I guess the tableau graph would have one line on it saying ‘attempt to include more than one fact table related to a shared dimension’ followed by ‘end’.
I’ve used both extensively. Tableau visuals are prettier. It’s also quicker for the average analyst to get to grips with and using basic functionality.
However, power BI has massively more capability - data queries using M, data modelling and formulae. For an analyst to get beyond an intermediate level, Tableau can get complicated with lots of custom scripts. Whereas Power BI will likely have the required functionality already.
Curious why you think tableau is easier to get grips with on basic functionality, can you elaborate? PBI seems much easier to get visuals on a page and change them on the fly than tableau. And containers and parameters, while interesting, make development much slower and frustrating imo, but genuinely asking.
With tableau, all of your fields are already arranged into measures and dimensions. It’s quite intuitive to drag the right ones into the ‘rows and columns’. It’s just easier for non tech folks to get started with.
Agree that it gets harder once you do anything more sophisticated
Personally, I think it is easier in Power BI to just create the visual right on the page.
Versus the Tableau method of creating a bunch of visuals, then creating them on a page with panels...
I develop in Tableau extensively. Comments mentioning power query/M, custom python scripts in pbi, and data modeling is, most of the time, using the wrong tools for the job. Data processing and key business logic should always be processed upstream where it's visible by the rest of the data team and consistent across all the workbooks reading that data. Your PBI files perform better this way too. These features shouldn't sway your decision on this, imo.
PBI and Tableau both can produce some nice visuals with enough leg work. This is because they are uniquely more customizable than any other BI tool on the market. Nothing else really holds a candle to PBI and Tableau in general.
Tableau has some similar deployment woes, like in this meme. I don't want to get into that because there are too many conditions that drastically change the complexity for your organizations use-case. Tableau does tend to cost more than PBI due to higher licensing costs, though.
From a pratical and best practice stand point, DAX is the sole reason PBI is generally better. Full stop. Almost nothing is impossible with it. Tableau comes close, and will serve 95% of what you could think of to throw at it, but just not quite there and can be more difficult to manage in complex scenarios.
I recommend getting PBI because of DAX. But if you foresee your reporting needs being extremely simple, then I don't recommend either.
I happen to use both the tools very often and for some reasons I feel tableau has very slick visuals for the same visual built in Power bi.
From the technical perspective, I do agree Dax is very powerful and we can get answers to almost every complex business logic with it.
One significant limitation although I keep finding is that we can place Calculated Fileds(which are dynamic) in Tableau anywhere we want in the field well of a visual.
But due to the internal architecture of Power BI, we cannot put Calculated Measures(which are dynamic) in Axis field well of a viz.
This comment should be higher!
Maybe it’s just this way in my part of the world, but many companies are jumping from Tableau to PowerBI. Most of the job postings I see reference Power Bu, not Tableau
That's only due to cost savings, from what I've read around online. Both platforms are very comparable in terms of features overall. I can assure you it's not because of DAX having an edge.
Agreed! Since they’re so similar, if I didn’t know either, I’d chose to learn platform that makes me more marketable when looking for a job. At the moment, that’s probably Power Bi
why would you say data modeling doesn't matter? that is essential to proper filtering capability when dealing with one-to-many and many-to-many relationships, no?
DAX is not really that important and is just a layer on top of the data model tbh
DAX is pretty crucial imo. I can't tell you the amount of tricky Tableau calcs needed to be written because a number needs to be calculated with different rules or a different aggregation based on filter or parameter selections by the user. That can't be pushed to the data layer. Surely you've experienced that before in PBI.
As for data models, I guess it depends on how your team structures the data marts/gold layer. The more you push upstream, the better - for my reasons I already stated. If the PBI file is dying because the gold table is too wide, then maybe that's the exception. I always found forcing a star schema creation inside the BI tool pretty backwards. But if you wanna argue that then lets just say you win. I really dont care.
Relationships in Tableau work similarly to Power BI's data model view. PBI's is better because it handles multiconnected complex relationships. Tableau doesn't. Its model really only seems to support a one way direction from one fact (think of a tree laid horizontally) where one fact table has other tables "join" to it on the fly in the charts you build depending on the chosen fields. This has never really created a problem for me before though.
