Microsoft Power BI vs SAS Visual Analytics vs Tableau comparison

The compared Microsoft and SAS solutions aren't in the same category. Microsoft is ranked #1 in BIT , with an average rating of 7.9, and holds a 22.6% mindshare in the category. SAS is ranked #8 in DV , with an average rating of 8.5, and holds a 5.0% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of SAS users who would recommend it.

Microsoft Power BI

Read 315 Microsoft Power BI reviews

25,672 Views
20,611 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

SAS Visual Analytics

Read 39 SAS Visual Analytics reviews

1,828 Views
1,600 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Tableau

Read 295 Tableau reviews

20,237 Views
17,182 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Microsoft Power BI

SAS Visual Analytics

Tableau

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Microsoft Power BI, SAS Visual Analytics, and Tableau based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools.

To learn more, read our detailed BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Report (Updated: December 2024).

Buyer's Guide

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

December 2024

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Mindshare comparison

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

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Featured Reviews

Amol Rane

Solutions Architect M365 at Sogeti UK

Supports AI initiatives in terms of predictive analytics

The only issue is with permissions. Sometimes, despite granting granular permissions, dashboards are visible to people who shouldn't have access. It's difficult to understand why the permissions slip out. Sometimes dashboards are visible to stakeholders even though they should not have permission. It's a bit difficult to understand why the permissions slip out. The dashboards lack a user-friendly appearance, and the permissions should be easier to understand. At this point, we have to go through a lot of details. It takes a lot of time to understand the permissions, so if there were better options available within the Power BI setup, it would be quite beneficial, especially for admins. So, there should be a more user-friendly dashboard appearance and easier-to-understand permissions.

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Robert Heck

Co Owner at Hecht und Heck GmbH

A great solution for big organizations, complex business requirements, and highly sophisticated and specialized statistics

There are a few little things that are predefined and can be done out of the box immediately. There is no business intelligence application that is predefined, which is something some customers or prospects would love to have. Small and mid-sized companies would struggle with it because they prefer something standard that has been predefined by somebody else. For instance the system does not come with a pre-defined accounting, budgeting or planning model for a particular industry. Some competitors come with such a model (e.g. for retail companies) which makes the implementation of course easier if the customer can comproise with this predefined model. SAS does not provide such models but does not demand customers to comply with a foreign business model.

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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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution is stable with reasonable performance."

"The most valuable features are the flexibility, how many ways you can interrogate the data, and the the graphical visualization."

"The solution's initial setup isn't too complicated."

"When we are introducing Microsoft BI to our clients, if they're familiar with Excel, the transition phase will be much easier for them. They can easily switch from Microsoft Excel to Microsoft BI. The core foundation or the base technology is the same in both tools. There are a few limitations in Microsoft Excel, and this is where Microsoft BI comes in."

"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 product is intuitive and user-friendly."

"I like the fact that Power BI lets me use Excel data. At least 90% of my state data is in Excel spreadsheets. Having the ability to just attach a spreadsheet as a data source is very, very important. It's also good for training and teaching. Sometimes you don't always have access to a live production database, so having a spreadsheet with sample data is always nice."

"I like Microsoft BI's drill-down feature and its overall ease of use."

More Microsoft Power BI pros

"It's quite easy to learn and to progress with SAS from an end-user perspective."

"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."

"Data handling is one of the best features of SAS Visual Analytics."

"The flexibility of the configuration is valuable to me."

"It is a very stable solution."

"I believe that the possibilities for exploring data and formulating visual results are quite good because it allows the business analyst to have different perspectives on the data."

"The alert generation feature also helps in sending out ad hoc messages to the business users if business thresholds have been crossed."

More SAS Visual Analytics pros

"There are already connectors to almost every single major database and service that you can possibly think of."

"From the data science point of view, we use it for model building purposes. For example, if we are using it for a bank and we want to understand how much loan the bank can provide, we can use visualization to show the educational qualification, salary, gender, and city of a customer, and by using this information, we can arrive at the loan amount that this person is eligible for. I can also use it to view all prospective customers, so essentially, this is going to help me in model building as well as in understanding and segmenting customers and doing forecasting and predictive analytics. We use model widgets, and we can create thousands of visualizations, such as motion charts and bubble charts. We can also create animated versions of the graphs and view the data from multiple dimensions. These are the features that we typically use and like."

