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 23.7% 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

386 Views
270 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Tableau

Read 295 Tableau reviews

13,602 Views
11,455 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: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Adaptive Insights vs. Tableau

January 2025

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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 (3rd), ESG Reporting Software (5th)

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 January 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 23.7%, up from 22.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Reporting

Featured Reviews

Brian Teets

Workday Adaptive Planning Manager at Accenture

Facilitates leveraging the query reporting engine and modeling engine into Excel spreadsheets but there is room for improvement in terms of performance

There's a tool called Office Connect that leverages what I call the benefits of both worlds, where we can use the query reporting engine and the modeling engine that's in Adaptive Insights and leverage it into, like, an Excel spreadsheet. That's pretty popular with a lot of our client partners. Also, the ability to build models to do revenue models or expense or personal planning, and bottoms-up planning. Really, having a tool for a single source of truth. So when you have a lot of typical when we think of the process where a lot of planners are involved, separate spreadsheets. And if you have a lot of people involved, then you have that. Usually, it can be a nightmare. Trying to, right, aggregate that together. So, the aggregation option of the tool is really a big plus.

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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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

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

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

"Reports are allowed to be edited for aesthetic purposes, which is lacking in a lot of other dashboard tools."

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

"The biggest feature is the source of truth for all of our budget and forecast versions."

"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."

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

More Adaptive Insights pros

"The solution helps users create dashboards and analyze data without relying on IT or product teams."

"Tableau Prep tool for data preparation is a most valuable tool."

"Tableau is highly scalable. Now that they've introduced Hyper, you can create an extract of more than 5 million rows in minutes and then do your analysis."

"There are already connectors to almost every single major database and service that you can possibly think of."

"Data Interpreter: Which can identify issues or potential errors with your imported data."

"Self-service is most valuable. Users can pick up quickly and do the resolution. There are a lot of out-of-the-box features, and it satisfies most of the needs. If users are properly trained, they can deal with any situation."

"It is definitely easy to use. It is intuitive, and more or less, everything can be done from the front end. As such, there is no concept of metadata. You can just take data from a database and start building your own stuff, such as OLAP data warehouse. You don't need extensive metadata modeling like Oracle BI."

"The platform's most important feature is predictive analysis."

More Tableau pros

Cons

"Adaptive Insights could improve the data designer interface to make integrations easier to set up."

"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."

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

"The integrations could be simpler. It takes quite a bit of internal and IT know-how to set up."

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

"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."

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

More Adaptive Insights cons

"Implementation requires a technical background."

"It needs a little bit more advanced modeling. I would like to see functionality like Cognos has in the Framework Manager."

"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."

"Formatting controls could use some improvement."

"Navigating through activities like cleansing, reshaping, and wrangling extensive or complicated datasets could prove challenging within the Tableau environment."

"The cost of owning the solutions from Tableau is much higher compared to any other analytical solutions."

"An area needing improvement involves the complexity of the product should you need to alter a lot of parameters. If you have technical servers, much interface, different providers and more serious processes, that will be time consuming."

"Some of our clients are looking for better UI when using Tableau as they often work with this solution directly."

More Tableau cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

"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."

"It's affordable."

"Adaptive Insights' pricing is reasonable."

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

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

"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."

"The product's price is relatively inexpensive and manageable for enterprise-level companies."

"Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis."

"Pricing is not bad. It's competitive."

"In general, if someone is new and wants to learn Tableau, it's around $70 per month."

"We are on an annual license which costs us $1,400 which is very expensive. Microsft BI is less expensive."

"The pricing of Tableau should be better to remain competitive in the market, especially when compared to alternatives."

"Its cost is quite high. A corporate license costs about 150-200K per year for all the users, but there was probably some discounted amount. This cost includes everything."

"The initial cost that is set according to CPU cores is expensive."

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…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Real Estate/Law Firm

Hospitality Company

Educational Organization

43%

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 17% of the time

Microsoft Power BI vs Adaptive Insights

Compared 13% of the time

Planful vs Adaptive Insights

Compared 12% of the time

QPR Metrics vs Adaptive Insights

Compared 11% of the time

Oracle HFM vs Adaptive Insights

Compared 11% 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 8% 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

January 2025

Download Adaptive Insights product report

Buyer's Guide

Tableau

December 2024

Download Tableau product report

Also Known As

Workday Adaptive Planning, Adaptive Discovery , Workday Adaptive Planning

Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online

Learn More

Workday

Salesforce

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.

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.”

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

January 2025

Free Report: Adaptive Insights vs. Tableau

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