BI tools Comparison

By Promodo

Tools that we are working with

Promodo team compared three of the market leaders in BI – Tableau, Power BI and Looker.

These reporting platforms have been compared across different features they offer and their approximate costing to make the best choice for your company.

Decision making overview

• Tableau is a data visualization tool that allows users to connect to various data sources and create interactive dashboards and charts. It has a wide range of visualization options and is well suited for large-scale data analysis. It's easy to use for creating interactive and visually appealing dashboards.�
• Power BI is a business intelligence platform developed by Microsoft. It allows users to create interactive visualizations and dashboards from various data sources. It also has the ability to integrate with other Microsoft products, such as Excel and SharePoint. Power BI is well suited for small to medium-sized businesses that use Microsoft products.�
• Looker is a data platform that allows users to create, explore, and share data insights. It allows for multi-dimensional data exploration and is well suited for large-scale data analysis. Looker is also known for its robust SQL support, which makes it easy for analysts to work with large data sets.

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Cost Comparison

• Tableau has a few different pricing options, including a free trial, a Tableau Creator license for individual users, and a Tableau Server or Tableau Online option for businesses. The Creator license starts at $70 per user per month.
• Power BI has a free version, called Power BI Desktop, which allows users to create and view reports, as well as a paid version, called Power BI Pro, which starts at $9.99 per user per month. There is also an enterprise version called Power BI Premium, which is priced on a capacity-based model and starts at $4,995 per month.
• Looker's pricing is based on the number of users and the amount of data being analyzed. Personal version can be used for FREE. Pricing starts at $5,000 per month for up to 10 users, with custom pricing for larger deployments.

Our team experience

Power BI - $10 per user account, up to 5 users can be on one account

Tableau - $70 per account for report creation and $15 per user account for viewers, but only one user can use one account (or the account will be blocked)

Power BI - does not have its own server, must be deployed on your own (this is an advantage if you understand the necessary resources and don't overpay)

Tableau - has its own server

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Our team experience

Power BI - has the ability to preprocess data in Power Query (this is an advantage, in Power Query you can do the same without knowing SQL; in Tableau you need to know SQL, important for those who plan to maintain their own reports)

Tableau - only works with ready-made tables

Power BI - can set up any custom visualization

Tableau - visually and aesthetically more beautiful

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Data Source Connectivity

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• Power BI supports a lot of data sources including flat files, SQL based databases, OData, SAP BW,SAP HANA, Azure Cloud Platform, Blank query etc.
• One of the strengths of Tableau is its ability to connect to wider range of data sources compared to Power BI and Looker
• Looker can connect to number of data sources but one of the most powerful features is its trusted data model. It has its own proprietary modeling language called LookML, which is defined as a better way to write SQL and define queries.

Data Volume

• Power BI can handle a maximum of 10 GB of data storage per user. However, for large datasets we can access it directly from the database or cloud.
• Tableau can handle billions of rows of data as it has a columnar data model.
• Looker queries created via the Explore page will have a maximum limit of 5,000 rows

Visualizations

• Power BI supports about 3500 data points and also has a lot of visualizations to choose from.
• Tableau offers a wide range of visualizations. The interface is very intuitive to create charts and tables.
• Looker provides extensive visualization abilities with real-time analysis. Users can also create custom visualizations

Integration

• Power BI can seamlessly integrate with Microsoft tools, and also has API access to Salesforce, Google Analytics etc.
• Tableau has also invested a lot on the integration side. You can integrate with a number of third party tools. Looker’s API integrates data with many applications such as Google Docs, Excel and a lot of third-party applications.
• Looker Blocks feature streamlines integration by offering pre-built code that can be embedded into outside systems with more ease

Querying

• Power BI has a natural language query tool where you can ask questions like “which are the top 5 products” or “what is the sales trend for the previous year” and get answers to this .
• Tableau: Tableau doesn’t have a natural language query like Power BI but you can do live querying and extracts.
• LookML is the language used to describe dimensions, calculations, aggregations etc. This is what makes the tool unique and powerful