Microsoft Dynamics 365 vs. Tableau Desktop

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Microsoft Dynamics 365
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a CRM providing sales, marketing, and service functionality. It is offered as SaaS and on-premise. Dynamics 365 is part of the larger Dynamics suite of business intelligence and ERP products.
$44
per month
Tableau Desktop
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Tableau Desktop is a data visualization product from Tableau. It connects to a variety of data sources for combining disparate data sources without coding. It provides tools for discovering patterns and insights, data calculations, forecasts, and statistical summaries and visual storytelling.
$75
per month
Pricing
Microsoft Dynamics 365Tableau Desktop
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Tableau
$75
per month per user
Tableau Enterprise
$115
per month per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Microsoft Dynamics 365Tableau Desktop
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsAll pricing plans are billed annually.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Microsoft Dynamics 365Tableau Desktop
Considered Both Products
Microsoft Dynamics 365
Chose Microsoft Dynamics 365
Out of all the software and CRMs evaluated, Microsoft Dynamics 365 was the best suited for the company and team's needs.
Chose Microsoft Dynamics 365
Our business switched from a year long Salesforce deployment to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Online in order to bring the program/project's data and database management in-house, eliminating the need for a Salesforce implementation consultant and resulting in significant cost …
Tableau Desktop
Chose Tableau Desktop
I've worked with Tableau and Power BI and would say that Power BI has come a long way in the past 2 years and is an equal matchup. Power BI pulls ahead with its integration with Office 365 and MS Power Apps.
Features
Microsoft Dynamics 365Tableau Desktop
Sales Force Automation
Comparison of Sales Force Automation features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Dynamics 365
7.7
83 Ratings
1% below category average
Tableau Desktop
-
Ratings
Customer data management / contact management7.981 Ratings00 Ratings
Workflow management7.879 Ratings00 Ratings
Territory management7.160 Ratings00 Ratings
Opportunity management7.572 Ratings00 Ratings
Integration with email client (e.g., Outlook or Gmail)8.278 Ratings00 Ratings
Contract management7.961 Ratings00 Ratings
Quote & order management7.757 Ratings00 Ratings
Interaction tracking8.171 Ratings00 Ratings
Channel / partner relationship management7.362 Ratings00 Ratings
Customer Service & Support
Comparison of Customer Service & Support features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Dynamics 365
8.0
68 Ratings
5% above category average
Tableau Desktop
-
Ratings
Case management7.863 Ratings00 Ratings
Call center management7.850 Ratings00 Ratings
Help desk management8.457 Ratings00 Ratings
Marketing Automation
Comparison of Marketing Automation features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Dynamics 365
7.8
78 Ratings
1% above category average
Tableau Desktop
-
Ratings
Lead management7.672 Ratings00 Ratings
Email marketing8.171 Ratings00 Ratings
CRM Project Management
Comparison of CRM Project Management features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Dynamics 365
8.0
76 Ratings
4% above category average
Tableau Desktop
-
Ratings
Task management8.171 Ratings00 Ratings
Billing and invoicing management8.054 Ratings00 Ratings
Reporting8.065 Ratings00 Ratings
CRM Reporting & Analytics
Comparison of CRM Reporting & Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Dynamics 365
7.6
77 Ratings
0% below category average
Tableau Desktop
-
Ratings
Forecasting7.667 Ratings00 Ratings
Pipeline visualization7.773 Ratings00 Ratings
Customizable reports7.476 Ratings00 Ratings
Customization
Comparison of Customization features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Dynamics 365
7.7
80 Ratings
1% above category average
Tableau Desktop
-
Ratings
Custom fields7.678 Ratings00 Ratings
Custom objects7.572 Ratings00 Ratings
Scripting environment7.956 Ratings00 Ratings
API for custom integration7.861 Ratings00 Ratings
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Dynamics 365
8.8
75 Ratings
5% above category average
Tableau Desktop
-
Ratings
Single sign-on capability8.869 Ratings00 Ratings
Role-based user permissions8.770 Ratings00 Ratings
Social CRM
Comparison of Social CRM features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Dynamics 365
7.7
44 Ratings
4% above category average
Tableau Desktop
-
Ratings
Social data7.843 Ratings00 Ratings
Social engagement7.643 Ratings00 Ratings
Integrations with 3rd-party Software
Comparison of Integrations with 3rd-party Software features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Dynamics 365
7.2
65 Ratings
3% below category average
Tableau Desktop
-
Ratings
Marketing automation7.665 Ratings00 Ratings
Compensation management6.834 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform
