Understanding the Difference between Tableau & Power Bi

With limited experience using Tableau I wanted to see what it would be like to recreate a Tableau dashboard in Power Bi. Finding an excellent Tableau tutorial from Stanley George Joseph, I built the dashboard from a sales data set he provided, once in Tableau, then again in Power Bi.

Unsurprisingly, both tools were largely capable of the same things, but I was interested to notice several differences, which pointed to an overall difference in philosophy.

First on the small differences:

• Tableau is beautiful especially compared with the sterile look of Power Bi.
• Tableau is flexible, surprisingly so. Tableau feels like it is built for the type of user who needs things just right.
• Tableau lacks some basic visual archetypes (i.e. Doughnut & Butterfly charts) and instead relies on the user to develop their own workarounds, passing knowledge from experienced users to new users. In the Power Bi ecosystem, these short comings are addressed with an integrated marketplace where Power users plug these holes with shared custom visualizations.
• In Tableau, visuals have their own tabs vs. only existing as an object on the Dashboard pane in Power Bi. Unique tabs add an emphasize & involvement to visualizations encouraging the user to fine tune details. In Power Bi the options in the Format pane come across as more of a checklist than an involved design decision.
• Tableau data ingestion is limited coming from Power Bi, this is largely how Power Bi differentiates itself. The Data Modeling feature in Power Bi is incredibly nice to have and being able to transform data with M code and DAX offers users a lot of control.

In short, Tableau is visual first whereas Power Bi is data first.

With that in mind which product is a better fit for your organization?

We’re a Data Driven Organization of course we want to put data first…

Not so fast. Of course data is important, but there are better tools and tech stacks to manage data than Power Bi. I mean theoretically all the data your exporting should exist in system cleansed already, right? Right?...

Sources can be messy, and users might prefer to handle cleansing in their BI tool then through other means. But if there’s already a more fit tool to massage the data, you should probably have a tool that’s the best at what it uniquely does, namely visualizing.

So Which Product is Right for Me?

If you’re in the situation where you need to choose between these products asking yourself these questions might guide you.

And if you still struggle to decide consider asking, What Sector am I in?

Sectors with the Best Fit

These sectors may benefit the most from this differentiation.?Now this list isn’t exhaustive and there are use cases for firms outside of Sectors but by and large this is a useful heuristic.

Conclusion

Even though both tools were able to produce the same dashboard (more or less) there’s a surprising difference between Power Bi and Tableau which may affect which product is a better fit for your organization. While both are business intelligence tools the two effectively solve different problems; Tableau is artisanal and about changing hearts, while Power Bi is a productivity software to make sure operations are steady as she goes.