Which one to choose; Power BI or Tableau?
You may have heard this before, but the answer is “it depends”. Not very satisfying, is it? The next questions should be, “if it depends, then how do I decide if Tableau or Power BI is right for me?”. Now you are on the right path!
An effective approach to a comparison like this is to create an objective set of benchmarks to help inform a decision. This will ensure you move beyond subjective criteria and prevent you from being unduly influenced by each product's marketing material.
Putting a Scorecard To Work For You
Here is a scorecard with 10 criteria to assist with your Power Bi vs. Tableau evaluation;
- Target audience: Is this tool built for engineers, technical people, or business users? Will we be happy with using this every day?
- Features — What are they great at? Areas of focus and emphasis? How quickly can I be productive? What is most important as it relates to features? Visualization? Reporting? Dashboards? Does the product roadmap align with my expectations?
- Technology — What are supported databases? Is it cloud only? Is it a desktop app, server software, or both? Which operating systems it supports Windows? Mac? Linux?
- Collaboration — How can people working together to create, update outputs like visualizations, models, calculations?
- Education — What training, learning material is available? Videos, self-paced online classes? Paid courses?
- Community — Is there online communities, forums, enthusiast blogs, passionate evangelist users, local meetups, user groups? Is the community driven by the company or are users are forming an organic community? Both?
- Customers — Proof points? Who is using it? Coca Cola? Apple? Starbucks? Big companies? Mostly small companies? Is it teams or individuals? Both? Would they purchase again? What lessons learned do they have? What are examples of work product they have created?
- Support — How is support provided? Is it paid? Free? Contact online, call, chat?
- Partners — Are there consultants, freelancers or people that can be hired or provide value-added services around the product? If yes, how robust is that partner ecosystem?
- Cost — How is the product priced? Discounts at scale?
Answering these questions will help you moved beyond product marketing and make an informed decision based on your specific organizational needs. For reference, here a couple of sample articles that put both Tableau and Power BI through these criteria at a high level.
- Is Tableau Right For You? 10 Point Scorecard To Make The Right Decision
- Is Microsoft Power BI Right For You? 10 Point Scorecard To Make The Right Decision
As always, experiment! Most vendors, including Tableau and Power BI, offer free trials.
DWant to discuss how to select a BI platform? Need a platform and team of experts to kickstart your data and analytic efforts? We can help! Getting traction adopting new technologies, especially if it means your team is working in different and unfamiliar ways, can be a roadblock for success. This is especially true in a self-service only world. If you want to discuss a proof-of-concept, pilot, project or any other effort, the Openbridge platform and team of data experts are ready to help.
Reach out to us at hello@openbridge.com. Prefer to talk to someone? Set up a call with our team of data experts.
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