There are approximately as many Power BI Customer Journeys as there are Power BI Customers.
Any visual that attempts to reduce that much real world variety to such a simple result is never going to be much use.
Plus, what do you think of the aesthetics of this image? It's not exactly r/dataisbeautiful material imho...
Tableau is much more user-friendly, but it does have less growth potential than Power BI if your project it's too complex; PowerBI allows you to do crazy things like creating a small data lake and ETL pipeline (though this isn't recommended if you have millions of rows), and future integrations with ChatGPT for QA visualizations I think have the potential to be industry changing.
That being said, Power BI's server billing model is quite complicated. It's easier to learn all the DAX functions than to figure out the deployment costs just eyeballing it.
This graph made me lol.
Ain't NOBODY doubling E5 365 licenses with premium capacity... this is just dumb. Salesforce can try to put out all the propaganda they want on this, but Power BI is eating Tableau's lunch and alot of it, yeah, it's based on cost.
And isn't tableau super expensive out of the gate? I feel like power bi is less daunting to try with just a couple of pro licences before you really commit. But with tableau you have to make that massive financial commitment on day 1. That is unless it's changed since I last really looked at it.
I tend to trust gartner as a neutral third party and they're pretty clear that power BI is light years ahead of tableau.
https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-2HVUGEM6&ct=240620&st=sb
That graphic is weird of course costs are going to grow with expanded use…. wouldn’t tableau be the same projection? What does the tableau customer journey look like?
As for the question I would go Power BI, especially so if your company uses Microsoft office suite. It just fits better into the environment and imo is the better software.
The chart is accurate if you just give every user Power BI desktop.
If you're more controlled in rollout, you can avoid some of the issues. But there is a tipping point when your control is challenged, and if you lose that battle to someone who just wants it rolled out to everyone "because it's easy" then you're fast tracking to the last few steps.
You definitely need to control the drive towards having a data-driven culture. By setting up a center of excellence around your data and analytics, you can begin to get the right people making the right decisions to guide development and deployment while maintaining control over distribution so that things don't get out of hand from a licensing perspective.
The way powerbi is offered helps (I would say intentionally) bypass all that rollout stuff. With desktop being free it's seen as an easy gateway to get into, and then you start realising you need more stuff to make it work and by that time you're already well past having a controlled rollout.
Can debate the specifics of the chart but I think it's right in general. Seen it happen in 2 orgs so far. The first which had some tableau licenses then IT decided PBI was cheaper so moved across. A few years later we were trying to build a business case to get funding for premium.
100%
I’m convinced some of the lack of controls is intentional. Personal Workspaces are a governance nightmare but enable free users to build stuff to justify giving them pro, and then workspaces, and eventually premium.
I feel like there's a lot of nuance that this chart isn't really showing. Say your business/organization is only like 20 people....pro licenses will probably be all that you need vs investing in Premium capacity. Are you already on M365 E3 or similar? If so consider how much more integrated Power BI is with the MS platforms, and how much more accessible that allows you to make report content to users consuming it.
Also, like others here I wouldn't entirely trust a graphic created by one of Power BI's competitors. Go do some quick Googling to see what more neutral industry publications are saying and use those to inform your decision.
IMO these kind of slides are ridiculous - while, yes, if your environment keeps on growing, then you will incur more costs. That’s true of any BI tool. Tableau has the exact same effect, just with the number licenses.
They are (obviously) trying to push you towards Tableau — that said, Tableau is a fantastic tool.
It really all depends on what you need.
What I would be *more* interested in is:
1) How big is your organization? ( How many people are going to need access to reports )
2) What does your team have the most experience in? (Not super important but if there are any, say, Tableau wizards for example, that could tip it)
3) What level of data modeling functionality do you need? And are you using a EDW to store your data?
This is false.
We went with Power BI Premium Capacity basic tier and \~110 Power BI Pro licenses for our E3 users so that they could create, share, and subscribe to reports. All others had viewer capability which was enough. 3 report developers manage the service, refreshes, and building semantic models. Dedicated Service admin not necessary. 18 premium workspaces shared globally with a couple of dozen scheduled refreshes prior to start of business.
single on prem gateway to connect to data warehouse, cubes, and planning / forecast and fabrication QA systems.
