Power BI vs. Tableau

Ohio State vs. Michigan. Yankees vs. Red Sox. Tom vs. Jerry. Among these famous rivalries is one so fierce that even a data scientist will admit their bias (and data scientists hate bias!). We’re not talking about R vs. Python or Alteryx vs. Knime; no, this article is about the big one: Tableau vs. Power BI. And while we won’t take a side (or at least won’t admit our bias), we will try to highlight some of the more significant differences we’ve noticed between the two interactive visualization platforms. At the end of the day, your analytics team’s familiarity and preferences with each platform, your organization’s Microsoft licensing, and your dashboarding needs will likely be the deciding factors used to determine the platform that is best for you. Let’s take a look at the nuanced differences in cost and usability.

Cost

When it comes to cost, Power BI is likely to at least be slightly less expensive than Tableau and, if your organization already purchases Microsoft 365 E5 licenses for its employees, the cost of Power BI (Pro license) is already paid through that! In other words, if your organization has purchased a Microsoft 365 E5 license for each employee and decided to use Tableau for interactive dashboarding, it would essentially be paying for two dashboarding tools; and paying for and using two different dashboarding tools is not only cost inefficient, but also likely to lead to user confusion on where to go for different types of data; as a result, we recommend that an organization choose a single interactive visualization platform.

What about organizations who don’t purchase Microsoft 365 E5 licenses for employees? While organizations could perhaps negotiate licensing costs in bulk with Tableau or Microsoft, the standard prices for Power BI tend to be less. According to the Tableau price sheet at the time of this article, a Tableau Viewer license was marketed at $15 per month and a Tableau Creator license was marketed at a whopping $70 per month. Compare that to a Power BI Pro license that, at the time of this article was marketed at $10 per month according to the Power BI price sheet. Remember, this $10 per month is essentially waived/included if the user has a Microsoft 365 E5 license.

What about a Power BI creator license? It doesn’t exist! With Power BI, the creator/developer software, called Power BI Desktop, can actually be downloaded for free on Power BI’s download page. A developer would just need the $10 per month Power BI Pro license (or an E5 license) in order to publish their dashboard to Power BI Online and viewers would also need to have a $10 per month Power BI Pro license (or an E5 license) in order to view the dashboard online.

It is interesting to note that technically analytics teams could use the interactive dashboarding aspects of Power BI  at absolutely no cost. Again, Power BI Desktop, which is used to create .pbix interactive dashboard files, is free to download; so an analyst could use this tool to perform an analysis or data exploration at no cost. An analyst could even create an interactive dashboard, e-mail the .pbix file to stakeholders, and perhaps include a link in the e-mail where recipients would need to download Power BI Desktop themselves (just one time) in order to open the attachment, again all at no monetary cost.

So why pay the $10 per user per month for a Power BI Pro license? The e-mail approach above would require the analyst to manually click refresh in the dashboard, save it, and e-mail it on the cadence their stakeholders want to receive the latest data. Compare this to using a Power BI Pro license to publish the dashboard online, automate the dashboard refresh online, and simply send stakeholders a link one time that they can visit anytime to see the latest data. There’s no need for your stakeholders to download anything. They can see all the dashboards they have access to in one place. Publishing online also allows for the dashboard creator to set up row level security, which only gives viewers visibility to the data they need to see. There are plenty of other benefits of the Power BI Pro license as well, but that’s a good starting list!

When it comes to cost, Power BI is likely to at least be slightly less expensive than Tableau and, if your organization is a heavy Microsoft user and already purchases Microsoft 365 E5 licenses for its employees, the cost of Power BI (Pro license) is already paid through that!

It is also worth noting that Microsoft offers a Power BI Premium / Per Capacity that, at the time of this article, was marketed starting at $4,995 per capacity per month. It can essentially be used to give online access to as many viewers as you’d like without the need to buy the $10 per user per month Power BI Pro license; but, if the dashboards are used frequently enough and use a lot of capacity/memory, an organization may need to buy more “capacities” to avoid user access being impacted. This could be a good option for an organization to look into if there are a lot of non-E5 licensed viewers (> 500, internal and external) who might need to view some dashboards from time to time, but wouldn’t typically be viewing on a daily basis.

Usability

Launched in 2003, Tableau has been continually refined for 20 years, which is very unique in the interactive dashboarding space. As a result, even as competing interactive dashboarding platforms were launched, they’ve been the clear market leader for many years; but that appears to be changing. Launched in 2015, Power BI usage has accelerated at a rapid pace since then as they’ve often launched new updates to the software’s functionality on a monthly basis. In fact, according to this comparison of Power BI and Tableau Google searches over time, Power BI appears to have surpassed Tableau in Google searches (in the United States) since around May 2023 and they clearly have the momentum. Can’t you just see the folks at Microsoft throwing a big party once those lines crossed?

In our opinion, after 8 years of numerous monthly updates to the software, Power BI is now able to do much of what Tableau has been able to do for years and, in some cases, more. To be sure, Tableau makes some data operations easier than Power BI, while Power BI makes others more user friendly than Tableau; in fact, the manner of creating a dashboard or visual in one platform v. the other can be quite different. There are far too many differences in the way the two platforms work to cover them all here; but we’ll highlight some that we deem significant.

In our opinion, Power BI makes building dashboards more efficient by allowing users to drag and drop “visuals” (like tables, charts, and slicers) directly on the dashboard canvas. In Tableau, a separate worksheet is typically used for each table and chart and only then are these worksheets dragged onto a dashboard canvas; compared to Power BI, this just seems like an extra unnecessary step to creating a dashboard.

On the other hand, Tableau makes the use of parameters very flexible and user friendly. Parameters can be used to allow viewers to breakdown charts and tables by different columns with different measures with the click of a filter. Power BI only recently added parameter functionality and, in our opinion, it tends to be more complex to implement and less flexible at this stage.

When comparing the level of effort required to create more unique visuals, beyond simple tables and charts, we feel Power BI makes it much easier with their large menu of easy-to-use visualization types (and many more available to download). To create certain types of more complex visualizations (like waterfall charts for instance) in Tableau, users tend to need to cobble together visualizations meant for something else to create something somewhat resembling the desired product, but that is still lacking functionality.

Again, we could go on for hours about the differences across the platforms, but this highlights a few that stood out to us. Data modeling, row level security, formatting, and even things like sorting are done quite differently across the platforms. Oftentimes, one’s opinion of the usability will be driven by which one they have the most experience with.

Closing Remarks

To summarize, Power BI, for many organizations, will have a moderate to significant cost advantage compared to Tableau. Usability differences are hard to quantify and often come down to personal preferences and familiarity, but it is worth noting that the platforms have similar functionality, but work in very different ways; so one’s familiarity with a certain tool will likely play a big factor in which one feels more “usable”. The combination of a generally lower cost and accelerated catch up in functionality seem to have helped Power BI catch up to Tableau recently, even with Tableau’s 12-year head start!

At Value Driven Analytics, we can build actionable, automated, and interactive dashboards for your organization regardless of whether you use Power BI or Tableau. If you’re sending out manual, static Excel reports today and would like to move to automated, interactive dashboarding instead, we can provide advice on which platform might be best for your organization. Finally, if your analytics team could benefit from analytics training on either Power BI or Tableau, we can create an engaging program customized to your objectives.

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