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The product is awesome. I made some really neat visualizations and analyses with it during an MBA project using the 15-day trial. But it's ridiculously expensi
by cscharenberg 11y ago
The product is awesome. I made some really neat visualizations and analyses with it during an MBA project using the 15-day trial. But it's ridiculously expensive - $1000 per year with some real limitations on how many data sources you can connect.
If I could dabble with it for $50/year I would. $1000 though? That limits their market tremendously to big companies only. It's hard enough to get an $80 tool approved.
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Looks like they give it free for students now, which is cool: https://www.tableau.com/academic/student https://www.tableau.com/academic/student. But after learning it, there's no path to bring the software with them when they move to actual companies, because of the cost.
- TheLogothete 11y agoTableau is an enterprise product and it's one the cheaper ones out there. You can't offer that kind of a product for $50/year.
- CamperBob2 11y agoYou can't, but Microsoft can. That's what the rest of the world might call a "bad omen."
- greggyb 11y agoPower BI, Microsoft's answer to it is $10/mo - yes, not $50/year, but a lot closer to that than to $1,000. The vis layer doesn't need to be expensive.
- TheLogothete 11y agoPowerBI has nowhere near the capabilities of Tableau. On top of that, PowerBI is subsidized in order to funnel customers for SQL Server.
- WhitneyLand 11y agoWhat's are some of the biggest things missing in Power BI compared to Tableau?
- greggyb 11y agoTableau offers a richer end-user customization interface. Power BI offers custom visuals, but these are definitely developer-only at this point. The behavior you get from the baked in pieces is more rigidly defined than that from Tableau (monthly releases address these things one item at a time). Out of the box mapping is miles better in Tableau. Overall Tableau is more fully-featured than Power BI. Tableau aims to be a complete BI presentation layer. Power BI is positioned as the self-service and personalized consumption component as a part of a larger BI presentation layer. Microsoft would prefer that the entirety of the BI stack be made up of their technologies, but Power BI can consume other data sources, and its reports can be embedded in other apps, so it fits into other technologies as well. We could go feature-by-feature and Tableau would win the majority of presentation sophistication bullets (more fine-grained control of display, filtering, interactions - richer collection of built-in visualizations). The differentiator for Power BI is more on the self-service end. Personalized dashboards (dashboard and report are two distinct concepts in Power BI) can be trivially created from published reports. Customized reports can easily be extended from published reports and datasets. There's a strong collaboration framework based on Office 365 groups and with lessons learned from SharePoint. There is also a pretty seamless upgrade path. Power Pivot models can currently be promoted to SSAS, and the expectation is for the same to be possible with Power BI models (all the same backing database technology). I hate to be so vague, but there's a lot to both products. I'd be happy to dive deeper into some specific cases if you've got questions.
- mistermann 11y agoSince you sound fairly familiar with both platforms, what's your take on if and how well MS is doing on making PowerBI functionally equivalent to Tableau? At the rate they are going do you expect they will reach parity in the foreseeable future?
- 11y ago
- greggyb 11y agoTableau is sitting on top of a data warehouse anyway. $company will be shelling out much more on the data warehousing and ETL side than on the vis layer. Even with open source tooling, it's a large and ongoing development effort to do BI right.
- chris_wot 11y agoQlikview costs quite a lot and I'd argue is also enterprise-grade, and doesn't have the same cost issue plaguing Tableau. Which is sad, because Tableau is probably the better product in many ways.
- TheLogothete 11y agoI am pretty sure Qlick deployments are way more expensive than Tableau ones because as far as I know it is more capable data modeling-wise. It is also nowhere near as polished.
- infinite8s 11y agoI think QlikSense is Qlik's answer to Tableau's desktop product.
- chris_wot 11y agoIt most likely is. But it gets chosen because people know how to use it.
- StanGrove 11y agoPowerBI may be subsidized or not. But in our use-cases and in their documentation, it really doesn't funnel customers to SQL Server. Sure, it plays nice with SQL, SSAS/MD and SSAS/Tabular. But it also plays nice with many, many other data sources individually and in mashup. Its internal data modeling and ETL capabilities rival the power of SSAS and SSIS and they are free -- I see them as more of a competitor to SQL than a front end to it.
- TheLogothete 11y agoYou may, but that's not how the strategy guys at Microsoft see it, according to their own words. Data modeling and ETL capabilities rival SSAS and SSIS only in very trivial scenarios. I'm not saying that to bash on PowerBI. I love that product and use it heavily and promote it to clients. It just serves different purposes than Tableau.
- greggyb 11y agoThe data modeling engine IS SSAS. The only major missing pieces are row-level security and defined KPIs. The query language, DAX, and the backing columnstore database are the same engine used in SSAS Tabular.
- TheLogothete 11y agoxVelocity is only a (small) part of SSAS and it has a very limited application compared to OLAP even in the upcoming 2016 edition which greatly enhances the columnar store functionality.