations, and its stability. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

Romil S., Deputy General Manager of IT at Nayara Energy, notes, "Its visualizations are good, and its features make the development process a little less time-consuming. It has an in-memory extract feature that allows us to extract data and keep it on the server, and then our users can use it quickly.

Ariful M., Consulting Practice Partner of Data, Analytics & AI at FH, writes, “Tableau is very flexible and easy to learn. It has drag-and-drop function analytics, and its design is very good.”

Salesforce

Sample Customers

1. Cisco Systems 2. Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated 3. Deloitte 4. DocuSign 5. Dropbox 6. Electronic Arts 7. Fender Musical Instruments Corporation 8. Fitbit 9. Fossil Group 10. Groupon 11. Hilton Worldwide 12. HP Inc. 13. Intuit 14. Johnson & Johnson 15. LinkedIn 16. Lyft 17. McAfee 18. Medtronic 19. Netflix 20. Oracle 21. Pandora 22. PayPal 23. Pinterest 24. Red Hat 25. Salesforce 26. ServiceNow 27. Slack Technologies 28. Spotify 29. Symantec 30. Tableau Software 31. Twitter 32. Workday

Accenture, Adobe, Amazon.com, Bank of America, Charles Schwab Corp, Citigroup, Coca-Cola Company, Cornell University, Dell, Deloitte, Duke University, eBay, Exxon Mobil, Fannie Mae, Ferrari, French Red Cross, Goldman Sachs, Google, Government of Canada, HP, Intel, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Macy's, Merck, The New York Times, PayPal, Pfizer, US Army, US Air Force, Skype, and Walmart.

Buyer's Guide

Adaptive Insights vs. Tableau

March 2025

Free Report: Adaptive Insights vs. Tableau

Find out what your peers are saying about Adaptive Insights vs. Tableau and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.

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