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 21.4% mindshare in the category. SAS is ranked #7 in DV , with an average rating of 8.5, and holds a 4.7% 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 319 Microsoft Power BI reviews

24,917 Views
19,745 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

SAS Visual Analytics

Read 39 SAS Visual Analytics reviews

1,717 Views
1,501 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Tableau

Read 295 Tableau reviews

19,482 Views
16,446 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Microsoft Power BI

SAS Visual Analytics

Tableau

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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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: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

January 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:

Mindshare comparison

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

Data Visualization

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

Featured Reviews

James Balbach

Executive Director, Decision Support at Community Health Network

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.

Read full review

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.

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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

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

"You don't need much support with Microsoft Power BI because it has such a large base of users who can answer your questions on their forums. There are also many video tutorials and webinars available online that offer solutions to whatever problems you may have."

"It works well with SSAS, which we use to generate all different kinds of trending and analytics reports. Sometimes we use Power Query and DAX to build some aggregations on the Power BI side as well."

"The sharing features are vital, especially the ability to share and test different shared dashboards."

"The solution is easy to set up and implement."

"The way data is presented is very valuable. The amount of information that we can get at a glance is also valuable. You can then drill-down and see data from many different angles in the same chart by selecting certain things. Based on the selection, everything changes automatically. If we have four parameters in a particular item, when you select a parameter, the remaining charts on that page automatically change for that particular parameter."

"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."

"Tech support is very helpful."

More Microsoft Power BI pros

"Quick deployment to dashboards and analytics features (using SAS Visual Statistics and Enterprise Guide). Easy to create a simple forecast and discover business insights using segmentation tools."

"I use Visual Analytics for enterprise reporting."

"The technical support services are good."

"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."

"We've found the product to be stable and reliable."

"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."

"It integrates well with SAS, making it simple and quick for developers."

"It's a stable, reliable product."

More SAS Visual Analytics pros

"It is very easy to create dashboards, charts, and graphs."

"Tableau has comprehensive, insightful charts, which allow you to build stunning dashboards and enrich your support decision-making."

"The product offers an intuitive user interface, detailed screens and widgets, and the absence of data limitations"

"Any feature I am looking for usually is part of the next upgrade within a few months. They have a very good dynamic evolution."

"All features are valuable. It is very user-friendly, and it is mostly drag-and-drop. If we have the dataset available, then we can develop any dashboard very quickly."

"It is definitely easy to use. It is intuitive, and more or less, everything can be done from the front end. As such, there is no concept of metadata. You can just take data from a database and start building your own stuff, such as OLAP data warehouse. You don't need extensive metadata modeling like Oracle BI."

"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 solution deployment was straightforward."

More Tableau pros

Cons

"SSMS & SSRS."

"Microsoft BI comes under pressure when there is a lot of data to be crunched. It gets slower and slower, and the functionality becomes a bit of a problem. The performance goes down with data being fed into the system. The infrastructure requirement also increases if you have to increase the performance. This is the area that can be improved in my opinion. Initially, the product is good, but over the years, when data gets accumulated, it becomes a problem unless the old data is kind of archived and is no longer shown on the visualization. It has a feature by using which a user can query for a report through simple questions to a bot. So, if I want to look for the customer share of revenue by geography, I just simply state that in the chatbot. If I wanted it in a pie chart, then you say, "Please show it to me in a pie chart." It comes out well for basic charts. This feature should be improvised more so that people can very quickly get customized reports on the go."

"The real-time data refresh capabilities is one of the things I had issues with"

"Visualization systems are still relatively young."

"Integrating it with the physics build model or the engineering model should be included."

"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."

"You do need to do some hard coding for certain things in Microsoft BI."

"I would like Microsoft to include some inbuilt machine learning so that it becomes point-and-click, rather than us developing models out of API and BI connecting to that and getting the results. That process gets in the way of continuity."

More Microsoft Power BI cons

"There is room for improvement in anti-money laundering prevention and operation monitoring, as well as operation monitoring surveillance."

"There are scalability issues. It depends on the data volume and number of end-users. VA requires a lot of hardware resources to move volumes of data."

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

"SAS Visual Analytics could improve by making it more accessible for users outside the organization."

"The solution should improve its graphics."

"In Brazil, there are few documents, courses, and other resources for studying and implementing the tool."

"The installation process can be a bit complex."

"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."

More SAS Visual Analytics cons

"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 have products like Tableau, Power BI, Cognos, and QlikView in the data visualization segment. Compared to those, Tableau is quite costly."

"If I have to develop any, for example, pie charts, I can develop them just fine. However, if I have to develop a donut chart, that I cannot do it in a simple way. There are tricks that I need to use if I have to design a donut chart. It should be more flexible and provide more visualization options."

"It would be nice if we could export more raw data. Currently, there is a limit as to how much data you can export."

"The pricing is high. I'm using a student license, however, I know that even this license is very expensive. I've tried to have this product in our organization, however, it's quite expensive. We don't have the internal budget."

"Lacks machine learning algorithms that you can implement using R, SPSS Modeler, and Python."

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

"SAP BusinessObjects has some semantic layer designs that give the flexibility to do ad hoc reporting or dashboard designing. If that can be brought into Tableau, it would be great. We have the data in the database, but we should also be able to bring something between the database and the dashboard and do some semantic layer modeling for ad hoc reporting requirements."

More Tableau cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's costs are quite reasonable given the range of features provided."

"You don't need a license for development, but if you want to publish to external users, you need a license. The licensing is very costly, but I think that since the advantages and benefits of Power BI are so high, people are willing to pay. I can't blame them."

"No comment on pricing."

"The solution is less expensive than other PowerBI tools, which is why most people go with it, although it does cost more than MSBI tools."

"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."

"This solution came free, it was offered by Microsoft with our E3 license."

"Microsoft BI requires licenses."

"Costs less than most competing solutions."

More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice

"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."

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

"The product is expensive."

"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."

"Licensing is simple."

"The product is quite expensive."

More SAS Visual Analytics pricing and cost advice

"It is fairly expensive. I have no idea what they paid. We were on an enterprise license, so whatever it is they licensed at the enterprise level is what we paid."

"The cost is high."

"Its price is reasonable. Everything is included in the license."

"The price of Tableau could improve. The license is too expensive."

"There is a license for the use of this solution and it is on a per-user basis. The server is free but the users you have to pay for."

"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."

"Buy 50 at a time. Project your use base every three months, and project your requirements forward."

"The price of Tableau is high, although there are different types of licenses available."

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

43%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

20%

Government

13%

Computer Software Company

10%

University

Educational Organization

43%

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 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

Amazon QuickSight vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 9% of the time

Domo vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 8% of the time

Databricks vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 7% of the time

KNIME vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 6% of the time

IBM SPSS Modeler vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 2% of the time

More Microsoft Power BI Competitors

Databricks vs SAS Visual Analytics

Compared 12% of the time

Dataiku vs SAS Visual Analytics

Compared 6% 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 4% of the time

More SAS Visual Analytics Competitors

Domo vs Tableau

Compared 12% 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

MicroStrategy vs Tableau

Compared 3% 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

SAS Visual Analytics

January 2025

Download SAS Visual Analytics product report

Buyer's Guide

Tableau

January 2025

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

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.

Microsoft

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.”

SAS

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

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

January 2025

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