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Birst vs Tableau comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
15th
Average Rating
7.4
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 January 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 23.7%, up from 22.6% 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."
"It provides supporting data for critical policy and operational changes"
"Data Interpreter: Which can identify issues or potential errors with your imported data."
"The most valuable features are data discovery and fine visualizations."
"Tableau's most valuable feature is its ability to connect with various data sources and display real-time data on three different dashboards."
"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."
"Show Me is a feature to help with knowing which chart is an appropriate one for the selected variables, and it makes helps in creating appropriate visuals."
"The solution makes for very productive and really informative decision making. It can lead the whole business and build a strategy across whole working departments."
"I have found Tableau easy to use and the features are superb."
 

Cons

"Customer support takes lot of time to get a solution."
"The pricing is a bit higher than the competition. They'll need to lower it to stay competitive."
"Other tools are more competitively priced."
"Improvements can be made in template support. The workbook file structure is really hard to version control. If there was some sort of version control support offered particularly for workbooks, that would help big time."
"There could be improvements on the mobile application, it is lacking features."
"The product needs to allow for better ways to drill down more effectively on the information at hand."
"The process of embedding the dashboards on external portals and websites could be improved."
"People are migrating to Microsoft BI due to the speed, which is quite slow to load, and the lack of visualization options."
"Improvements in schema security and row/column security need to be made."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Please negotiate on the price and purchase the latest version."
"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."
"Pricing could be better. I believe they should offer better pricing for deployment in small to mid-sized companies."
"For big business, Tableau could be expensive as having a lot of Tableau server users (entering with a browser to reports) could be a bit expensive."
"The price of Tableau could improve. The license is too expensive."
"Paying for users you never setup or buying expensive desktop licenses for users who can solve their users with web editing on the server are the two biggest expenses."
"I like the payment model. For the people who need to create, they buy their licenses. Everyone else can use the free Tableau Viewer. This is much better than some of the competitor products, which require full licences for everything."
"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."
"I believe it has a lifelong license, and once you purchase it, you don't have to renew it, but I'm not sure."
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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
42%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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Comparisons

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Also Known As

No data available
Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online
 

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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: January 2025.
831,158 professionals have used our research since 2012.