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Microsoft Power BI vs SAS Visual Analytics 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:
 

Mindshare comparison

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
Data Visualization
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

James Balbach - PeerSpot reviewer
Robust system consistently elevates data visualization and seamlessly updates with user-driven advancements
Power BI is a general-use visualization system. I can express the performance of our network through high-level key performance indicators. It allows me to show detailed improvements in quality and safety and patient experience. I create improvement dashboards for task forces and work teams. I have built analytic dashboards that guide analytics, enabling research and dataset manipulation.
Renato Vazamin - PeerSpot reviewer
Single environment for multiple phases saves us time, and has good visualizations
We had that solution installed previously in another solution, Selvaya, but I don't think we used it at the time. We are now using SAS Detect Investigation as a complementary solution, in which we have part of the process, use a gene, SAS collects information and identifies some business situations, and the business guys use Visual Analytics to explore the results of the process. We previously used the FICO platform, but we switched because FICO's pricing was not scalable. Bringing more data or workloads to the platform required a significant investment in order to scale. We needed to change because we have a lot of data to process every day. FICO was also a little more complicated than SAS Visual Analytics.
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

"It is useful for bringing visualization to data. It calculates counts, ratios, etc."
"The DAX coding language is good for creating formulae."
"Data integration is very useful in Power BI. It lets me collect data from many sources. For example, I can get data from Oracle databases and SQL Server databases at the same time."
"The solution's initial setup isn't too complicated."
"As it was my first time using Power BI, I can say that it was fairly easy to learn, especially if you already know BI-type tools."
"The product is intuitive and user-friendly."
"What I have found valuable about Microsoft BI is its performance and ease of use. The interface is very simple and it is accessible to everyone. If someone is new to this type of solution it is straightforward to understand."
"It is more user-friendly compared to SSRS."
"The product is stable, reliable, and scalable."
"I use Visual Analytics for enterprise reporting."
"The most solution's notable aspect, in my view, is the ability to integrate various data sources and harness advanced technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence. This helps with quality assurance processes."
"The tool's most valuable features are its ease of use and advanced data visualization capabilities."
"The technical support services are good."
"Data handling is one of the best features of SAS Visual Analytics."
"The speed to display charts and react to users' choices is great."
"It provided the capability to visualize a bunch of data in an organized way."
"The maps and colors and interface are all fantastic."
"The most valuable feature is that we can integrate with our own database, and it will displays the KPIs. This is highly required from the business side."
"Data Interpreter: Which can identify issues or potential errors with your imported data."
"The solution has great features which nobody can beat, you can do a lot of customizations, such as use different dimensions and colorize them. Additionally, you can use the numeric values for the customization, which is an exceptional feature."
"The most valuable part of the solution is the general dashboard features."
"The platform's most important feature is predictive analysis."
"It has a shallow learning curve and so you can go to market very, very, very quickly."
"It's a very good, flexible product, and it's easy to learn."
 

