Board vs Tableau comparison

Board International and Salesforce are both solutions in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category. Board International is ranked #24 with an average rating of 7.7, while Salesforce is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.6. Board International holds a 0.5% mindshare in BIT, compared to Salesforce’s 18.3% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Board International users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of Salesforce users who would recommend it.

Board

Read 36 Board reviews

586 Views
409 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Tableau

Read 295 Tableau reviews

18,562 Views
15,629 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Board

Tableau

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Tableau and Board compete in the business intelligence and analytics space. Board has the upper hand due to its comprehensive planning capabilities, while Tableau excels in data visualization.

Features: Tableau offers a drag-and-drop interface for creating complex data visualizations and interactive dashboards. It supports data blending from multiple sources and includes the capability to perform in-memory calculations. Board provides an integrated solution combining data analysis, planning, and simulation capabilities. It supports dynamic reporting and allows for data modifications through its customizable procedures.

Room for Improvement: Tableau could improve by enhancing collaboration capabilities and providing more robust support for non-visual data analytics. Additionally, improving cost efficiency could benefit many users. Board could enhance its scalability and speed of deployment. A more intuitive user interface would make the tool more accessible to non-technical users, while better customization options for dashboard visuals could elevate user engagement.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Tableau offers straightforward deployment with strong community support. Its seamless integration with various data sources simplifies setup. Board requires a more customized implementation approach, which can delay deployment. It compensates with robust customer service, often tailored to specific client needs.

Pricing and ROI: Tableau generally incurs higher initial costs, focusing on delivering rapid data insights for a fast ROI through superior visualization. Board, with its extensive functionality, presents a potentially higher initial cost but promises long-term ROI through comprehensive business performance management.

To learn more, read our detailed Board vs. Tableau Report (Updated: February 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Board vs. Tableau

February 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

Board

Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

24th

Ranking in Reporting

20th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Business Performance Management (10th)

Tableau

Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

2nd

Ranking in Reporting

2nd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.4

Number of Reviews

295

Ranking in other categories

Data Visualization (1st), Embedded BI (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of Board is 0.5%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tableau is 18.3%, down from 19.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

Featured Reviews

Wiboon Thabsuwan

Senior Consultant at IMD Company Limited

Easy to use and requires less time to learn or understand its features

I think the product is good in terms of ease of use. The interface looks really nice and very easy to use. Every command appears in the icon. It looks like you don't have to understand everything about the command. You do not necessarily have to know more, or I would say that there is less time for our study about the products. Functionality-wise, it is quite easy to use and requires less time to understand or learn about the product. I am a software vendor, so I do not use the tool myself. I use it for my clients. My clients mostly use it for budgeting and timing purposes. I would say that's really less maintenance at all because they can do everything by themselves. It is good in terms of ease of use.

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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

"We can build reports super fast."

"The tool seems to have a lot of ways to handle scaling."

"I think the product is good in terms of ease of use."

"The ease of being able to get the data into BOARD is what makes it nice for people with a semi-IT background."

"A lot of flexibility from the data modeling standpoint. It can add specific line items into our budget, for example, or if we want to make changes to the data model itself, we have that flexibility."

"It is very easy to use. It has got what they call a toolkit, which is a no-code development environment. You can develop a whole solution with it because it is a complete platform. There is a lot of online material that can be used as a reference. You can help yourself while developing a solution. There are some prebuilt applications in the platform environment. You can very easily customize and integrate these applications. It also has flexible scaling of machine resources, which is really great."

"Instead of taking two people a week each month to perform our internal KPI reporting, the same two people can have it done in a day."

"Where it used to take me three days at the beginning of the year to create the new financial statement, now it is a matter of minutes because all the data is in the system."

More Board pros

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Tableau has many different connectors for different databases. It's very easy to connect to MySQL, SQL Server, Amazon EMR, Presto, Redshift, BigQuery, and so on."

"Visualization attributes: Marks – Color, Size, Label, etc.. Easily Accessible and Intuitive."

"The initial setup is quick and easy and you don't need special outside assistance to set everything up."

"The most valuable feature is the aggregation function."

"The most valuable features of the solution are the permission management and the user management."

More Tableau pros

Cons

"We have had some challenges with newer version of the rollout in terms of stability."

"It can have more functionality for narrative reporting. They should also improve their training courses, which are currently very lightweight. When you get into more complex things, it is quite difficult to figure out what you're supposed to do, and you have to look at a lot of videos before you actually understand, which is a bit frustrating. Their training can be more comprehensive."

"It would be nice to have more connectors for other data sources. BOARD is a great tool to become the single source of the truth. Making it easier to connect data sources for niche software tools will make it easier to keep everything in one place."

"The setup was a bit complex."

"What could be better is the manual... nowadays, most people use a web client, but on the Board manual website, a lot of the information is only about the Windows client. If they could update that, it would be helpful."

"I would like to see a better Web client, where the controls work the same way as in the Windows client. I do think that the focus is now on the Web, so it should be improved upon."

"My analysts have used the technical support. Sometimes they have felt like they did not receive the answer that they needed, or you have to go and upgrade in order to address a problem. "

"I'd like to see a more passive report user for enterprise report writers that aren't particularly technical."

