SQL Server Integration Services vs. Tableau Desktop

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
SSIS
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft's SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is a data integration solution.N/A
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.
$70
per month
Pricing
SQL Server Integration ServicesTableau Desktop
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Tableau Creator
$70.00
Per User / Per Month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
SSISTableau Desktop
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsAll pricing plans are billed annually.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
SQL Server Integration ServicesTableau Desktop
Considered Both Products
SSIS
Chose SQL Server Integration Services
Alteryx Designer is easier to use for machine learning models. The functionality of drag and drop is the most valuable. It is a very user-friendly tool that can be understood easily. My teams also work with other solutions, such as Integration Services, and these solutions are …
Chose SQL Server Integration Services
I personally prefer SSIS. There are items that each do better than the others, but the ease of use of SSIS, along with its extensibility to 3rd party, ability to write any code required in the tool, and uses the same IDE for the MS BI suite (more of an issue if you're not a …
Chose SQL Server Integration Services
As noted, INformatica has more mature features for ETL, especially with the built in debugger but the SQL Server BI stack allows an integrated solution from ETL, Cube and BI development as well as report development.
Tableau Desktop
Chose Tableau Desktop
In tableau you can achieve things really quickly and it has the power to show you insight data very easily. Tableau is also economical in comparison to what these tools cost. It's a full value tool.
Chose Tableau Desktop
Tableau Desktop is powerful in terms of data sources and dashboarding creation. You can customize and fine-tune your graphics (color, size, text, tooltips and so on). You can make calculations on measures and dimensions. It's also has a cool geocoding function and maps layers.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
SQL Server Integration ServicesTableau Desktop
Data Source Connection
Comparison of Data Source Connection features of Product A and Product B
SQL Server Integration Services
7.5
53 Ratings
9% below category average
Tableau Desktop
-
Ratings
Connect to traditional data sources8.853 Ratings00 Ratings
Connecto to Big Data and NoSQL6.240 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Transformations
Comparison of Data Transformations features of Product A and Product B
SQL Server Integration Services
8.1
53 Ratings
3% below category average
Tableau Desktop
-
Ratings
Simple transformations8.553 Ratings00 Ratings
Complex transformations7.752 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Modeling
Comparison of Data Modeling features of Product A and Product B
SQL Server Integration Services
7.4
51 Ratings
9% below category average
Tableau Desktop
-
Ratings
Data model creation8.627 Ratings00 Ratings
Metadata management7.133 Ratings00 Ratings
Business rules and workflow8.142 Ratings00 Ratings
Collaboration7.338 Ratings00 Ratings
Testing and debugging6.148 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Governance
Comparison of Data Governance features of Product A and Product B
SQL Server Integration Services
6.9
41 Ratings
17% below category average
Tableau Desktop
-
Ratings
Integration with data quality tools7.436 Ratings00 Ratings
Integration with MDM tools6.536 Ratings00 Ratings
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
SQL Server Integration Services
-
Ratings
Tableau Desktop
8.5
166 Ratings
4% above category average
Pixel Perfect reports00 Ratings8.3138 Ratings
Customizable dashboards00 Ratings9.0165 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates00 Ratings8.3144 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
SQL Server Integration Services
-
Ratings
Tableau Desktop
9.0
163 Ratings
10% above category average
Drill-down analysis00 Ratings9.2158 Ratings
Formatting capabilities00 Ratings9.0161 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages00 Ratings8.4121 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration00 Ratings9.3156 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
SQL Server Integration Services
-
Ratings
Tableau Desktop
8.8
157 Ratings
5% above category average
Publish to Web00 Ratings9.3148 Ratings
Publish to PDF00 Ratings8.4148 Ratings
Report Versioning00 Ratings8.7115 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling00 Ratings9.2122 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers00 Ratings8.572 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
SQL Server Integration Services
-
Ratings
Tableau Desktop
8.6
155 Ratings
6% above category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)00 Ratings8.9153 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization00 Ratings8.8148 Ratings
Predictive Analytics00 Ratings8.7125 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining00 Ratings8.02 Ratings
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
SQL Server Integration Services
-
Ratings
Tableau Desktop
8.7
141 Ratings
1% above category average
Multi-User Support (named login)00 Ratings8.8138 Ratings
Role-Based Security Model00 Ratings8.4118 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)00 Ratings8.7128 Ratings
Report-Level Access Control00 Ratings9.02 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)00 Ratings8.976 Ratings
Mobile Capabilities
Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of Product A and Product B
SQL Server Integration Services
-
Ratings
Tableau Desktop
8.4
134 Ratings
5% above category average
Responsive Design for Web Access00 Ratings8.6123 Ratings
Mobile Application00 Ratings8.396 Ratings
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile00 Ratings8.7116 Ratings
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
Comparison of Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding features of Product A and Product B
SQL Server Integration Services
-
Ratings
Tableau Desktop
8.7
63 Ratings
9% above category average
REST API00 Ratings8.655 Ratings
Javascript API00 Ratings8.350 Ratings
iFrames00 Ratings8.948 Ratings
Java API00 Ratings8.945 Ratings
Themeable User Interface (UI)00 Ratings8.552 Ratings
Customizable Platform (Open Source)00 Ratings8.845 Ratings
Best Alternatives
SQL Server Integration ServicesTableau Desktop
Small Businesses
Skyvia
Skyvia
Score 9.6 out of 10
BrightGauge
BrightGauge
Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM InfoSphere Information Server
IBM InfoSphere Information Server
Score 8.1 out of 10
Reveal
Reveal
Score 9.9 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM InfoSphere Information Server
IBM InfoSphere Information Server
Score 8.1 out of 10
Jaspersoft Community Edition
Jaspersoft Community Edition
Score 9.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
SQL Server Integration ServicesTableau Desktop
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(53 ratings)
8.8
(193 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(3 ratings)
8.9
(39 ratings)
Usability
9.3
(8 ratings)
8.6
(63 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(10 ratings)
Performance
8.8
(6 ratings)
6.1
(9 ratings)
Support Rating
8.2
(7 ratings)
6.9
(56 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
9.4
(4 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(4 ratings)
Implementation Rating
10.0
(1 ratings)
8.0
(34 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
8.1
(2 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(3 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
SQL Server Integration ServicesTableau Desktop
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft
Ideal for daily standard ETL use cases whether the data is sourced from / transferred to the native connectors (like SQL Server) or FTP. Best if the company uses MS suite of tools. There are better options in the market for chaining tasks where you want a custom flow of executions depending on the outcome of each process or if you want advanced functionality like API connections, etc.