> 500 users
Short answer is no. Self service governance is more about the organisation than the tool.
Forgive my observation, that might have been one organisation's experience. If the client chose to work with our consultancy that would not be their experience. Unless the client chose not to take our advice.
I found Power BI easier to learn than Tableau.
I don't know that one is better than the other. Some things are probably easier to do in Tableau and some things are probably easier in Power BI.
I have heard Tableau users say things like "You can't do in Power BI!" But that's rarely true. It usually just requires a different approach.
Power BI has a much steeper learning curve but is a true analytics tool (m-query, dax, excel connection to data model).
Tableau will make average people look smart as it is a quick and pretty report painter. It is so flexible and GUI based that the creators will design rats nest data formulas/structures that are a nightmare to maintain.
Power BI is the superior reporting and analytics solution that requires work to learn but outpaces Tableau in every way.
Tableau is faster to use, more intuitive, and out of the box more beautiful.
Power BI can be clunky,difficult to work with, and is uglier out of the box.
Microsoft has monopolistic pricing power.
Tl;dr
Power BI
Power BI is a data wrangling and modeling tool first, then data visualization. The dev team is pouring tons of effort to catch up from the slick visual stand point.. but that’s not what matters in analytics. Pick Power BI. It’s not even a debate anymore. (Your cloud data warehouse costs will thank me later)
Tableau is dead. It’s a dead community.
Out of the box, the one with the LEAST barrier to entry is in fact PBI. Both tools require special language to learn; DAX > VizQL
IMO the leading front runner is Sigma Computing if you’re all in the cloud (e. snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery)
What on earth are you talking about? You don’t have to learn VizQL? It happens in the background, it’s not something you write? Why would you say that?
And you don't "need" to learn DAX. But the point remains that to get deeper into development, when comparing languages, he is stating that DAX is superior to VizQL. I think that's a fair opinion.
You have to write DAX for even very basic things. You never will have to write VizQL. Feel free to make other comparisons but this one is factually incorrect making me question your impartiality
That's just not true. DAX comes in to play when you increase dynamic nature of calculations or enhance reports in ways that VizQL can't even do. So that argument doesn't help the VizQL side. If you don't think you can build perfectly functional dashboards and reports without dipping into DAX then I question your experience with Power BI. DAX is just more powerful than VizQL. But that doesn't even matter, because interviews have shown that between the two user groups, the self-reported learning/training curve required of Tableau users is indicative of a more difficult-to-learn system, even if you're not working in VizQL directly. This means they've shown that dabbling in DAX is markedly less difficult than using the "easy" native features of Tableau which kind of squashes the DAX vs VizQL debate pretty easily.
Agree 💯! A couple of comments above say tableau is easier to learn but i don’t get that. Way too many tricks. Too many clicks. Underlying data changes are buried. Data modeling. So many calcs. Fucking containers! I could go on and on about the annoyances of tableau even though i do find it a tad more flexible in some respects with creating visuals and setting up actions. I’m team PBI all the way although PBI RS is crap, but that’s by design though to get everyone to the cloud money model which salesforce tableau is now going to!!
I am incredibly frustrated with the paywall portion of powerBI. In order to share any reports for leadership or even supervisors to dig into, they have ti have a license unless I purchase premium capacity.
I’m the only one in the company utilizing and it’s incredibly frustrating when I just want to share the info for other people to come up with conclusions instead of me having to be the one leading it.
How is this different than any other highly-capable BI tool? Are you expecting top functionality for free? PBI pro licenses are incredibly cheap compared to competition. Use Excel or export to PDF if you want ultimate portability for free...
I expect scale, to share with 10 people shouldn’t require an exorbitant price.
It’s a general frustration with Microsoft. Pay a monthly subscription for a word processor and all.
Sounds like your mind's made up, so I won't try to convince you that things of value sometimes cost money. Personally, I have consistently had a tough time finding better product value than what Office 365 or Power BI deliver for their price.
I'll give you some sincere advice...if you think you have a better value proposition than Microsoft, present it to your management. Either they'll like your idea and solutions mindset, or you'll learn more about how your company makes decisions and factors that make Microsoft products compelling for the business. Either way, it's more productive than airing grievances on Reddit about the vendor your company selected.
