Microsoft Power BI is a visualization and data discovery tool from Microsoft. It allows users to convert data into visuals and graphics, visually explore and analyze data, collaborate on interactive dashboards and reports, and scale across their organization with built-in governance and security.
$10
per month per user
Tableau Server
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Tableau Server allows Tableau Desktop users to publish dashboards to a central server to be shared across their organizations. The product is designed to facilitate collaboration across the organization. It can be deployed on a server in the data center, or it can be deployed on a public cloud.
$12
Per User Per Month
Pricing
Microsoft Power BI
Tableau Server
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Viewer
$12.00
Per User Per Month
Explorer
$35.00
Per User Per Month
Creator
$70.00
Per User Per Month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Microsoft Power BI
Tableau Server
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Microsoft Power BI
Tableau Server
Considered Both Products
Microsoft Power BI
Verified User
Administrator
Chose Microsoft Power BI
Microsoft Power BI is part of the MS product family, and since we are a Microsoft shop (Office365, Azure, SQL DB) it fits into our environment with centralized management/administration. This alone justified additional costs (licensing). Tableau and SAP Business Objects are …
We liked Power BI over the other options we looked at (primarily Tableau) because of its super easy integration with other Microsoft products like Dynamics 365, MS Server, as well as desktop applications that we use company-wide that are base don Windows. The price was also a …
Power BI does not have the feel of a fully independent and robust BI Solution. It tackles smaller functional or department-level analytic needs and can operate in a small or solo roll-out environment. But scaling up to enterprise would be better suited for Qlik or Tableau. Same …
Consultant BI senior/Administrateur - spécialité SAS
Chose Microsoft Power BI
Integration of data sources feels more robust and strict. Definitely a more classic or formal approach to data integration. In terms of visuals, Power BI is not completely up to par with Tableau but is nonetheless a great tool especially for a new player in that field of …
Power BI, Tableau, and QlikView are the market leaders when analyzed on Gartner`s magic quadrant for business intelligence tool. One of the critical drawbacks of all these visionary tools is the absence or expensive back end that are needed to support the infrastructure. …
Power BI is a lot easier to use. The designs are also much nicer. Costs to implement Power BI (minus the existing data infrastructure) is much lower than other tools commercially available. However, the tool is still relatively new and still lacks many common features that …
Tableau Server can handle a large datasets without any lagging the data or slow updating the data, easily can use all the functions and formulas by using data up-to thousands of entry and easily can present in table, charts and dashboards formats and main thing to store and …
Seemed to be the industry standard with a lot of support. The problem is their own support suck so much that if you use them you can only pray nothing will ever go wrong.
Today, if my shop is largely Microsoft-centric, I would be hard pressed to choose a product other than Power BI. Tableau was the visualization leader for years, but Microsoft has caught up with them in many areas, and surpassed them in some. Its ability to source, transform, …
We selected Tableau Server over other options because of the published feature set and capabilities. It appeared to be far more advanced than its competition. However, it failed to meet expectations. Moving forward we are going to give a more serious look at Google Data Studio …
Tableau is a stable and time tested product which can handle hundreds and thousands of users and a huge amount of content, plus tableau has also introduced a web authoring tool which you can [use to] edit dashboards using your browser.
Because our big data project team wants to show highly customized visualization for their complex data and analyzed results, only Tableau Desktop can support this target. After we developed many, many dashboards and other views, we wanted to share it with different users. We …
In operations we use the tool for many different topics, from factory quality systems to high level reviews. We have created kind of an internal "App Store" based on Power BI where you have a lot of different dashboards for different solutions (cost, cash, health and safety, sales, factories, distribution centers...) and you as an user just need to get in that "App Store" and enter in whatever tool can be useful for you. It is open to all the operations employees and can use on demand. Also it has raised the imagination of our colleagues, as they are not only working by themselves creating new reports, but also raising fantastic ideas that can be extended for the usage of all the community.
Tableau Server is well suited for a data warehouse build and handling big data. Tableau data aggregation, transformation, clustering capability is powerful and easy to implement. The choice of charts and visualisation tools is outstanding. Customisation and dynamic data visualisation capability is superb. The user interface takes some time getting used to.
It's good at doing what it is designed for: accessing visualizations without having to download and open a workbook in Tableau Desktop. The latter would be a very inefficient method for sharing our metrics, so I am glad that we have Tableau Server to serve this function.
