Microsoft Power BI vs Tableau comparison

Microsoft and Salesforce are both solutions in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category. Microsoft is ranked #1 with an average rating of 7.9, while Salesforce is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.6. Microsoft holds a 22.6% mindshare in BIT, compared to Salesforce’s 19.7% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of Salesforce users who would recommend it.

Microsoft Power BI

Read 318 Microsoft Power BI reviews

25,672 Views
20,611 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Tableau

Read 295 Tableau reviews

20,237 Views
17,182 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Microsoft Power BI

Tableau

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 2025

Microsoft Power BI and Tableau are leading contenders in the Business Intelligence category, each with unique features and areas of improvement. Power BI holds an edge in affordability and Microsoft integration, whereas Tableau excels in data visualization.

Features: Microsoft Power BI is praised for its integration capabilities, affordable pricing models, and use of existing Microsoft tools like Power Query and Power Pivot for data preparation. Tableau stands out with data visualization, offering dynamic, aesthetically pleasing graphics, and an intuitive design for data exploration and dashboard sharing. Both tools boast strong community support and receive constant updates.

Room for Improvement: Power BI users show dissatisfaction with integration limitations concerning non-Microsoft data sources, a need for enhanced real-time processing, and more intuitive interfaces for non-technical users. Tableau users point to high pricing as a concern, alongside desires for improved predictive analytics and more robust ETL functionalities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Power BI offers flexible deployment options, catering well to those within the Microsoft ecosystem, alongside responsive customer service and a robust online community. Tableau also supports varied deployment methods but demands a higher training investment upfront, with users noting complexities in licensing.

Pricing and ROI: Power BI is noted for its low starting cost and accessible paid tiers, providing strong ROI through comprehensive reporting at lower costs compared to competitors. Tableau's premium pricing may restrict smaller businesses but offers high-value visualization capacities, particularly beneficial for large enterprises.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Power BI vs. Tableau Report (Updated: November 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI vs. Tableau

November 2024

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Helped 831,158 peers since 2012

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

Microsoft Power BI

Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

1st

Ranking in Reporting

1st

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

318

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

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 January 2025, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of Microsoft Power BI is 22.6%, up from 22.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tableau is 19.7%, up from 18.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

Q&A Highlights

it_user83559

Database Expert at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

May 15, 2014

Business users moving from Tableau to MS Report builder

Rich- What is it that current leadership perceives as lacking in the current reporting tool set? Why change if the only benefit is features or a products capabilities? Can the products features and capabilities be exploited? By who and when? How does that make money for the company? Increased profit? Cost reduction? Increased resource utilization? Fewer days for order to cash? Reduced collections? Better on time shipping? Faster production? Increased gross margin? Reduced inventory? You get the picture. It's the people that make the difference. Not the tool! What is it that we need to know to grow our business constantly and continuously? Every tool mentioned can do really great "stuff". But what "stuff" does your company need? I wish you the best.

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Featured Reviews

Shoury Priyanshu

Senior Manager, Strategy & Consulting at Viacom18 Media Pvt Ltd

Facilitates seamless data aggregation with some outdated visual elements hindering user appeal

Real-time data integration is an area for improvement. Although I've worked on several solutions involving real-time integration, it's not very user-friendly and often lags, especially with over a million data rows. This makes Power BI difficult to manage as loading times can reach one or two minutes, which is problematic today. There are challenges with scalability, requiring multiple pages in dashboards to manage these issues. Visualization could be improved as it appears outdated. Users, especially newcomers, find it unappealing and not user-friendly.

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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

"It allows individuals to do the analysis themselves."

"It is stable enough. It has a lot of powerful functions. It can also be customized with the DAX language. It is also intuitive enough and incremental. You can start with something simple, and then step-by-step, you can increase the reports and dashboards according to your needs."

"The solution is quite scalable."

"We have found the product to be scalable."

"I also find connecting to different data sources is quite simple. Other solutions we were using before were complicated."

"With Power BI, you're able to store your data within spreadsheets and SharePoints, and then have Power BI pull the data out and report on it. So we actually saved a ton of money not needing to load the data into databases, which is a big prerequisite for many other reporting tools."

"It is easy to work with and very chic."

"The scalability is good. We have 20 people in my organization using this solution and plan to increase usage."

More Microsoft Power BI pros

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

"The action feature which Tableau has is very useful for us. If we click on one visualization, it will pass the value to another visualization. That interactivity within different visualizations is the most valuable feature of Tableau."

"The solution allows for the possibility for end-users to do their own reporting."

"Tableau is highly scalable. Now that they've introduced Hyper, you can create an extract of more than 5 million rows in minutes and then do your analysis."

"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."

"It is a stable solution."

"Tableau's visualization features let you present information insights quickly and practically. So it's something which I prefer with Tableau. In terms of reporting, I have to point out the sheer quality and function of the Tableau server, but the first impression is that it's a great visualization tool."

"This solution has improved insights into quantitative data."

More Tableau pros

Cons

"The initial setup is a little bit technical."

"The handling of the workspaces can be made more granular for user access rights. It can be managed a little bit better in terms of the connection to Active Directory so that we have more granular access rights. I am not sure if this is really possible or if we can solve it differently, but we need a lot of workspaces, and we are not sure how we can deal with it from the access rights perspective."

"Sometimes in Power BI, the logic can be challenging to follow."

"This solution's performance when handling big data could be improved. Right now, if you're handling big data, the application becomes slow and the performance is very low."

"One thing I would like to have is the scripting language, as they already have within Excel. It's already within a Microsoft business product, because Excel is the number one business product out there. So it would be nice to have the scripting capability in order to automate certain processes."

