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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