Cons

"The licensing needs improvement. There needs to be a middle option between Pro and Premium versions."
"Microsoft has made a lot of progress with Power BI in the past couple of years, but there is still some room for improvement. For example, Integration is one area they could work on. They are adding more integration with other Microsoft tools, but I would like it if they sped up the process."
"The challenge of this product is in truncating the table data."
"Some kind of expression wizard, where the user can build a complex expression without any knowledge of DAX, can be a good addition to the product."
"The orchestration module for refreshing data flows is something that is missing and we have to do it manually."
"The setup took a lot of tinkering with InfoSec to allow us to do stuff."
"Anything they can do to improve enterprise collaboration is going to help people get set up and utilize the solution."
"The initial installation is difficult."
"Better connectivity with other data origins, better visualization, and the ability to create KPIs directly would all help."
"A bit more flexibility in the temperatization will be helpful."
"The licensing ends up being more expensive than other options."
"SAS Visual Analytics could improve by making it more accessible for users outside the organization."
"I haven't come across any missing features."
"The product is expensive and needs the integration of more languages."
"The visualization should be better in SAS Visual Analytics. It is easy to use but when compared to other solutions it is lacking and the support is not very good."
"The deployment isn't smooth. Deploying Visual Analytics on the cloud takes a lot of work, or you can use some providers that give you SAS as a service. For example, there is a provider called SaasNow. They host SAS Visual Analytics and the license. You can buy the license and deploy it there without the hassle of installation because deploying the software isn't easy."
"The solution’s pricing could be improved."
"Improvements in schema security and row/column security need to be made."
"It's already using 32 gigabytes of memory, but the performance is not so good. It's very heavy."
"Its documentation can be improved so that a user can get a good hands-on experience. Tableau is well documented, and on their website, there are a lot of tutorials that are available for free. I started my learning process through those tutorials, but there are certain loopholes in those tutorials, which only got filled through a couple of good YouTube channels that talk about Tableau. YouTube helped me a lot. So, the documentation could be better, I understand that it is evolving day by day, and with more usage, there would be more such documentation."
"When you create new fields in Tableau and you enter the formulas, there is a new small window that is there in the interface. You can enter the calculated fields, it could be more user-friendly. At this time it is limited and hard to understand at the beginning. The fields should be easier to use, such as in Microsoft Excel. You can have a difficult time understanding what to do in the fields, you end up doing trial and error to figure it out."
"When there are millions of records, scaling up is quite difficult."
"Tableau has so many functions, so sometimes it's hard to find the right solution quickly. I have to search multiple menu bars to find the right command."
"In the cloud sometimes the performance is a little bit slow."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Setup is easy, and the cost is economical. You do sometimes need to pay additional costs for third party products which "plug-in" to Microsoft BI."
"It is a cheap solution for our needs."
"MS BI comes with all the tools and it is, to the best of my knowledge, the most affordable solution."
"I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, with one being cheap and ten being expensive."
"Microsoft BI is not expensive."
"Paid for itself in the first month."
"Remove the cost of a licence to show a dashboard within SharePoint. Why should readers of a dashboard have to pay to view? ​"
"I'm not very familiar with the licensing aspect, as it operates in the cloud as a SaaS (Software as a Service) model. Essentially, you pay based on cloud cost models, which might include hourly rates or similar billing structures introduced by Microsoft. Many organizations utilize it and pay for its services, somewhat like Office 365. It's a cloud-based platform that provides the necessary services, including support, for development, and you pay accordingly for the usage."
"SAS Visual Analytics is expensive, as is the rest of the platform."
"Visual Analytics is expensive for a small company like mine. You also need to deploy it on a server or cloud, so you pay for the license as well as the cost of the cloud or the server that you will deploy on."
"$10,000 per annum for an enterprise license."
"The product is expensive."
"The product is quite expensive."
"I work with the tool's free version...The tool's corporate version is very expensive and requires a monthly hire."
"Licensing is simple."
"It's approximately $114,000 US dollars per year."
"Its price is a concern. It is more expensive than Power BI. My guess would be that it is $1000 or less per year. We might go for Power BI in the future because of its umbrella with Microsoft licensing. It is much cheaper for us to use Power BI, and some folks will go in that direction because they don't want to pay the higher license."
"Tableau has reasonable pricing."
"We are paying an annual licensing fee."
"The value for money is definitely there."
"There is a license for this solution and we pay on an annual basis."
"Tableau has core-based and user-based licensing, and it is tied to scalability. The core-based licensing is about you buying a certain number of cores, and there is no restriction on the number of users who can use Tableau. The restriction is only on the number of cores. In user-based subscription licensing, there is a restriction on the number of users. Big companies and government organizations with a lot of users typically go for core-based licensing. User-based subscription licensing is a more common model. It has user roles such as creator, explorer, and viewer. A creator is someone who does the groundwork or development work. An explorer is someone who is into middle management but is not technically savvy, such as a category head. A viewer is like a typical decision-maker in senior management. For each role, Tableau is priced differently. The viewer role has the minimum price, and the creator role has the highest price. This pricing is available on their website. Everybody can see it."
"The license is very expensive."
"We are on an annual license which costs us $1,400 which is very expensive. Microsft BI is less expensive."
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Comparison Review

it_user79932 - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 4, 2015
Comparison of SAP BO, Tableau, QlikView, Cognos, Microsoft, OBIEE and Pentaho
1. SAP BO/BI Enterprise scalability Security Ease of use Semantic layer 2. Tableau Visualization Data discovery Turnaround time 3. IBM Cognos Enterprise scalability Security In-memory feature 4. MS BI - Flexibility 5. Pentaho - Open source but still enterprise grade 6. QlikView Data…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
43%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
Government
5%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Government
13%
Computer Software Company
10%
University
7%
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

Seeking lightweight open source BI software
There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I wou...
Is Power BI a complete platform or only a visualization tool?
Power BI is an advanced visualization tool oriented to big data with a very complete set of widgets to visualize info...
How does Oracle OBIEE compare with Microsoft BI?
Oracle OBIEE is great in allowing design and creativity per the individual needs of the organization. Dashboards are ...
What do you like most about SAS Visual Analytics?
The most solution's notable aspect, in my view, is the ability to integrate various data sources and harness advanced...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAS Visual Analytics?
It's about an average of five. It's easy to scale, but it comes with cost.
What needs improvement with SAS Visual Analytics?
Some capabilities are missing compared to Power BI, especially when working with spreadsheet types. Furthermore, Exce...
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 ...
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 be...
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....
 

Also Known As

SSRS, SSAS, MSBI, MS Reporting Services, Microsoft BI Tools, Microsoft Big Data, Power BI Pro, MS BI
SAS BI
Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Accenture Adidas Aetna AIG Airbus Alibaba Allstate Amazon American Express Aon AT&T Audi Bank of America BASF Bayer Berkshire Hathaway Boeing Coca-Cola Comcast Cisco Coca-Cola Dell Disney Emirates Equinix FedEx Ford GE Google H&M Home Depot Honda IBM Intel JPMorgan Chase Kellogg's Kroger L'Oréal McDonald's Merck MetLife Microsoft Nike Oracle P&G PepsiCo Procter & Gamble Prudential Financial SAP Siemens Snapchat Spotify Starbucks Target Toyota T-Mobile Unilever Visa Walmart WeWork World Bank Xerox
Staples, Ausgrid, Scotiabank, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, Oklahoma Gas & Electric, Xcel Energy, and Triad Analytics Solutions.
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.
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