Microsoft SQL Server vs. Tableau Server

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Microsoft SQL Server
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database.
$1,418
Per License
Tableau Server
Score 8.1 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 SQL ServerTableau Server
Editions & Modules
Subscription
$1,418.00
Per License
Enterprise
$13,748.00
Per License
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 SQL ServerTableau Server
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Microsoft SQL ServerTableau Server
Considered Both Products
Microsoft SQL Server

No answer on this topic

Tableau Server
Chose Tableau Server
Tableau Server is extremely well suited for a company with a few dedicated analysts creating dashboards and reports for a few stakeholders. It is also great at handling a large number of report viewers, but it is more expensive because you have to pay for each user. We have …
Chose Tableau Server
Tableau is extremely self intuitive to use and has a large supporting community
Chose Tableau Server
I didn't select Tableau but am very glad we have it! I have used several reporting tools and Tableau is the easiest to use and has the best user adoption. Other tools can involve lots of background work or just difficult to display the data as needed. Tableau is easy to use and …
Chose Tableau Server
It is the most user-friendly and its features are all suitable for our company's needs.
Chose Tableau Server
Tableau by far has the most intuitive interface and best out of the box looks for presentation. The speed of development and ease of development is unbeatable.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Microsoft SQL ServerTableau Server
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft SQL Server
-
Ratings
Tableau Server
9.2
95 Ratings
12% above category average
Pixel Perfect reports00 Ratings9.129 Ratings
Customizable dashboards00 Ratings9.494 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates00 Ratings9.381 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft SQL Server
-
Ratings
Tableau Server
8.9
95 Ratings
9% above category average
Drill-down analysis00 Ratings8.795 Ratings
Formatting capabilities00 Ratings8.493 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages00 Ratings8.959 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration00 Ratings9.489 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft SQL Server
-
Ratings
Tableau Server
7.9
91 Ratings
6% below category average
Publish to Web00 Ratings9.585 Ratings
Publish to PDF00 Ratings9.284 Ratings
Report Versioning00 Ratings8.070 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling00 Ratings7.477 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers00 Ratings5.19 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft SQL Server
-
Ratings
Tableau Server
8.4
90 Ratings
4% above category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)00 Ratings8.886 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization00 Ratings8.885 Ratings
Predictive Analytics00 Ratings7.764 Ratings
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft SQL Server
-
Ratings
Tableau Server
7.3
95 Ratings
16% below category average
Multi-User Support (named login)00 Ratings7.393 Ratings
Role-Based Security Model00 Ratings7.390 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)00 Ratings7.392 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)00 Ratings7.362 Ratings
Mobile Capabilities
Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft SQL Server
-
Ratings
Tableau Server
7.5
79 Ratings
6% below category average
Responsive Design for Web Access00 Ratings7.177 Ratings
Mobile Application00 Ratings7.061 Ratings
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile00 Ratings7.768 Ratings
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
Comparison of Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft SQL Server
-
Ratings
Tableau Server
7.3
46 Ratings
8% below category average
REST API00 Ratings9.040 Ratings
Javascript API00 Ratings9.137 Ratings
iFrames00 Ratings9.140 Ratings
Java API00 Ratings5.57 Ratings
Themeable User Interface (UI)00 Ratings6.19 Ratings
Customizable Platform (Open Source)00 Ratings4.67 Ratings
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Score 9.9 out of 10
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User Ratings
Microsoft SQL ServerTableau Server
Likelihood to Recommend
9.6
(96 ratings)
7.1
(111 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(6 ratings)
10.0
(20 ratings)
Usability
9.9
(10 ratings)
5.4
(17 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(1 ratings)
9.0
(9 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(1 ratings)
8.1
(8 ratings)
Support Rating
7.9
(25 ratings)
3.4
(18 ratings)
In-Person Training
9.0
(1 ratings)
8.0
(4 ratings)
Online Training
9.0
(1 ratings)
9.0
(9 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.0
(5 ratings)
9.1
(13 ratings)
Configurability
10.0
(1 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Microsoft SQL ServerTableau Server
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft
Microsoft SQL Server is a great RDBMS and meets all of our requirements. If you need a stable DB platform to support your line of a business application you'll be well served. Licensing costs are far cheaper, more portable and a lot more user friendly than Oracle. Product support and security patches from Microsoft are strong.
Read full review
Tableau
