7 Reasons Why You Should Switch from Tableau to Power BI

Tableau and Microsoft Power BI are two of the biggest players in the field of data analytics tools according to Gartner. But when choosing a data analytics tool, it's especially important to choose one that best fits the needs of your organization. Perhaps your organization is already heavily invested in BI and you've also recently migrated to the cloud, you have an Office 365 package, but you're still also working with Tableau. This creates a jumble of reports across different tools. There's a good chance your organization is now choosing to migrate to Power BI after all. But why would you migrate, what are the differences between these two heavyweights, and what tips can you use for your migration? You'll find the top 7 reasons in the blog below.

Why switch from Tableau to Power BI

Tableau and Power BI are two different data analytics tools, each with their own pros and cons. It could well be that you once chose Tableau for its fantastic data visualization capabilities, but are now finding that Power BI is actually a more attractive tool for your organization. When you look at the differences between Power BI and Tableau, it almost feels like comparing apples to oranges. Both tools have their own specialty and strength. So when choosing a data analytics tool, it's important to decide in advance which aspects matter most to your organization. Do you need help choosing the right tool? Feel free to get in touch with us.

Power BI can be a better choice for your organization in a number of situations. For example, when you're already using Azure and the Office 365 suite. The choice to also start working with Power BI can then be made quickly, perhaps simply because of the good integration options. For example, you can easily use Power BI in Teams and publish your reports in PowerPoint or share them on SharePoint. There are also countless possibilities with the Power Platform. With an Office 365 license, you can also partially make use of that (in this blog you can read more about the licensing structure of the Power Platform).

7 reasons to consider switching to Power BI

To make it easy for you, we've listed the most important reasons to consider making the switch:

#1 Price

Power BI is a lot cheaper than Tableau. Power BI's cheapest subscription starts from €8.40 per user, per month. Tableau's cheapest subscription starts at $15 (about €13.73) per user, per month. With this cheapest Tableau subscription, however, you can only edit dashboards and visualizations. That's a significant difference from the cheapest Power BI subscription, where you already have access to virtually all of Power BI's functionality right away.

#2 Custom data visualizations

Although Tableau is one of the best data analytics tools for visualizing data, Power BI has the option to use custom data visualizations via the Microsoft Store. This quickly gives you access to hundreds of new data visualizations.

#3 Security

Microsoft invests significantly more time, money, and dedicated resources than Tableau to ensure high levels of data and user security.

#4 User interface

It's easy to get started learning Power BI. Thanks to the familiar Microsoft interface, many users can get to work with it easily, even when they don't have much experience yet with data analytics tools. Tableau, on the other hand, takes a bit more time to master. That's why it's often a favorite tool among more experienced users.

#5 Data sources

Tableau beats Power BI when it comes to the number of data sources available. Power BI has only limited access to other databases and servers compared to Tableau.

#6 Cloud vs. On–Premise

Power BI has a fully functional SaaS version of its software and is therefore mainly geared toward working from the Cloud. Tableau, on the other hand, does have a Cloud version of its software available, but is primarily strong on-premise.

#7 Power Platform integration

Microsoft Power BI is part of the Power Platform. The Power Platform consists of four components that can each mean a lot for your organization on their own, but that can also be combined to strengthen each other. The Power Platform consists of the following four components: Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents. With the Power Platform, Microsoft continues to build on the philosophy of giving people without a developer background the tools to automate business processes. In this blog, you can read more about the Power Platform and what it can mean for your organization.

Migrating from Tableau to Power BI

Once you've made the choice to switch from Tableau to Power BI, there are of course a number of things to consider. Below, we've listed a number of points to keep in mind during a migration from Tableau to Power BI.

1. Make sure you have sufficient knowledge of data modeling and/or data warehousing. Or choose TimeXtender.
2. Appoint someone as Enterprise Power BI Product Administrator. This prevents the task from being left unattended with no one taking the time to learn the ins and outs of implementing and managing it, or someone simply taking on this task and suddenly creating a jumble of reports and workspaces.
3. Make sure someone within your organization understands Power BI's DAX. This prevents complicated situations.
4. Find out exactly which Power BI licenses you need within your organization. Not everyone needs a Power BI Pro license. Read here for more about the different licenses.

Example from one of our clients

You might now be wondering what such a process looks like. How does an organization decide to switch from Tableau to Power BI? Below, we briefly describe an example of one of our clients who is still in the middle of this migration to Power BI.

Human resources service provider

This client initially only had Tableau. That environment was developed and maintained by a single person at the time, meaning all the knowledge sat with that one person. The organization wanted to spread the knowledge and was already doing a lot with the Microsoft Azure Stack itself. In addition, they were already using the Office 365 suite, leading them to conclude that switching to Power BI would also be more attractive in terms of price. Power BI is also easy to use as a data analytics tool, which was advantageous for this client because many end users needed to work with the reports. In addition, with a Power BI Pro license it's easy to share reports with third parties, where row-level security makes it easy to see who is allowed to see which data and who isn't. They've now partially migrated to Power BI, but still partly use Tableau as well. In the future, they want to switch completely to Power BI so they have a single BI front end.

Want to know more?

After reading this story, are you curious whether a migration to Power BI is also a step your organization is ready for? Feel free to get in touch with us without obligation, or schedule an appointment via the buttons below. We can then help you make this decision.

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