Microsoft BI (MSBI) vs. Tableau Desktop vs. UiPath Automation Platform

Microsoft BI has a lot of features and is a very powerful tool, especially if you have folks on your team that know how to utilize all of its capabilities. To truly unlock all that it can do, it does require people to have a deep understanding of its capabilities. That's where the software really shines. If you are looking for a simpler, more basic reporting tool, there are other programs available that do not require such a steep learning curve.

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).

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UiPath Automation Platform is well-suited for automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks such as invoice processing, data entry, and report generation. By using UiPath Automation Platform, employees can focus on more strategic tasks, which leads to increased efficiency. Additionally, UiPath Automation Platform is highly effective at automating rule-based processes, such as financial processes like bank statement reconciliation, account payable, and account receivable processes that follow a set of predetermined rules.

• Comparatively easy to use compared to other data analytics solutions, collaborating with other colleagues on data work is simple.
• Using Visual Studio for database, ETL, reporting, and analytics development save time and money.
• Transfer of data from one application to another via Excel and comparison of data attributes between applications
• Dashboard functionality, as well as Python support, are available, allowing you to add additional charts and graphs.

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• An excellent tool for data visualization, it presents information in an appealing visual format—an exceptional platform for storing and analyzing data in any size organization.
• Through interactive parameters, it enables real-time interaction with the user and is easy to learn and get support from the community.

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• UiPath is very simple to learn.
• Any type of application can be automated (Desktop Application, Web Application and also applications reachable only via remote technologies such as Citrix, Remote Desktop and so on).
• The writing of a process code takes place entirely through the use of objects. In the event that there were no objects capable of solving a particular problem, it is possible to use some languages of the .net platform such as: VB.net, C#.
• It is easy to scale the solution by adding more robots to run a process in case the solution requires more performance in the future.
• It can also be used by functional analysts to design the flow to be automated.
• An academy is available online where basic and advanced courses can be taken. It is also possible to take a completely free basic certification.

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• MSBI designs can work on increasing data processing capabilities enough to handle the huge datasets etc.
• It would be a lot better if it is a little low on cost.
• it needs to create opportunities little more than they do regarding customization of some very unique visualization effects

• Pricing should be more user-friendly and usage-driven
• Making edits to the production reports is fairly tough and has a vast scope of additional capabilities
• Tableau Desktop should be able to differentiate itself from the Tableau server else there is no major meaning of two different products being offered

• As I mentioned, Excel automation is not very effective, there are a number of packages to add, but there is nothing as smooth as a good macro.
• Working with selectors is certainly challenging and UiPath does a good job with that, but there is room for improvement since the interface could be smarter in selecting the right attributes and warn the user if something is not properly setup.

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Microsoft BI is fundamental to our suite of BI applications. That being said, Northcraft Analytics is focused on delighting our customers, so if the underlying factors of our decision change, we would choose to re-write our BI applications on a different stack. Luckily, mathematics are the fundamental IP of our technology... and is portable across all BI platforms for the foreseeable future.

Our use of Tableau Desktop is still fairly low, and will continue over time. The only real concern is around cost of the licenses, and I have mentioned this to Tableau and fully expect the development of more sensible models for our industry. This will remove any impediment to expansion of our use.

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This platform has so much potential and have been garnering a lot of attention by proving benefits in terms of saving operational and manpower costs. I am sure with minute efforts we were able to achieve our ROI and the same is the case with many of our customers whom we have been working around Digital Automation initiatives.

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The Microsoft BI tools have great usability for both developers and end users alike. For developers familiar with Visual Studio, there is little learning curve. For those not, the single Visual Studio IDE means not having to learn separate tools for each component. For end-users, the web interface for SSRS is simple to navigate with intuitive controls. For ad-hoc analysis, Excel can connect directly to SSAS and provide a pivot table like experience which is familiar to many users. For database development, there is beginning to be some confusion, as there are now three tool choices (VS, SSMS, Azure Data Studio) for developers. I would like to see Azure Data Studio become the superset of SSMS and eventually supplant it.

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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.