Read full review
Tableau
Tableau Desktop is one the finest tool available in the market with such a wide range of capabilities in its suite that makes it easy to generate insights. Further, if optimally designed, then its reports are fairly simple to understand, yet capable enough to make changes at the required levels. One can create a variety of visualizations as required by the business or the clients. The data pipelines in the backend are very robust. The tableau desktop also provides options to develop the reports in developer mode, which is one of the finest features to embed and execute even the most complex possible logic. It's easier to operate, simple to navigate, and fluent to understand by the users.
Read full review
Pros
Microsoft
  • Ease of use - can be used with no prior experience in a relatively short amount of time.
  • Flexibility - provides multiple means of accomplishing tasks to be able to support virtually any scenario.
  • Performance - performs well with default configurations but allows the user to choose a multitude of options that can enhance performance.
  • Resilient - supports the configuration of error handling to prevent and identify breakages.
  • Complete suite of configurable tools.
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
  • SSIS has been a bit neglected by Microsoft and new features are slow in coming.
  • When importing data from flat files and Excel workbooks, changes in the data structure will cause the extracts to fail. Workarounds do exist but are not easily implemented. If your source data structure does not change or rarely changes, this negative is relatively insignificant.
  • While add-on third-party SSIS tools exist, there are only a small number of vendors actively supporting SSIS and license fees for production server use can be significant especially in highly-scaled environments.
Read full review
Tableau
  • Formatting the data to work correctly in graphical presentations can be time consuming
  • Daily data extracts can run slowly depending on how much data is required and the source of the data
  • The desktop version is required for advanced functionality, editing on [the] Tableau server allows only limited features
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Microsoft
Some features should be revised or improved, some tools (using it with Visual Studio) of the toolbox should be less schematic and somewhat more flexible. Using for example, the CSV data import is still very old-fashioned and if the data format changes it requires a bit of manual labor to accept the new data structure
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
SQL Server Integration Services is a relatively nice tool but is simply not the ETL for a global, large-scale organization. With developing requirements such as NoSQL data, cloud-based tools, and extraordinarily large databases, SSIS is no longer our tool of choice.
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
Raw performance is great. At times, depending on the machine you are using for development, the IDE can have issues. Deploying projects is very easy and the tool set they give you to monitor jobs out of the box is decent. If you do very much with it you will have to write into your projects performance tracking though.
Read full review
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
The support, when necessary, is excellent. But beyond that, it is very rarely necessary because the user community is so large, vibrant and knowledgable, a simple Google query or forum question can answer almost everything you want to know. You can also get prewritten script tasks with a variety of functionality that saves a lot of time.
Read full review
Tableau
I have never really used support much, to be honest. I think the support is not as user-friendly to search and use it. I did have an encounter with them once and it required a bit of going back and forth for licensing before reaching a resolution. They did solve my issue though
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
The training for new users are quite good because it covers topic wise training and the best part was that it also had video tutorials which are very helpful
Read full review
Implementation Rating
Microsoft
The implementation may be different in each case, it is important to properly analyze all the existing infrastructure to understand the kind of work needed, the type of software used and the compatibility between these, the features that you want to exploit, to understand what is possible and which ones require integration with third-party tools
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
I had nothing to do with the choice or install. I assume it was made because it's easy to integrate with our SQL Server environment and free. I'm not sure of any other enterprise level solution that would solve this problem, but I would likely have approached it with traditional scripting. Comparably free, but my own familiarity with trad scripts would be my final deciding factor. Perhaps with some further training on SSIS I would have a different answer.
Read full review
Tableau
If we do not have legacy tools which have already been set up, I would switch the visualization method to open source software via PyCharm, Atom, and Visual Studio IDE. These IDEs cannot directly help you to visualize the data but you can use many python packages to do so through these IDEs.
Read full review
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
Return on Investment
Microsoft
  • Data integrity across various products allows unify certain processes inside the organization and save funds by reducing human labour factor.
  • Automated data unification allows us plan our inputs better and reduce over-warehousing by overbuying
  • The employee number, responsible for data management was reduced from 4 to 1 person
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
ScreenShots