Publishing to Tableau Server is quick and easy. Just a few clicks from Tableau Desktop and a few seconds of publishing through an average speed network, and the new visualizations are live!
Seeing details on who has viewed the visualization and when. This is something particularly useful to me for trying to drive adoption of some new pages, so I really appreciate the granularity provided in Tableau Server
The desktop app is great but needs a lot of performance improvements
No MacOS Version for the Desktop app, this is a big limitation for business since executives prefer Macs
Premium Cloud Version of Power BI is awfully expensive
On-Premise Version of the Power BI Reports Server is bundled only with SQL Server Enterprise License and cannot be purchased separately and requires Software Assurance Subscription
On-Premise Power BI Report Server doesn't support ADFS, AzureAD or any Claims-Based authentication platform, a sad disadvantage for enterprises
Tableau Server has had some issue handling some of our larger data sets. Our extract refreshes fail intermittently with no obvious error that we can fix
Tableau Server has been hard to work with before they launched their new Rest API, which is also a little tricky to work with
It simply is used all the time by more and more people. Migrating to something else would involve lots of work and lots of training. The renewal fee being fair, it simply isn't worth migrating to a different tool for now.
At this point, I think we all know who has taken the lead in the business intelligence and analytics market worldwide. With fresh new updates every other day on top of an already robustly built product with all features that one can dream of is a no brainer, I feel. Microsoft will invariably be synonymous with quality and professionalism.
I think the use case we described earlier about a non-technical user that was copying/pasting data into Word during emergencies is our best reason. This person had little technical ability, and the Tableau mobile solution powered by Tableau server completely resolved the issues. She has since become one of the most vocal proponents of Tableau.
Our instance of Tableau Server was hosted on premises (I believe all instances are) so if there were any outages it was normally due to scheduled maintenance on our end. If the Tableau server ever went down, a quick restart solved most issues
While there are definitely cases where a user can do things that will make a particular worksheet or dashboard run slowly, overall the performance is extremely fast. The user experience of exploratory analysis particularly shines, there's nothing out there with the polish of Tableau.
I can't really speak to the support overall, [but] I will say that in the almost three years I have used the system, I have only needed to contact their support team once. I think the team was helpful, but it did take some time for us to resolve the issues/ request that they had. I guess the good news is that the system is pretty stable, and I personally have rarely needed to contact their technical support team.
I think the folks that work in support are generally pretty good at what they do (when you get them on a WebEx). But the process of reporting issues to them and waiting for a response (via email only) is a hassle. I never understood why you can't just call them up and discuss the issues with them. It would take a handful of email exchanges before they would agree to a WebEx session. That was frustrating.
In our case, they hired a private third party consultant to train our dept. It was extremely boring and felt like it dragged on. Everything I learned was self taught so I was not really paying attention. But I do think that you can easily spend a week on the tool and go over every nook and cranny. We only had the consultant in for a day or two.
The Tableau website is full of videos that you can follow at your own pace. As a very small company with a Tableau install, access to these free resources was incredibly useful to allowing me to implement Tableau to its potential in a reasonable and proportionate manner.
Implementation was over the phone with the vendor, and did not go particularly well. Again, think this was our fault as our integration and IT oversight was poor, and we made errors. Would they have happened had a vendor been onsite? Not sure, probably not, but we probably wouldn't have paid for that either
[Microsoft] Power BI is practical and effective, like a hammer for a nail, it is easy to use and produces very quickly the results that in most cases are urgently required by clients (nice reports to share on the web). To start using [Microsoft] Power BI you need a business email address, with that you create an account in Power BI Service and in less than 1 hour you will have installed Power BI Desktop, a report will have been created and it will have been published on the web .
Today, if my shop is largely Microsoft-centric, I would be hard pressed to choose a product other than Power BI. Tableau was the visualization leader for years, but Microsoft has caught up with them in many areas, and surpassed them in some. Its ability to source, transform, and model data is superior to Tableau. Tableau still has the lead in some visualizations, but Power BI's rise is evidenced by its ever-increasing position in the leadership section of the Gartner Magic Quadrant.
Tableau does take dedicated FTE to create and analyze the data. It's too complex (and powerful) a product not to have someone dedicated to developing with it.
There are some significant setup for the server product.
Once sever setup is complete, it's largely "fire and forget" until an update is necessary. The server update process is cumbersome.