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Subject Expert
I hate PBI. These are the ways in which Tableau is superior:
- Significantly better formatting options for tables. For example you can nest column headers any way you want. In PBI you need to pivot the data.
- PBI has no option for small multiples/lattice charts.
- PBI has been slower for me.
- Tableau just works when importing data. In PBI I have to go into the query editor if I add columns to a table or change the layout and remove the column import number field.
- Significantly more complex filtering possibilities with tableau
- PBI has no option to brush across a scatter plot for filtering. Isn’t this table stakes?
- PBI scatter plot formatting is trash.
- PBI graphs look like trash comparatively.
- PBI formula editor is slow and clunky. Compare it to Tableau’s and they are worlds apart.
- PBI date intelligence is the least intelligence thing I can imagine.
-PBI can’t specify dimensions as easily as tableau.
- Can PBI group fields in folders? I don’t think so. Tableau can.
- DAX is unintuitive imo (I know sql, r, python, Julia)
- Can’t auto size tables (what is this shit?)
- PBI has no concept of parameters
- PBI ribbon is unintuitive. In Tableau you right click a field to format. In PBI you go to the modeling ribbon. How is this the spot for formatting? Formatting options are weak.
- PBI mapping is terrible.
A few things PBI does well:
- it has variables.
-it has themes.
I could keep going on disadvantages but man they are numerous. I actually like having each graph in its own window. Focus on one thing and get the details right then combine.
Subject Expert
I admittedly might have some sort of DAX learning handicap. It feels clunky having to filter in calcs. And in consulting where you are constantly building dashboards even simple calcs feel time consuming. Or something like a change over time calc where I need to build a date table to get it to work. In Tableau it’s as simple as window_avg(sum[var], -1, -1). Or you could use a lookup or whatever.
It might not be so bad if the editor wasn’t straight up terrible.
Like I said I might terrible at DAX.
I’ve used both for quite awhile and I think I find Tableau more customizable while it may take a bit of time to get used to in order to take full advantage of it. From my experience you can do more things with Tableau than PBI.
Aside from that, I think general consensus is that Tableau creates more visually appealing charts (from graphic & UX designers that I’ve worked with)
Also, if cost is a concern, Tableau is overall more expensive I think. My company offers free PBI subscription, so I usually find myself using it only for mockups, but prefer to use Tableau when it comes to actual production
Btw. You can resize the charts you created in a worksheet after you dragged it to the dashboard easily in Tableau.
Subject Expert
I popped open Tableau today after my rant. PBI still feels like a toy where Tableau feels like a tool to get work done. I actually think it is due to the worksheet / dashboard dynamic. OP you’ll learn to love it I suspect.
One area where PBI is maybe better is drill downs on dates. Though I feel like both are unintuitive. In Tableau I think I’d rather drive date drill downs with parameters. I’m thinking price volume schedules here. That way i can link the parameters to the window functions.
I saw that tableau finally implemented dynamic parameters. That is a game changer.
I’m sure most will think I’m a tableau fanboy (I am), but I’ve used qlik, qliksense, microstrategy, spotfire and PBI and I keep thinking tableau is the better tool. Once needs get really complex I tend to switch to r/shiny.
I’d love to try looker though. It seems to have some interesting functionality.
I think tableau just has more contracts with companies And adaptable. See below
Tableau was a mature product much before Power BI. A lot for legacy reporting dashboards have been set up in tableau. Need someone to maintain update them. Once you get the job, don't be surprised if IT pushes you to Power BI because of lower cost.
I found Power BI to be relatively user unfriendly. But that was a while back and my former firm's data wasn't great. Tableau is decent, but I preferred Yellowfin when I was using it. Qlik Sense seemed... inferior, but I used it only for an extremely short period of time.
SM1 has summed it up quite well. I’m certified in both and I’d say Tableau is ultra flexibility, not married to any platform so integrates with a wider variety of data sources and is visually crisper with higher fidelity.
Power BI is more optimized for a more rounded production. It does dashboards and all but is not so forgiving when you create calculated fields. If you start as a new column and figure it should be a measure, you have to rebuild the calc. Tableau doesn’t have that constraint.
If you have a lot of data, you will soon find power bi has restrictions on what it can plot. You came move legends around in power bi either.
My biggest frustration with power bi is that you have to yet learn DAX and MQuery in order to make it do what you want. The data modeling capabilities are great but confusing and Tableau has something like in the new release.
If you’re doing something simple power hi is great for that. Move things around, copy formatting from one object to another and pinkish to Power bi service. It gets better every month but for some of our clients that ask for impossible scenarios, tableau shines hands down.
Subject Expert
Its awesome and very expensive. I had it running in AWS for a while at ~$60/hr. You could query and aggregate billions of points in under a second easy. That was a big install. You could do a real cheap server if you don’t need to scale that large. Brytlyt and Kinetica are the other options in that space.
Tableau has strong partnerships with AWS on cloud implementation. I think it makes ‘better’ viz’s but can’t put my finger on why.
Subject Expert
Tableau visuals are very sharp. Visuals in PBI seem fuzzy. I suspect it is something to do with the PBI visual scaling. I’m guessing (wild guess) that tableau draws specific pixels where PBI because it is always scaling things uses some approximate algorithm but I don’t really know much about it.
I would be curious to know if my hypothesis is correct.
If you don't like Tableau because you are looking for something that's more like punching yourself in the face, you should try Domo.
I found data manipulation to be far easier in power BI using the power query functionalities. I also found Power BI's measures and calculated columns to be easier to use than in Tableau.
I can't remember the exact terminology now, but I thought creating different pages, and within each page different panes, to be confusing and difficult to use. In power BI I can resize things as I like and drag and drop them anywhere. It seemed like I wasn't able to do that in Tableau, but that might be from my inexperience.
Not trying to start an argument, genuinely seeking discussion.
What do Tableau users think about data manipulation in Tableau?
Do you find it tedious to create dashboards in Tableau?
Is anyone at least intermediate in both and can speak to pros and cons? I'm only a beginner in Tableau so understand that impacts my perception, I just found it much more difficult to move past the beginner stage in Tableau vs PBI, to the point that I just didn't.
If data is clean/straightforward and not fragmented I will use Tableau but if data is fragmented and requires a lot of transformation and modeling which is the reality with Big Data, I will use Power BI
Tableau certified here.
One functionality I see in PowerBI that I can't figure out if it's possible to do in Tableau is the (beta) decomposition tree.
Granted. That's more like Frankenstein financial modelling and it's probably something that's best kept in spreadsheets and Excel.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/visuals/power-bi-visualization-decomposition-tree
Subject Expert
Oops I read this backwards. I do think there is a tableau decomposition tree add on. Look in the extensions gallery if you need it. It’s pricey.