Comparison of Platform features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Dynamics 365
6.8
56 Ratings
10% below category average
Tableau Desktop
-
Ratings
Mobile access6.856 Ratings00 Ratings
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Dynamics 365
-
Ratings
Tableau Desktop
8.4
175 Ratings
3% above category average
Pixel Perfect reports00 Ratings8.1145 Ratings
Customizable dashboards00 Ratings9.1174 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates00 Ratings8.1151 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Dynamics 365
-
Ratings
Tableau Desktop
8.3
172 Ratings
4% above category average
Drill-down analysis00 Ratings8.5167 Ratings
Formatting capabilities00 Ratings8.4170 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages00 Ratings8.0126 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration00 Ratings8.5165 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Dynamics 365
-
Ratings
Tableau Desktop
8.3
166 Ratings
1% above category average
Publish to Web00 Ratings8.0155 Ratings
Publish to PDF00 Ratings8.0154 Ratings
Report Versioning00 Ratings8.3120 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling00 Ratings8.6128 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers00 Ratings8.778 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Dynamics 365
-
Ratings
Tableau Desktop
8.3
164 Ratings
4% above category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)00 Ratings8.5162 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization00 Ratings8.5156 Ratings
Predictive Analytics00 Ratings8.6131 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining00 Ratings7.57 Ratings
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Dynamics 365
-
Ratings
Tableau Desktop
8.9
149 Ratings
5% above category average
Multi-User Support (named login)00 Ratings9.0145 Ratings
Role-Based Security Model00 Ratings8.9125 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)00 Ratings8.7136 Ratings
Report-Level Access Control00 Ratings9.010 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)00 Ratings9.283 Ratings
Mobile Capabilities
Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Dynamics 365
-
Ratings
Tableau Desktop
7.9
141 Ratings
2% above category average
Responsive Design for Web Access00 Ratings8.7130 Ratings
Mobile Application00 Ratings7.3101 Ratings
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile00 Ratings7.5122 Ratings
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
Comparison of Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Dynamics 365
-
Ratings
Tableau Desktop
7.9
67 Ratings
3% above category average
REST API00 Ratings8.259 Ratings
Javascript API00 Ratings7.853 Ratings
iFrames00 Ratings7.151 Ratings
Java API00 Ratings8.448 Ratings
Themeable User Interface (UI)00 Ratings7.654 Ratings
Customizable Platform (Open Source)00 Ratings8.148 Ratings
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User Ratings
Microsoft Dynamics 365Tableau Desktop
Likelihood to Recommend
7.5
(103 ratings)
8.6
(204 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.0
(20 ratings)
7.5
(41 ratings)
Usability
7.4
(33 ratings)
8.2
(73 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(11 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(10 ratings)
Support Rating
8.0
(11 ratings)
1.0
(57 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
9.4
(4 ratings)
Online Training
7.5
(2 ratings)
8.0
(5 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.2
(4 ratings)
8.0
(34 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(3 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
3.8
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(4 ratings)
Professional Services
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Microsoft Dynamics 365Tableau Desktop
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft
Provides our company access to manage and customize the folds tailored to our needs. We needed to have certain paragraphs on certain paperwork per customer. MD 365 has those options to customize where needed and remove when not. The system is easy to navigate, and training can be done in a matter of days, even without prior knowledge of the system or similar systems.
Read full review
Tableau
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).
Read full review
Pros
Microsoft
  • Best to use for AP - like in our organization, there are plenty of AP bills, so with Dynamics, we can quickly enter the same into the Excel utility, which means CSV-based upload, and then we can easily upload the same to the software. It's a time saver.
  • Best for Bank reconciliation - MS Dynamics makes Bank reconciliation easy. Banks can easily sync with software and easily get reconciled.
  • Generating invoices to customers and directly sending them to their inbox is easy with this software.
Read full review
Tableau
  • 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.
Read full review
Cons
Microsoft
  • Small learning curve, obviously. You won't figure this out in a day, a week, or even a month. But given time, you can learn to be an expert. Or you can always get a consultant or hire in somebody. But learning the tool isn't out of the questions by any means.
