In this paper, power BI Tableau and each dimension compared to help you find the right products faster.
Comparison of two industry leaders
company background
power BI is mainly based on advanced Excel functions, including Power Query, Power Pivot and Power View. Microsoft's interest is to provide a powerful and customizable suite of tools for the user data to other business applications (especially Excel for advanced users). Tableau's mission is "to help people see and understand data," and apparently it's main goal is visualization.
Visual effects
Data visualization for business intelligence company is essential, in particular, tells the story of the chart makes it easier to coordinate those executives and decision-makers are not familiar with in terms of scientific data and make critical decisions as a team. Tableau and Power BI provides powerful visualization, but how they achieve it is different. In terms of a template, Power BI offers 29 kinds of standard visual effects, and Tableau offers 24 kinds in the Show Me function. But this is not about the comparative figures, the two-element standard visual effects software can be combined and modified, resulting in thousands of combinations of graphics. Tableau visualization more standardized, can very quickly generate worksheets and aesthetic dashboard. Power BI visual effect is more customizable, skilled users can do more work to optimize data and visualization to better meet the specific needs of the business.
Data Integration and Management
Power BI Tableau and multiple data sources are integrated, but when introduced into an external data source, Tableau provide more external data interface.
In contrast, Power BI Query Editor window after you import data from a data source to be adjusted, and the Excel interface very similar to the Ribbon built many useful tools. Power BI Power Query M also has a function that can help data modeling and adjustment in the case of the query editor can not complete the work, these advanced features make Power BI more by technology savvy users of all ages.
Cost
Power BI Desktop is a free standard version that allows ordinary users to create a basic dashboard and view the data. But you want to customize and share custom dashboards, you need monthly rate of $ 9.99 Pro version subscription. Tableau introduced different pricing options for different types of users, ranging from $ 12 a month to $ 70.
Both platforms have a free trial, Tableau free for 14 days, Power BI Pro free trial for two months.
how to choose
Power BI and Tableau is a great product, and functionally similar to their own strengths, the choice depends on the specific business needs. If you need to customize the data to adjust the data and modeling can choose to use Power BI, if more data is to fine visual presentation can be selected Tableau.