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.
Read full review
Pros
Microsoft
  • Easy to configure and use with Visual Studio and Dot Net
  • Easy integration with MSBI to perform data analysis
  • Data Security
  • Easy to understand and use
  • Very easy to export database and tables in the form of SQL query or a script
Read full review
Tableau
  • 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
Read full review
Cons
Microsoft
  • The import/export process can be tricky to follow with lots of steps and could be better for importing flat files
  • Obtaining help from Microsoft is cumbersome and often other internet sources are better and quicker
  • The documentation is not great and again it's generally better to obtain help elsewhere if needed
Read full review
Tableau
  • 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
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Microsoft
We understand that the Microsoft SQL Server will continue to advance, offering the same robust and reliable platform while adding new features that enable us, as a software center, to create a superior product. That provides excellent performance while reducing the hardware requirements and the total cost of ownership of our solution.
Read full review
Tableau
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.
Read full review
Usability
Microsoft
SQL Server mostly 'just works' or generates error messages to help you sort out the trouble. You can usually count on the product to get the job done and keep an eye on your potential mistakes. Interaction with other Microsoft products makes operating as a Windows user pretty straight forward. Digging through the multitude of dialogs and wizards can be a pain, but the answer is usually there somewhere.
Read full review
Tableau
Tableau Server is unbeatable at creating easy to use, interactive dashboards for busy executives. The software also saves time for the busy analyst that is tired of always using Excel. Tableau Server is a head and shoulders improvement over Excel.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
Microsoft
Its does not have outages.
Read full review
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
Read full review
Performance
Microsoft
SSAS data cubes may some time slow down your Excel reports.
Read full review
Tableau
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.
Read full review
Support Rating
Microsoft
We managed to handle most of our problems by looking into Microsoft's official documentation that has everything explained and almost every function has an example that illustrates in detail how a particular functionality works. Just like PowerShell has the ability to show you an example of how some cmdlet works, that is the case also here, and in my opinion, it is a very good practice and I like it.
Read full review
Tableau
We have consistently had highly satisfactory results every time we've reached out for help. Our contractor, used for Tableau server maintenance and dashboard development is very technically skilled. When he hits a roadblock on how to do something with Tableau, the support staff have provided timely and useful guidance. He frequently compares it to Cognos and says that while Cognos has capabilities Tableau doesn't, the bottom line value for us is a no-brainer
Read full review
In-Person Training
Microsoft
It was good
Read full review
Tableau
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.
Read full review
Online Training
Microsoft
very hands on and detailed training
Read full review
Tableau
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.
Read full review
Implementation Rating
Microsoft
Other than SQL taking quite a bit of time to actually install there are no problems with installation. Even on hardware that has good performance SQL can still take close to an hour to install a typical server with management and reporting services.
Read full review
Tableau
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
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Alternatives Considered
Microsoft
[Microsoft] SQL Server has a much better community and professional support and is overall just a more reliable system with Microsoft behind it. I've used MySQL in the past and SQL Server has just become more comfortable for me and is my go to RDBMS.
Read full review
Tableau
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.
Read full review
Scalability
Microsoft
SQL server does handle growing demands of a mid sized company.
Read full review
Tableau
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Microsoft
  • Increased accuracy - We went from multiple users having different versions of an Excel spreadsheet to a single source of truth for our reporting.
  • Increased Efficiency - We can now generate reports at any time from a single source rather than multiple users spending their time collating data and generating reports.
  • Improved Security - Enterprise level security on a dedicated server rather than financial files on multiple laptop hard drives.
Read full review
Tableau
  • 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.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Tableau Server Screenshots

Screenshot of Tableau Server interface and administration view 1.Screenshot of Tableau Server interface and administration view 2.Screenshot of Tableau Server permissions view.Screenshot of Tableau Services Manager (TSM) view 1.Screenshot of Tableau Services Manager (TSM) view 2.