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Comment by sologoub | Hacker News Reader

Tableau is a visualization software that you can bolt on top of many different data sources, from spreadsheets to BI tools and even AWS RedShift to get awesome looking dashboards and interactive visuals.

They are/were extremely popular with many sales organizations for internal dashboarding and even some media outlets used their stuff for public websites.

Sad to see this state of things for them, as the product was true good at one point. That said, I have not touched it in 3-4 years, so not sure how competitive it is now.

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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 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.

-- Looks like they give it free for students now, which is cool: 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.

Tableau 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.

Power 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.

PowerBI has nowhere near the capabilities of Tableau.

On top of that, PowerBI is subsidized in order to funnel customers for SQL Server.

What's are some of the biggest things missing in Power BI compared to Tableau?

Tableau 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.

Since 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?

I think the answer is yes if you buy into the Microsoft stack, which includes SSRS and SSAS being used in conjunction with Power BI. SQL 2016 is a big BI release for Microsoft.

Power BI as a standalone product is pretty brutally limited in terms of data volume (250MB compressed data model is the max that can be hosted in the cloud service), and is missing the extensibility and flexibility that comes from a tool like SSRS.

As a self contained product, Tableau will likely hold the lead for some time. As a platform, I think Microsoft is beyond Tableau - they cover far more of the BI spectrum (and well, especially with SSAS) than Tableau seems to ever intend to.

Those are quite big products, making feature-by-feature comparison would be quite a daunting task.

It all boils down to this, in my opinion: PowerBI is for dashboards and reporting mostly. Tableau can do dashboards, but it can also do "analysis". Uncovering insights in the data that go way beyond simple cross-filtering.

In my mind, they are different tools for different purposes.

You do know Power BI can call arbitrary R code for both statistical analysis and visualization?

I do know. In fact, I do it for clients.

Just because you can, doesn't mean everyone will rush to do it. This is a self-service platform. Putting the data in the hands of decision makers. There is hierarchy in how people use such software:

The user: He uses only the apparent features in the GUI. Like the grid and aggregation formulas in Excel. He learns how to use the software from other people showing him how to do stuff.

The Power User: He has deeper needs, but can only be bothered to use features 1 or 2 levels deep in the GUI. Like pivot tables, vlookups and index/match, logical operator formulas in Excel. He learns how to use the software from tutorials.

The Advanced User: He has a task and does not mind getting his hands dirty in order to fix it. Uses DAX and Cube formulas. Perhaps even Macros. He learns by googling his problem and reading documentation.

The Developer: Solves the problems at the programmatic level.

Tableau occupies a very specific spot. It is brilliant for the User who only consumes dashboards via clicking on them. No explanation needed and it is super polished. It is also powerful enough for the Advanced User who can perform relatively sophisticated analyses from the interface. Generally speaking, it is not a good fit for the Power User who doesn't have the need to justify using it. It is also not a terribly good choice for the developer because it is too restrictive and the programmatic features are not well thought out.

Tableau 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.

Qlikview 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.

I 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.

I think QlikSense is Qlik's answer to Tableau's desktop product.

It most likely is. But it gets chosen because people know how to use it.

PowerBI 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.

You 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.

The 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.

xVelocity 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.

You can't, but Microsoft can.

That's what the rest of the world might call a "bad omen."

We're using them for a client, and pretty much every client I've worked with lately is using them. I think they'll be just fine, it's still a good product.

The AWS RedShift integration was a really good move, as one of the reasons we did not adopt them at my previous company was the requirement that the data set fit in memory of the server.

With RedShift, you offload the actual crunching to the db that can handle billions of rows, and then visualize the results.

They still are popular, especially in the government contracting world. It's almost a mandatory requirement their business analysts use Tableau when creating dashboards for clients.

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