More Board cons

"Tableau's automatic insight could be improved. It has some predefined capabilities to understand the data, but I think they need more. Customers need more insight automatically from data—they don't want to discover them, they want to get the forecast automatically. The data preparation should also be improved because it's not easy. Tableau tries to focus on the business side, but the backend side has not improved much. They also have an ETS solution, but it's limited."

"Maybe the price could be a bit cheaper, especially if you're a personal developer that uses Tableau just to explore smaller data sets and you're not a company or something like that."

"I have used Power BI as well as Tableau. There are a couple of interesting features that I like in Power BI, but they are not present in Tableau. For example, in Power BI, if I am looking at country-wise population, I can type and ask for the country that has the maximum population, and it will automatically give an answer and address that query. This kind of feature is not there in Tableau. Similarly, in Power BI, for integrating with the latest ML algorithms, we have decision trees and primarily multiple machine learning algorithms. The decision tree essentially visualizes the patterns in the data. We don't have such a feature in Tableau. If Tableau can integrate with the machine learning algorithms and help us to do visualizations, it would be a wonderful combination. Most of the people are going for Tableau primarily for visualization purposes. However, in the data science industry, users want to do model building as well as tell a story. As of now, Tableau is fulfilling the requirements for visualization purposes. If they can bring it up to a level where I can use it for machine learning purposes as well as for visualization, it would be very helpful. Many people who want to do data science don't want to write a code. Tableau is anyway a drag and drop tool, and if they can provide those options as well, it will be a powerful combination."

"We need big servers to perform the operations that we are doing. They should probably relook at its architecture."

"Lacks customization in some areas."

"Tableau is an end-to-end analytics platform, and it is doing a pretty good job in terms of connecting to the data and analyzing it. It can, however, do better in terms of data management and the ETL features, which are not on the advanced analytics or machine learning side. Tableau Prep is where users would want to see more advancements. They can improve Tableau Prep, which is an analytic platform tool for data cleansing. People who work with data spend most of their time curating the data. Cleaning up the data and getting it ready for analysis is what takes the most time. If Tableau can invest more time in improving the Tableau Prep platform, it would be great. Previously, Tableau didn't have the functionality for writing to a database. So, you couldn't really alter the database tables and write to your database, but they fixed that in one of the very recent releases. However, it isn't really advanced and should be improved."

"The visualizations should be user-friendly and allow for more custom visualizations."

"Tableau is difficult to scale because of the cost, which makes it difficult to scale."

More Tableau cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Find a partner who will take responsibility for the implementation, and be available for support."

"The solution is quite expensive, if it is made cheaper then we can have more clients. I rate it four out of ten."

"The tool's price is a bit high compared to other solutions."

"In terms of the pricing, it was reasonable. BOARD is not the lowest in the market, but it was reasonable for us."

"It is not the cheapest product on earth, but you get so much. It provides good value for money."

"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."

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

"The price could be higher for the quality of software, so they revised the pricing in this version, and I agree with the price for top version. The top version costs about $70 per month, and the price is cheap for the quality."

"It is a bit difficult for some people when they hear $70.00 per month, as some solutions are available for less than $10.00 or for free."

"We pay for the enterprise license for Tableau. The licensing could be cheaper and more flexible."

"For the use and the capability of the software, it's $70 per month, and that is quite inexpensive."

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

"The value for money is definitely there."

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

13%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Insurance Company

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

Is Board better than Anaplan as a Business Intelligence (BI) solution?

We've had several FP&A departments include Anaplan in their analytics discussions, and while BI information IS generated, the focus is generally on compiling input from various sources and simu...

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What do you like most about Board?

All the reports are prepared automatically.

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What needs improvement with Board?

Some of my company's customers are interested to see the predictive analytics part of the tool. Some customers would like to leverage or prioritize predictive analytics as the main feature, but som...

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 ...

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Comparisons

Anaplan vs Board

Compared 30% of the time

Pigment vs Board

Compared 13% of the time

SAP Analytics Cloud vs Board

Compared 10% of the time

Oracle Hyperion vs Board

Compared 9% of the time

Microsoft Power BI vs Board

Compared 9% of the time

More Board 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

Board

March 2025

Download Board product report

Buyer's Guide

Tableau

March 2025

Download Tableau product report

Also Known As

No data available

Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online

Overview

BOARD International - headquartered in Switzerland - is a leading global provider of software for improving business results through better decision making. By unifying Business Intelligence and Corporate Performance Management into a single product, BOARD enables companies to achieve a shared vision of their performance across the entire organization, and thus a single version of the truth.

BOARD provides seamless solutions for • Reporting & Analysis • Budgeting, Planning & Forecasting • Profitability Modelling & Optimization • Simulation & What-if-Analysis • Scorecarding & Strategy Management • Financial Consolidation. Based on visual modelling, BOARD has enabled global companies to deploy BI and CPM applications without a single line of code in a fraction of the time and cost associated with traditional solutions.

Board International

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

Coca-Cola, Puma, Desigual, Ricoh, KPMG, H&M, Groupe SEB

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

Board vs. Tableau

February 2025

Free Report: Board vs. Tableau

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