Power BI For Office 365 (discontinued) vs. Tableau Desktop

If you want to create a visual dashboard or report that utilises various data sources then PowerBI can do this. It is great in that it takes your on-premises data and stores it on Microsoft servers where it can interact with it faster, reducing load on your own servers, while being efficient in what it transfers out. We have found it not well suited if you wanted to publish a simple report to many staff as they may all need a Pro license which can get expensive. Even if embedding the report onto a shared platform like SharePoint, it will not display if the users doesn't have a PowerBI Pro license.

Incentivized

The best scenario is definitely to collect data from several sources and create dedicated dashboards for specific recipients. However, I miss the possibility of explaining these reports in more detail. Sometimes, we order a report, and after half a year, we don't remember the meaning of some data (I know it's our fault as an organization, but the tool could force better practices).

Incentivized

• Ease of use. Most people have experience working with Excel. If you know how to create pivots, you can use Power BI.
• Data extraction and transformation (ETL). ETL is a joy with Power Query. It is intuitive, simple and a magical experience to transform poor data into something useful.
• Visuals. Power BI is beautiful to behold, especially Power View.
• Maps. The interactive maps are great built-in tools.
• Cost You cannot find anything cheaper than Power BI, unless you want to give it to every user in your company.

Incentivized

• The Visualizations graphics are really good and the color options help in designing attractive charts. They help to convey more information and can be made interactive.
• You can add filters with offer you to plug and play with values and understand different outcomes.
• You can drag and drop options while creating charts and dashboards. also it is a very fluid layout.

Incentivized

• Like many Microsoft products, you can get by with a small understanding of the product, but to truly realize the entire potential does take a while to learn.
• Hooking up SQL databases to the cloud version is a more complex than just querying right into the database from the desktop version.

Incentivized

• Formatting the data to work correctly in graphical presentations can be time consuming
• Daily data extracts can run slowly depending on how much data is required and the source of the data
• The desktop version is required for advanced functionality, editing on [the] Tableau server allows only limited features

Incentivized

If I were a small business owner, I would likely use Power BI for Office 365 for the sheer fact that I would get the Office licensing I need, along with powerful capabilities. As a Microsoft Partner, we continue to see Microsoft invest heavily in the Power BI capabilities, and will continue to implement and support BI solutions around this product, as we believe this is in the best interest of our clients.

Because right now its the best option out there (disclosure: I haven't used Qlikview or some of the other direct competitors of Tableau). The big investment is in Tableau Server not desktop. For the cost of the license of Tableau desktop, its a pretty good deal. You can hook it up to pretty much any data source easily. You can easily share the visualizations with your team/colleagues easily. Tableau Desktop is generally easy to use for business users. But the more advanced stuff is better suited for a analyst or someone with a IT/CS background.

We are satisfied with the functionality and capabilities of Power BI. Product is cost effective and full-fill the reporting requirements of the organization. You can perform most of the report level complex analysis with the help of DAX which makes Power BI very powerful analytic tool. Power BI for Office 365 has gone away and Power BI is the next evolution of it. Power BI comes with your Office 365 E5 subscription or you can purchase licensing for it separately.

Incentivized

Tableau Desktop has proven to be a lifesaver in many situations. Once we've completed the initial setup, it's simple to use. It has all of the features we need to quickly and efficiently synthesize our data. Tableau Desktop has advanced capabilities to improve our company's data structure and enable self-service for our employees.

When used as a stand-alone tool, Tableau Desktop has unlimited uptime, which is always nice. When used in conjunction with Tableau Server, this tool has as much uptime as your server admins are willing to give it. All in all, I've never had an issue with Tableau's availability.

Tableau Desktop's performance is solid. You can really dig into a large dataset in the form of a spreadsheet, and it exhibits similarly good performance when accessing a moderately sized Oracle database. I noticed that with Tableau Desktop 9.3, the performance using a spreadsheet started to slow around 75K rows by about 60 columns. This was easily remedied by creating an extract and pushing it to Tableau Server, where performance went to lightning fast

Incentivized

as of now there is strong community for Power BI, you can get solution for most of your problems from there. Also you can send your error to Microsoft as well. After every 15 days they release updates to overcome all the issues of defects.

Incentivized

The Tableau Desktop's support team has been very helpful and tend to response very quickly. After all you have paid very premium price for the product and it goes to the services. This makes using the tool much easier for these who doesn't have such experience to get help quickly.

Incentivized

It is admittedly hard to train a group of people with disparate levels of ability coming in, but the software is so easy to use that this is not a huge problem; anyone who can follow simple instructions can catch up pretty quickly.

I think the training was good overall, but it was maybe stating the obvious things that a tech savvy young engineer would be able to pick up themselves too. However, the example work books were good and Tableau web community has helped me with many problems

Incentivized

Time needs to be spent ahead of implementation to make sure data sources are set up and ready. Consultants need to understand the data sources and the goals before setting foot on-site. Installation is easy, learning to use it takes time. The training resources available are great.

Incentivized

One main competitor of Power BI is Tableau. Tableau has been around longer than Power BI so it can feel a little more refined in areas, however Power BI is catching up quickly. Tableau can be more expensive than Power BI. If you want more features and more refinement, and don't mind extra cost, then Tableau may be a better choice. But if you want something that's integrated with many things in O365, and are satisfied with fewer bells and whistles, Power BI may be the better option.

Incentivized

Tableau Desktop is clearly one of the best in the business. It has incredible capabilities, and many features are extremely useful. The intuitiveness of the dashboards and the graphical nature of the visualizations are widely used features and super helpful. One of the other benefits is that both programmers and non-programmers can equally explore and create their own opportunities, and seamless integration is possible.

Tableau Desktop's scaleability is really limited to the scale of your back-end data systems. If you want to pull down an extract and work quickly in-memory, in my application it scaled to a few tens of millions of rows using the in-memory engine. But it's really only limited by your back-end data store if you have or are willing to invest in an optimized SQL store or purpose-built query engine like Veritca or Netezza or something similar.

• As a Microsoft Partner implementing Business Intelligence solutions, Power BI has removed the barrier for our clients to begin the "BI journey". So often, projects get hung up in that early phase of procuring and installing/configuring expensive hardware and software. Just simply getting started and designing a beginning solution has allowed our clients to see results in 1-2 weeks using their data that might have taken months to achieve otherwise.
• One significant ROI example is process improvement. In many cases, individuals or teams are spending days each month gathering data from multiple sources for reporting to their constituents. We are reducing these times to minutes by automating many of the data collection and integration processes that were previously manual.

• Easy to share and manage viewer access on a different level to help identify fraud.
• Faster report generation, increased revenue, better decision-making, and data storytelling.
• One-click access to business health and the ability to build/maintain more effective and efficient reports.
• It's easy to share and even manage access to viewers on a different level, and reports are done in a more visual and storytelling manner.

Incentivized