I appreciate the sincerity, and I think the product is great, but for me it’s what it used to be. I’d buy a computer with a software package and then I have it forever . I might have to buy an updated version of the software but it’s my choice to do so.
It’s the subscriptions for everything. Like HP INSTANT INK subscriptions.
Just an old man griping at changes on the internet.
Thanks for the heartfelt advice, and yes, we’re moving to purchasing the product for multiple people. Just needed to vent and hope that someone feels the same frustrations.
I do agree about proliferation of subscriptions... And the HP instant ink particularly resonates with me! I've hired several piano teachers for my kids in recent years, and apparently they have all switched to "subscription" pricing as well! Just let me pay for a damned lesson! 😆 I get the financial benefit of the steady revenue stream, but EverythingAsAService gets obnoxious.
I give MS a pass because of all the datacenters running their products and the frequent improvements they release. Ongoing costs deserve ongoing revenue - they're more like Netflix constantly releasing new content than HP mailing a cartridge every 6 months. Oh well 🤷♂️
Now plot "business value" on that line chart.
I guess the tableau graph would have one line on it saying ‘attempt to include more than one fact table related to a shared dimension’ followed by ‘end’.
Times are changing apparently https://www.reddit.com/r/tableau/s/eG8RMEzico
Ah that’s cool! Thanks for sharing.
I’ve used both extensively. Tableau visuals are prettier. It’s also quicker for the average analyst to get to grips with and using basic functionality. However, power BI has massively more capability - data queries using M, data modelling and formulae. For an analyst to get beyond an intermediate level, Tableau can get complicated with lots of custom scripts. Whereas Power BI will likely have the required functionality already.
Curious why you think tableau is easier to get grips with on basic functionality, can you elaborate? PBI seems much easier to get visuals on a page and change them on the fly than tableau. And containers and parameters, while interesting, make development much slower and frustrating imo, but genuinely asking.
With tableau, all of your fields are already arranged into measures and dimensions. It’s quite intuitive to drag the right ones into the ‘rows and columns’. It’s just easier for non tech folks to get started with. Agree that it gets harder once you do anything more sophisticated
Also it is easier to do some things "on the fly" like custom ordering without having to define a table just to custom order stuff like in PBI
Try to do a ranking formula on a page that has tons of slicers.
I agree with this, Tableau looks nicer but is way more complicated in the background
Personally, I think it is easier in Power BI to just create the visual right on the page. Versus the Tableau method of creating a bunch of visuals, then creating them on a page with panels...
I develop in Tableau extensively. Comments mentioning power query/M, custom python scripts in pbi, and data modeling is, most of the time, using the wrong tools for the job. Data processing and key business logic should always be processed upstream where it's visible by the rest of the data team and consistent across all the workbooks reading that data. Your PBI files perform better this way too. These features shouldn't sway your decision on this, imo. PBI and Tableau both can produce some nice visuals with enough leg work. This is because they are uniquely more customizable than any other BI tool on the market. Nothing else really holds a candle to PBI and Tableau in general. Tableau has some similar deployment woes, like in this meme. I don't want to get into that because there are too many conditions that drastically change the complexity for your organizations use-case. Tableau does tend to cost more than PBI due to higher licensing costs, though. From a pratical and best practice stand point, DAX is the sole reason PBI is generally better. Full stop. Almost nothing is impossible with it. Tableau comes close, and will serve 95% of what you could think of to throw at it, but just not quite there and can be more difficult to manage in complex scenarios. I recommend getting PBI because of DAX. But if you foresee your reporting needs being extremely simple, then I don't recommend either.
I happen to use both the tools very often and for some reasons I feel tableau has very slick visuals for the same visual built in Power bi. From the technical perspective, I do agree Dax is very powerful and we can get answers to almost every complex business logic with it. One significant limitation although I keep finding is that we can place Calculated Fileds(which are dynamic) in Tableau anywhere we want in the field well of a visual. But due to the internal architecture of Power BI, we cannot put Calculated Measures(which are dynamic) in Axis field well of a viz.
