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Birst vs Tableau comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
8.3
Birst offers substantial returns by providing visualization tools that impact the organization through enhanced sales and data access capabilities.
Sentiment score
7.1
Tableau offers rapid insights and cost reductions, enabling users to recoup investments quickly despite some viewing it as costly.
This saves a significant amount of time, particularly for reports that would have needed around fifty people.
The ROI of using Tableau extends to its seamless integration across various platforms, as it's from Salesforce and thus not limited to any specific cloud provider.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.2
Birst's technical support is mixed; praised for responsiveness and customer service but faces challenges with time zones and reliance on forums.
Sentiment score
7.0
Tableau's customer service is responsive and professional, with praised technical support, though some note wait time concerns.
They provide quick email and phone responses and have Thai-speaking personnel.
The technical support for Tableau is quite good.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.4
Birst's scalability receives mixed reviews; some praise it, while others face challenges, costs, and complexity, yet cloud solutions impress.
Sentiment score
6.7
Tableau effectively scales with optimized configurations, but performance may decline with extremely large datasets, impacting scalability and cost.
Tableau is easy to use across various dimensions, whether on-premises or on the cloud.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
6.3
Birst users experience varying stability, with issues during upgrades and large datasets, though some report smooth performance improvements.
Sentiment score
7.3
Tableau is generally stable, efficient with varying data sizes, but may struggle with complex datasets or insufficient infrastructure.
I rate the stability a five or six because Tableau updates very often with new versions or patches.
 

Room For Improvement

Birst struggles with performance, customization, UI, visualization features, inefficiencies, and support, requiring enhancements and modernization in various areas.
Tableau users seek faster data processing, better customization, machine learning integration, and affordable pricing, plus enhanced support and training.
It sometimes requires extensive investigation to determine why the data does not appear correctly.
We cannot send the entire Excel file reports via email within Tableau.
The product owner should enhance its benefits or clarify its role.
 

Setup Cost

Birst offers market-standard pricing with a subscription model, providing comprehensive solutions and flexibility despite high entry costs.
Tableau's licensing is costly but offers valuable functionality, yet smaller firms find its pricing prohibitive and complex based on roles.
Tableau is rated an eight because it is pretty expensive compared to alternatives like Power BI.
The cost for viewer rights is around $60, but it can vary based on the business and is usually for a year.
 

Valuable Features

Birst provides scalable data visualization, cloud-based architecture, and integrates ETL, reporting, and dashboards for efficient data-driven decisions.
Tableau excels with interactive visuals, diverse data connections, and user-friendly interface, driving efficiency and insights alongside strong community support.
The real-time data processing eliminates the lack of timely reports or dashboards, allowing for hour-by-hour updates instead of monthly or weekly ones.
The platform supports live connections and real-time data processing, which is crucial for our reconciliations that need frequent updates.
Tableau is extremely good at dashboard creation, providing clear and concise visual presentations.
 

Categories and Ranking

Birst
Ranking in Reporting
32nd
Ranking in Embedded BI
15th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Tableau
Ranking in Reporting
2nd
Ranking in Embedded BI
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
298
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (2nd), Data Visualization (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of Birst is 0.2%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tableau is 22.6%, down from 23.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Reporting
 

Featured Reviews

it_user547323 - PeerSpot reviewer
We deploy dashboards using the integrated data warehousing and visualization abilities. Setup is complex.
From a visualization perspective, this tool claims to make several advances that are indeed interesting to a large proportion of the user base. However, it needs to prioritize several extremely fundamental features associated with charting, formatting and layout control. Some basic features that Birst needs to improve are: * Line graph between two measures (comparing one measure to another without summing them) – Basic scatter plot sums the measure up automatically. * Spark lines need to be made available. * Editing trend lines and gridlines in graphs – An option for customizing label location, label background under formatting chart elements such as gridlines and labels, custom label backgrounds and transparency, etc. * An option to customize the alignment of headings in any table as left, right, center, top, middle and bottom. Also there is need to add label customization in a table that is not associated to any measure but just plain text, instead of having to change it on the dashboard as a text input, which also does not re-size in the same ratio as the other components do when the screen size is modified. * Conditional filter – An additional option to use a filter “where variable-xyz in (a,b,c,d,)” type of statement for filtering attributes. This is helpful when the list of attributes is long and can be used instead of manually select each box. * Conditional display of KPI – For example, if the date range is x, then display KPI A; if the date range is y, then display KPI B. * Conditional indicators – A solution to give conditions to KPI indicators rather than to have a measure to check against a predefined number. * Unnecessary padding spaces around graphs, KPIs, tables – An option to be able to define the space and padding. * An option to customize a measure within a given timeline, embedded in the measure itself. There should be way to define that timeline dependent on a user-selected time in dashboard filters. Currently, there is no ability to display several measures on different time scales in the same table. For example, measure 1, 2 and 3 current, over last quarter and over last year.
ROMIL SHAH - PeerSpot reviewer
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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Comparison Review

it_user6330 - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Educational Organization
44%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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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 ...
 

Comparisons

No data available
 

Also Known As

No data available
Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Citrix Systems, Jive Software, SunnyD, Toshiba Medical Systems, Cisco OpenDNS, RB, Sunny D, Vertafore
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.
Find out what your peers are saying about Birst vs. Tableau and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
847,772 professionals have used our research since 2012.