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Which BI option is better for your business: Microsoft Power BI or Tableau?

With the growing shift of more and more businesses making use of business intelligence, the need to ensure that your business has the right software in place to cope with these changes is crucial. 

When looking at some of the leading business intelligence solutions in the market, you need to choose one that is fully scalable as your business grows in addition to being able to complete the tasks required from your business. 

In order to help you make your mind up, in our latest blog article, we will take you through two of the leading business intelligence solutions in the market currently: Microsoft Power BI and Tableau (powered by Salesforce). 

Parameters 

Microsoft Power BI 

Tableau 

Creator 

Microsoft 

Salesforce 

Released 

2013 

2003 

Costs 

Available from £8.20 per user per month for the Pro plan version. 

Available from £56 per user per month for the basic Creator bundle. 

Required licensing 

None 

Licensing keys needed 

Designed for 

SMEs 

Large enterprises 

Performance 

Great for data visualisation, integration & manipulation. 

Theory based visualisation & data analysis. 

Security 

Row-level security & role-based restrictions. 

Provides row-level security and set up filters. 

Usability 

Easy to use and perfect for both beginners and experts in businesses. 

Tricky to master and best suited for seasoned data analysts. 

Coding language used 

Power BI is powered by DAX for calculated columns and measures. 

Tableau makes use of MDX for both dimensions and measures. 

Deployment 

On Cloud, On-premise & Windows. 

On Cloud, On-premise, Mac & Windows. 

Data Capacity 

10GB anything more can be achieved by using Azure. 

Unlimited data without the safety of cloud services. 

Supports SQL 

Yes 

Yes 

Can connect to various data sources? 

Yes 

Yes 

As you can see from the table above, it is clear that Microsoft Power BI is the better option when compared against Tableau and can be easily integrated with Microsoft 365 and scaled up as your business grows. As well as this, the usability of Power BI makes it so much easier to train your employees up on how to use it effectively and efficiently to extract the data you need for reporting. 

Next Steps?  

If you have read the above comparison table and are wanting to discuss how we can help you to implement Microsoft Power BI across your business or want to explore the full potential of using the whole Microsoft Power Platform then please talk to our team of experts now to discuss your specific requirements

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