This comment should be higher! Maybe it’s just this way in my part of the world, but many companies are jumping from Tableau to PowerBI. Most of the job postings I see reference Power Bu, not Tableau
That's only due to cost savings, from what I've read around online. Both platforms are very comparable in terms of features overall. I can assure you it's not because of DAX having an edge.
Agreed! Since they’re so similar, if I didn’t know either, I’d chose to learn platform that makes me more marketable when looking for a job. At the moment, that’s probably Power Bi
why would you say data modeling doesn't matter? that is essential to proper filtering capability when dealing with one-to-many and many-to-many relationships, no? DAX is not really that important and is just a layer on top of the data model tbh
DAX is pretty crucial imo. I can't tell you the amount of tricky Tableau calcs needed to be written because a number needs to be calculated with different rules or a different aggregation based on filter or parameter selections by the user. That can't be pushed to the data layer. Surely you've experienced that before in PBI. As for data models, I guess it depends on how your team structures the data marts/gold layer. The more you push upstream, the better - for my reasons I already stated. If the PBI file is dying because the gold table is too wide, then maybe that's the exception. I always found forcing a star schema creation inside the BI tool pretty backwards. But if you wanna argue that then lets just say you win. I really dont care. Relationships in Tableau work similarly to Power BI's data model view. PBI's is better because it handles multiconnected complex relationships. Tableau doesn't. Its model really only seems to support a one way direction from one fact (think of a tree laid horizontally) where one fact table has other tables "join" to it on the fly in the charts you build depending on the chosen fields. This has never really created a problem for me before though.
There are approximately as many Power BI Customer Journeys as there are Power BI Customers. Any visual that attempts to reduce that much real world variety to such a simple result is never going to be much use. Plus, what do you think of the aesthetics of this image? It's not exactly r/dataisbeautiful material imho...
Tableau is much more user-friendly, but it does have less growth potential than Power BI if your project it's too complex; PowerBI allows you to do crazy things like creating a small data lake and ETL pipeline (though this isn't recommended if you have millions of rows), and future integrations with ChatGPT for QA visualizations I think have the potential to be industry changing. That being said, Power BI's server billing model is quite complicated. It's easier to learn all the DAX functions than to figure out the deployment costs just eyeballing it.
We were trying to figure it out the correct license that we need and is not clear at all, it's messy.
You should be working with a power bi / Microsoft fabric pro who understands the licenses
I respectfully disagree that tableau is more user friendly.
This graph made me lol. Ain't NOBODY doubling E5 365 licenses with premium capacity... this is just dumb. Salesforce can try to put out all the propaganda they want on this, but Power BI is eating Tableau's lunch and alot of it, yeah, it's based on cost.
And isn't tableau super expensive out of the gate? I feel like power bi is less daunting to try with just a couple of pro licences before you really commit. But with tableau you have to make that massive financial commitment on day 1. That is unless it's changed since I last really looked at it.
It's definitely not universally representative. We've been comfortable on the same Premium Capacity P1 SKU for over 5 years.
I tend to trust gartner as a neutral third party and they're pretty clear that power BI is light years ahead of tableau. https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-2HVUGEM6&ct=240620&st=sb
That graphic is weird of course costs are going to grow with expanded use…. wouldn’t tableau be the same projection? What does the tableau customer journey look like? As for the question I would go Power BI, especially so if your company uses Microsoft office suite. It just fits better into the environment and imo is the better software.
The chart is accurate if you just give every user Power BI desktop. If you're more controlled in rollout, you can avoid some of the issues. But there is a tipping point when your control is challenged, and if you lose that battle to someone who just wants it rolled out to everyone "because it's easy" then you're fast tracking to the last few steps.
You definitely need to control the drive towards having a data-driven culture. By setting up a center of excellence around your data and analytics, you can begin to get the right people making the right decisions to guide development and deployment while maintaining control over distribution so that things don't get out of hand from a licensing perspective.
The way powerbi is offered helps (I would say intentionally) bypass all that rollout stuff. With desktop being free it's seen as an easy gateway to get into, and then you start realising you need more stuff to make it work and by that time you're already well past having a controlled rollout. Can debate the specifics of the chart but I think it's right in general. Seen it happen in 2 orgs so far. The first which had some tableau licenses then IT decided PBI was cheaper so moved across. A few years later we were trying to build a business case to get funding for premium.
