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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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Birst
Ranking in Reporting
32nd
Ranking in Embedded BI
14th
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
6.4
Number of Reviews
295
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (2nd), Data Visualization (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 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 23.4%, up from 22.9% 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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Dashboards and self-service reports. These are widely used by customers in the EPM domain."
"I like Tableau's heat maps and the storyboard. You can create data stories and tons of visuals with it, and it goes together really well. Tableau lets you manipulate the data in various ways."
"The most valuable features are data discovery and fine visualizations."
"It has a shallow learning curve and so you can go to market very, very, very quickly."
"It's very easy to use and users don't need any IT support to access it as the information is right there."
"The feature that is currently most valuable is the import feature where I can link to an Excel data source. I'm not using it with any other data source, such as SQL Server. I directly link it to an Excel sheet, and if I change anything in that Excel sheet, the changed data immediately gets reflected in the virtualization. This is something that is very convenient for me as of now."
"The most valuable feature is the drag and drop, then the simplicity to build dashboards which allows us to provide more usable data to our customers."
"It's a very good, flexible product, and it's easy to learn."
"There are already connectors to almost every single major database and service that you can possibly think of."
 

Cons

"Customer support takes lot of time to get a solution."
"The price could be better."
"With Tableau, when you're dealing with very large datasets, it can be slow so the performance is an area that can be improved."
"At the organizational level, increasing the servers' capabilities to support us as an enterprise tool."
"Include forecasting on table calculation fields."
"The development part should be better. We are putting a lot of effort in during development, so if we face any struggles, we have to find workaround solutions on the internet."
"SAP BusinessObjects has some semantic layer designs that give the flexibility to do ad hoc reporting or dashboard designing. If that can be brought into Tableau, it would be great. We have the data in the database, but we should also be able to bring something between the database and the dashboard and do some semantic layer modeling for ad hoc reporting requirements."
"The charts in Tableau are quite limited."
"In the next release, there should be more information describing each chart because users have a difficult time telling them apart. They should also include the animations/videos, similar to Power BI."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Please negotiate on the price and purchase the latest version."
"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."
"Pricing could be better. I believe they should offer better pricing for deployment in small to mid-sized companies."
"Basically, we prefer a permanent license. A one-time charge is much better."
"It's an annual fee with everything included but it's quite expensive."
"For data extraction and analysis, Tableau is better than any other tool I have used with the same pricing model."
"There is a license for the use of this solution and it is on a per-user basis. The server is free but the users you have to pay for."
"Cost is where tools like MicroStrategy, Power BI, or Spotfire come into play. Cost-wise, Tableau is a little bit costlier than other tools such as Power BI. I have been using Tableau all these years, but about four years ago, Power BI came out at a very low cost. Their desktop version was free from the beginning. Power BI Desktop has always been free, whereas Tableau Desktop is costly. When it comes to cost, people prefer Power BI because it integrates very well with Office 365. You don't have to worry about integration with Teams or SharePoint."
"The solution is expensive but it depends on the customer's needs which will determine the cost of the licensing."
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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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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: February 2025.
842,194 professionals have used our research since 2012.