"One of the most valuable features of Tableau is that it's a visual analytics solution, not just a dashboarding solution. Compared to Power BI, which is a dashboarding solution, there are no limitations with Tableau. For example, when you add a chart or a map to Power BI, it has a 3,000-point limitation. When you try to track your whole vehicle on the map, you only see the first 3,000 rows on the map, and Power BI doesn't tell you which part of the data is shown on the map. But Tableau doesn't have any limitations, which means that you can see five million data points on a map. It starts the project by creating the visuals that directly converts to SQLs. In that way, all the components have no limitations. When we compared Tableau to Power BI, we also found Tableau to be more fancy. Fancy means you can create more visual graphics and more visual dashboards. With Power BI, this isn't so—it's just some tables and some simple charts together. Tableau is more for business users who want to analyze data. Tableau can directly connect the analytics systems, like R or Titan, and get the results in screen, so it's a good solution for analytics scientists. It has some predefined capabilities to understand the data."

"The solution helps users create dashboards and analyze data without relying on IT or product teams."

"Tableau Prep tool for data preparation is a most valuable tool."

"The most important feature in Tableau is visual analytics."

"It provides business users with a tool, so they are not dependent on IT."

"Our customers love the visual capabilities on top of it and the ability to explain and get the required data. There is no other product like Tableau in the business intelligence and analytics space."

More Tableau pros

Cons

"Its price could be better. Its licensing cost is very high."

"The solution could improve by simplifying the user interface and adding integration or compatibility with APA."

"There is no column-level security in Microsoft BI, and this is a feature that most of our customers are looking for. That is something that should be implemented."

"Actionable insights could be better."

"The solution is somewhat costly in comparison with MSBI tools."

"I have been doing trial and error to figuring out how to do the data analyzing and modeling. There could be some improvement to simplify it."

"It needs an AI which can choose the appropriate connection strings and provide options for connections."

"People without private emails cannot publish and, frankly, this doesn't allow for easy training."

More Microsoft Power BI cons

"There are certain shortcomings in the tool's support services, making it an area where improvements are required."

"I haven't come across any missing features."

"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."

"Colours used on report objects"

"The charts and tables could use better sorting, primarily using other variables than the ones on the figure. If they could implement views like in the older version (previous to Viya), it would be very nice."

"The product is expensive and needs the integration of more languages."

"The installation process can be a bit complex."

"The solution should improve its graphics."

More SAS Visual Analytics cons

"In the next release, I would like to be able to have the option to see more raw data that I'm converting on the dashboard."

"The interface can be improved, in part because there is no indication that something is running or that it's processing."

"The solution could use more features in data analytics."

"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."

"Whenever it comes to specialized visualization, Tableau is an absolute failure."

"Licensing and pricing options could be made better so that more users would be able to use it."

"The data processing in Tableau is pathetic compared to Qlik."

"The forecasting feature in Tableau in my view is too limited because it must have dates but I should be able to predict the outcome of an event without having a date as part of the input."

More Tableau cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of this product is very low, at approximately $8 or $9 per month for a developer."

"Microsoft BI requires licenses."

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

"We have premium licenses, but you can use it for free. You can share the content with anyone else, so you can use it for free."

"The cost of the solution is more flexible for us because the desktop is free and we pay as we use it in the cloud."

"This product offers good value for the money."

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

"They are charging us by users in storage, and there is a license fee. My financial people handle all that. The client has already worked out a contract with Microsoft, and basically, we're getting government prices."

More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice

"$10,000 per annum for an enterprise license."

"I work with the tool's free version...The tool's corporate version is very expensive and requires a monthly hire."

"It's approximately $114,000 US dollars per year."

"Licensing is simple."

"The product is quite expensive."

"It was licensed for corporate use, and its licensing was on a yearly basis."

"SAS Visual Analytics is expensive, as is the rest of the platform."

"The cost of the solution can be expensive. There is an additional cost for users."

More SAS Visual Analytics pricing and cost advice

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

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

"Tableau is not as cost-effective as Microsoft BI."

"It is reasonable based on what it offers."