"We have used other solutions and the reporting functionality should be user-friendly and have a drag and drop feature should be available, but Microsoft BI doesn't have these features. When you are creating reports and you can't change as a user. Every time you need one developer or one technical person to make the changes."

"We face multiple issues, and the connection drops off multiple times while integrating Microsoft Power BI with OAC and pulling in the data."

"Most clients have MacBooks. Therefore, they use Tableau as Power BI Desktop is not available for the MacBook right now."

More Microsoft Power BI cons

"In the cloud sometimes the performance is a little bit slow."

"There should be more GIS features, such as location analysis, which is quite limited. There are very few location-based functionalities."

"There should be more widgets that would help less trained individuals create charts with less difficulty."

"Lacks customization in some areas."

"The use of this service in the desktop version is annoying due to the constant updates which lead to reinstalling the application. If they could give support with updates on the same downloaded version, it would be great."

"They need a write-back; that is what is missing. If they get the write back to the database, they will be fully automated, but for the time being, they are not."

"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."

"Firstly, the high cost of Tableau licenses makes it inaccessible for many mid-scale clients. Secondly, the server requires at least 128GB of RAM, which can be impractical for some systems. We need a dedicated system to use Tableau."

More Tableau cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its cost seems to be unreasonable if you have many users, but for a lesser number of users, it is reasonable. It is $10 per month. Clients easily accept this option, so they must think it is reasonable. It is quite cheap as compared to other tools, such as Tableau. One of the best things about this solution is that it has a trial version."

"The price of Microsoft BI is expensive. We found the price of Tableau to be less expensive."

"The cost of licensing depends on the number of people that are going to be using the reports, and we are satisfied with it at $10 per user."

"There are a few options available for purchasing a license. Typically the number of users you have will determine the price of the license. The more users you have the more you will pay."

"I used a two months free trial to see if it had what I needed."

"The license is on a yearly basis."

"I rate the product price an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price."

"My company needs to make monthly payments towards the licensing costs attached to the product."

More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice

"This license is on a yearly basis."

"The cost of the solution should be improved."

"In Korea, the tool's pricing depends on the scale of usage. For instance, it's reasonable for a department with fewer than 50 users to adopt Tableau, like sales. However, the pricing becomes an issue when considering an enterprise solution for a larger user base, say 10,000 people."

"Tableau is an expensive solution compared to Power BI."

"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."

"Pricing could be better. I believe they should offer better pricing for deployment in small to mid-sized companies."

"Tableau has reasonable pricing."

"There is a license for this solution and we pay on an annual basis."

More Tableau pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user79932

Senior Manager - BI Head at NVidia

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…

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Answers from the Community

it_user83559

Database Expert at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

May 15, 2014

Business users moving from Tableau to MS Report builder

2 out of 21 answers

it_user79284

Owner

Feb 4, 2014

What might be “easy” for some is often “difficult” for others. Some users might find their experience with Tableau can be applied to quickly getting up to speed with Report Builder; others might find their mastery of Tableau gets in the way of learning the new software. I’m sure if asked, some colleague’s would say they find Tableau hard to use. Even so, I think what you really need to know is how much training would be needed after converting over to MS BI. I would suggest that to find the answer, you should ask the organization’s best Tableau users to try out a few typical daily tasks in Report Builder and let them evaluate how difficult or easy they are to complete. Their responses can be used to develop a training program for the other users. I would also suggest this link http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd239338.aspx. It provides tutorials for various tasks in Report Builder, which may be able to give you a feel for how simple or complex it is to build a dashboard, chart or report in Report Builder.

Read full answer

it_user79746

Consultant at a energy/utilities company

Feb 4, 2014

I am still early in my Tableau experience. I do know that MS has a thing called PowerPivot which is part of the MS answer to Tableau, interesting that so many other BI providers are having to adapt to the competition provided by Tableau, but that also requires enterprise Sharepoint. Where I work they are just coming out of what we might call BI 1.0 and trying to get to BI 2.0, which is why I am there.

Read full answer

See all 21 answers

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

43%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

42%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

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 would recommend as follows: 1) If you have legacies of SAP, Oracle - look for SAP...

See all answers

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 information, control users accessing information, the configuration of governance po...

See all answers

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 fully customizable and very user-friendly. This solution is very stable. Oracle ...

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...

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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...

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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

Domo vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 9% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 8% of the time

Databricks vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 6% of the time

KNIME vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 6% of the time

Oracle OBIEE vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 4% of the time

More Microsoft Power BI Competitors

Domo vs Tableau

Compared 13% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs Tableau

Compared 8% of the time

Databricks vs Tableau

Compared 6% of the time

SAP Analytics Cloud vs Tableau

Compared 4% of the time

SAS Visual Analytics vs Tableau

Compared 4% of the time

More Tableau Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI

January 2025

Download Microsoft Power BI product report

Buyer's Guide

Tableau

December 2024

Download Tableau product report

Also Known As

SSRS, SSAS, MSBI, MS Reporting Services, Microsoft BI Tools, Microsoft Big Data, Power BI Pro, MS BI

Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online

Learn More

Microsoft

Salesforce

Overview

Microsoft Power BI is a powerful tool for data analysis and visualization. This tool stands out for its ability to merge and analyze data from various sources. Widely adopted across different industries and departments, Power BI is instrumental in creating visually appealing dashboards and generating insightful business intelligence reports. Its intuitive interface, robust visualization capabilities, and seamless integration with other Microsoft applications empower users to easily create interactive reports and gain valuable insights.

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.”

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

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

Microsoft Power BI vs. Tableau

November 2024

Free Report: Microsoft Power BI vs. Tableau

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Power BI vs. Tableau and other solutions. Updated: November 2024.

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