  • Licensing can be confusing at times and isn't cheap, but it is cheaper than Salesforce. Plus no additional fees for data calls to better integrate your D365 CE data with other systems.
  • The Classic user interface left a bit to be desired, but now with the much-improved Unified Interface, the web client and the mobile client look the same, much more modern, and have more flexibility and power behind them for customizers as well.
Read full review
Tableau
  • 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
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Microsoft
CRM has allowed us to keep all of our data in one place that is easy for all users within the company to view. I came into the company after they had been using CRM for about 4 years. They have all said that since we have used this it has helped us control work processes better, it has allowed us to be able to track things so much better, and has been something that has helped unite many processes that used to be all over the place. We are currently using CRM 4.0 and are planning on upgrading in the next 18 months to the 2011 version. Support for 4.0 is almost all but dried up. Understandably so. Some of the customization we have done, and a plugins we use, are now contained within the 2011 version so we are looking forward to that upgrade. We use an email marketing company as well, and they primarily support the 2011 version, but their product connects and is integrated within CRM. This is a great benefit as well so that all of our marketing information can be contained in one location.
Read full review
Tableau
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.
Read full review
Usability
Microsoft
The usability is easily adopted for users familiar with other Microsoft products. Dynamics 365 has several interfaces that cross over browsers and tablets. These multiple interfaces will be phased out and updated to a single unified interface eventually to provide the same usability across all devices. The backend configurations is slowly improving with the introduction of PowerApps compared to pre-D365 Online versions
Read full review
Tableau
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.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Tableau
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.
Read full review
Performance
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Tableau
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
Read full review
Support Rating
Microsoft
Our partner, Ledgeview Partners has been FANTASTIC to work with. They are always timely in their response and have taken time to understand our business and our specific needs. We've made a lot of advanced customizations and they have been a great help in making those updates.
Read full review
Tableau
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.
Read full review
In-Person Training
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Tableau
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.
Read full review
Online Training
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Tableau
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
Read full review
Implementation Rating
Microsoft
We used a data warehouse to house our data, and our IT team and implementation vendor worked diligently ahead of time to construct idea implementation plans. Out of millions of records- we had less than a dozen errors, which is remarkable. My major insight is simply having a group of completely devoted individuals working towards your goal who fully understand the desired outcome. Focused resources for implementation season are critical to success.
Read full review
Tableau
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.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Microsoft
Microsoft Dynamics was part of a system overhaul for a local school, and we looked at many products. If we had used it for a company with low turnover, then it might have been more feasible. They needed something a new person could learn quickly, someone who might also be learning marketing terms at the same time - especially if there is nobody to train the individual now expected to know the system. Similar issues occurred with all of these programs (we called it being too big for their britches), and one of the bigger things we liked was that it is more compatible with MS Office products in both technical and visual appeal. If you have a steady employees who use a CRM consistently, low turnover, and those who are very familiar with Office products, Dynamics would be the smartest option for you. Unfortunately, this was just not true for the school environment
Read full review
Tableau
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.
Read full review
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Microsoft
On our purchase, I'd been interrogated about our usage. Our needs are met by Microsoft Dynamics 365, which is simple to use. With so much data and information available, we must ensure that it is presented correctly to managers. Due to a lack of use, we don't have to spend as much money on Salesforce.
Read full review
Tableau
No answers on this topic
Scalability
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Tableau
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.
Read full review
Professional Services
Microsoft
My company's preferred program right now is Microsoft Dynamics 365. We use it to keep track of customers and important sales metrics in a streamlined manner. Anyone familiar with CRMs will find the tool extremely useful. Considering that we have a good turnover, this product will be used for its basic segments. As a result, there are few chances of error with Microsoft dynamics because it is so easy to use. Many options for recording data on these leads are available. It meets our needs and pays off.
Read full review
Tableau
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Microsoft
  • For those without a centralized, all in one solution for major HR, Finance and other departments, Microsoft Dynamics 365 has vastly improved employee time utilization and profit.
  • Migrating clients from on-premise to the cloud has reaped benefits including better security, no unscheduled downtime and frequent updates to functionality.
  • Those transferring from cheaper solutions have lost money in the aim to be better integrated with other Microsoft products and AI they don't really utilize.
Read full review
Tableau
  • 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.
Read full review
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