There are two main reasons with this rating 1. UiPath Automation Platform requires the old school type of Change Weather management, Which actually eats a lot of time to manage and roll out the recent changes. There is not something kind of CI/CD when you are developing the things With UiPath Automation Platform. 2. Very high development and maintenance cost, which actually decrease its usability.

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The product has been reliable.

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.

Its a cloud based platform which is easily available and used

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SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) can drag at times. We created two report servers and placed them under an F5 load balancer. This configuration has worked well. We have seen sluggish performance at times due to the Windows Firewall.

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

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It has proved and provided good performance across platforms and technologies.

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MSBI natively has a site that allows you to vote on user enhancements and bug fixes. This allows the largest nagging issues to float to the top and the development team can prioritize accordingly. As mentioned earlier, the large community base of MSBI developers assist technical resources in handling technical questions.

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Tableau support has been extremely responsive and willing to help with all of our requests. They have assisted with creating advanced analysis and many different types of custom icons, data formatting, formulas, and actions embedded into graphs. Tableau offers a weekly presentation of features and assists with internal company projects.

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UiPath RPA has an exceptional studio interface. It has been a year and so since I am using UiPath RPA. Whether it is some my personal task to scrape information & links from the Journal or find a specific character string from multiple PDF collection using OCR, UiPath RPA has made its roots to our technological ecosystem

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This training was more directed toward what the product was capable of rather than actual programming.

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 have used on-line training from Microsoft and from Pragmatic Works. I would recommend Pragmatic Works as the best way to get up to speed quickly, and then use the Microsoft on-line training to deep dive into specific features that you need to get depth with.

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

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Video material supported by text. The training has evolved a lot in the past 3 years to become more attractive. Specific training tracks exist for the different roles in RPA development, where everyone is expected to learn basic development.

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We are a consulting firm and as such our best resources are always billing on client projects. Our internal implementation has weaknesses, but that's true for any company like ours. My rating is based on the product's ease of implementation.

Again, training is the key and the company provides a lot of example videos that will help users discover use cases that will greatly assist their creation of original visualizations. As with any new software tool, productivity will decline for a period. In the case of Tableau, the decline period is short and the later gains are well worth it.

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The implementation was quick and practical

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We have used the built in ConnectWise Manager reports and custom reports. The reports provide static data. PowerBI shows us live data we can drill down into and easily adjust parameters. It's much more useful than a static PDF report.

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I have used Power BI as well, the pricing is better, and also training costs or certifications are not that high. Since there is python integration in Power BI where I can use data cleaning and visualizing libraries and also some machine learning models. I can import my python scripts and create a visualization on processed data.

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As compared to other products, we require programming knowledge and concepts to work but UiPath is for everyone. It provides us extensive event logging at various stages and effective exception handling for applications and business. It increases our agility and enhances the overall productivity further by using the source control SVC. The solution that we implemented is also very scalable in terms of incorporating new requirements.

The open source tools require lots of IT effort in order to set up and maintain over time. UiPath is like a complete package and customer service is also active in terms of solving issues arising while automating procession on a day to day basis.

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.

It can be widely used across various departments regardless of platform the product,processes, use cases are build on.

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• As a SaaS provider we see being able to provide self-service BI to our client users as a competitive advantage. In fact the MSSQL enabled BI is a contributing factor to many winning RFPs we have done for prospective client organisations.
• However MSSQL BI requires extensive knowledge and skills to design and develop data warehouses & data models as a foundation to support business analysts and users to interrogate data effectively and efficiently. Often times we find having strong in-house MSSQL expertise is a bless.

Incentivized

• Tableau was acquired years ago, and has provided good value with the content created.
• Ongoing maintenance costs for the platform, both to maintain desktop and server licensing has made the continuing value questionable when compared to other offerings in the marketplace.
• Users have largely been satisfied with the content, but not with the overall performance. This is due to a combination of factors including the performance of the Tableau engines as well as development deficiencies.

Incentivized

• We are well on our way to automating our expenses, saving so many hours for project managers and engagement managers.
• Proofs-of-concept excite our clients, though we are yet to make a sale on a project.
• UiPath specifically has incited interest with our apprentices and has led them to join the RPA team.

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