"One of the biggest drawbacks of Tableau is the price, it is expensive. The price should be reduced."

"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."

"I believe it has a lifelong license, and once you purchase it, you don't have to renew it, but I'm not sure."

"Basically, we prefer a permanent license. A one-time charge is much better."

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…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

42%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

20%

Government

13%

Computer Software Company

10%

University

Educational Organization

42%

Financial Services Firm

11%

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 wou...

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 info...

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 ...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What needs improvement with SAS Visual Analytics?

Some capabilities are missing compared to Power BI, especially when working with spreadsheet types. Furthermore, Exce...

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 ...

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 be...

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....

See all answers

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

IBM Cognos vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 3% of the time

More Microsoft Power BI Competitors

Databricks vs SAS Visual Analytics

Compared 12% of the time

Dataiku vs SAS Visual Analytics

Compared 5% of the time

Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio vs SAS Visual Analytics

Compared 4% of the time

SAS Enterprise Miner vs SAS Visual Analytics

Compared 4% of the time

Amazon SageMaker vs SAS Visual Analytics

Compared 3% of the time

More SAS Visual Analytics Competitors

Domo vs Tableau

Compared 13% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs Tableau

Compared 8% of the time

Databricks vs Tableau

Compared 5% of the time

SAP Analytics Cloud vs Tableau

Compared 4% of the time

MicroStrategy vs Tableau

Compared 3% of the time

More Tableau Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI

December 2024

Download Microsoft Power BI product report

Buyer's Guide

SAS Visual Analytics

December 2024

Download SAS Visual Analytics 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

SAS BI

Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online

Learn More

Microsoft

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SAS

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.

SAS Visual Analytics is a data visualization tool that is used for reporting, data exploration, and analytics. The solution enables users - even those without advanced analytical skills - to understand and examine patterns, trends, and relationships in data. SAS Visual Analytics makes it easy to create and share reports and dashboards that monitor business performance. By using the solution, users can handle, understand, and analyze their data in both past and present fields, as well as influence vital factors for future changes. SAS Visual Analytics is most suitable for larger companies with complex needs.

SAS Visual Analytics Features

SAS Visual Analytics has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Data
Interactive data discovery
Augmented analytics
Chat-enabled analytics
Sharing and collaboration
Visual analytics apps
Embedded insights
Location analytics
Security and administration
In-memory engine

SAS Visual Analytics Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing SAS Visual Analytics. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Machine learning and natural language: SAS Visual Analytics uses machine learning and natural language explanations to find, visualize, and narrate stories and insights that are easy to understand and explain. This enables you to find out why something happened, examine all options, and uncover opportunities hidden deep in your data.

Easy and efficient reporting: With SAS Visual Analytics, you can create interactive reports and dashboards so you can quickly summarize key performance metrics and share them via the web and mobile devices.

Easy to use: SAS Visual Analytics was designed to be easy to use. Its easy-to-use predictive analytics enables even business analysts to assess possible outcomes, which also helps organizations make smarter, data-driven decisions.

Self-service data: Self-service data preparation gives users the ability to import their own data, join tables, create calculated columns, apply data quality functions, and more. In turn, the solution empowers users to access, combine, clean, and prepare their own data in an agile way, which helps facilitate faster, broader adoption of analytics for your entire organization.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the SAS Visual Analytics solution.

A Senior Manager at a consultancy says, “The solution is very stable. The scalability is good. The usability is quite good. It's quite easy to learn and to progress with SAS from an end-user perspective.

PeerSpot user Robert H., Co-owner at Hecht und Heck GmbH, comments, “What I really love about the software is that I have never struggled in implementing it for complex business requirements. It is good for highly sophisticated and specialized statistics in the areas that some people tend to call artificial intelligence. It is used for everything that involves visual presentation and analysis of highly sophisticated statistics for forecasting and other purposes.

Andrea D., Chief Technical Officer at Value Partners, explains, “The best feature is that SAS is not a single BI tool. Rather, it is part of an ecosystem of tools, such as tools that help a user to develop artificial intelligence, algorithms, and so on. SAS is an ecosystem. It's an ecosystem of products. We've found the product to be stable and reliable. The scalability is good.”

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

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.

Buyer's Guide

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

December 2024

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