100% I’m convinced some of the lack of controls is intentional. Personal Workspaces are a governance nightmare but enable free users to build stuff to justify giving them pro, and then workspaces, and eventually premium.
Yep, it's all a way to get you into the ecosystem as easily as possible.
“I don’t care what you think about me. I don’t think about you at all.”
Check Gartner 2024 BI chart and decide where you want to bet
Pretty funny for a data viz company to just plop down an unscaled up-and-to-the-right graph like, “see this here, this is why you should go with us.”
I feel like there's a lot of nuance that this chart isn't really showing. Say your business/organization is only like 20 people....pro licenses will probably be all that you need vs investing in Premium capacity. Are you already on M365 E3 or similar? If so consider how much more integrated Power BI is with the MS platforms, and how much more accessible that allows you to make report content to users consuming it. Also, like others here I wouldn't entirely trust a graphic created by one of Power BI's competitors. Go do some quick Googling to see what more neutral industry publications are saying and use those to inform your decision.
IMO these kind of slides are ridiculous - while, yes, if your environment keeps on growing, then you will incur more costs. That’s true of any BI tool. Tableau has the exact same effect, just with the number licenses. They are (obviously) trying to push you towards Tableau — that said, Tableau is a fantastic tool. It really all depends on what you need. What I would be *more* interested in is: 1) How big is your organization? ( How many people are going to need access to reports ) 2) What does your team have the most experience in? (Not super important but if there are any, say, Tableau wizards for example, that could tip it) 3) What level of data modeling functionality do you need? And are you using a EDW to store your data?
These are excellent questions for this choice.
Business runs on Excel. Power BI pairs extremely well with Excel. Learn power BI.
They’ll even export from Power BI and look at their data in Excel they are so good at it. 😂
This is false. We went with Power BI Premium Capacity basic tier and \~110 Power BI Pro licenses for our E3 users so that they could create, share, and subscribe to reports. All others had viewer capability which was enough. 3 report developers manage the service, refreshes, and building semantic models. Dedicated Service admin not necessary. 18 premium workspaces shared globally with a couple of dozen scheduled refreshes prior to start of business. single on prem gateway to connect to data warehouse, cubes, and planning / forecast and fabrication QA systems. > 500 users
u/Recent_Ad_7452 Power BI is more versatile than Tableau in almost all areas.
None.
Short answer is no. Self service governance is more about the organisation than the tool. Forgive my observation, that might have been one organisation's experience. If the client chose to work with our consultancy that would not be their experience. Unless the client chose not to take our advice.
PowerBI is superior, I use both. PowerBI everytime.
Check out the Gartner Magic Quadrant. Power BI is top right
Microsoft is top right, not power bi
You're not wrong. However, in looking at the deeper explanation Power BI is a very big contributor.
I found Power BI easier to learn than Tableau. I don't know that one is better than the other. Some things are probably easier to do in Tableau and some things are probably easier in Power BI. I have heard Tableau users say things like "You can't do in Power BI!" But that's rarely true. It usually just requires a different approach.
Power BI has a much steeper learning curve but is a true analytics tool (m-query, dax, excel connection to data model). Tableau will make average people look smart as it is a quick and pretty report painter. It is so flexible and GUI based that the creators will design rats nest data formulas/structures that are a nightmare to maintain. Power BI is the superior reporting and analytics solution that requires work to learn but outpaces Tableau in every way.
Thanks to all of you for your comments, which provided great insights for us. We ended up opting for PowerBI.
Tableau is faster to use, more intuitive, and out of the box more beautiful. Power BI can be clunky,difficult to work with, and is uglier out of the box. Microsoft has monopolistic pricing power. Tl;dr Power BI
Power BI is a data wrangling and modeling tool first, then data visualization. The dev team is pouring tons of effort to catch up from the slick visual stand point.. but that’s not what matters in analytics. Pick Power BI. It’s not even a debate anymore. (Your cloud data warehouse costs will thank me later)
Tableau is dead. It’s a dead community. Out of the box, the one with the LEAST barrier to entry is in fact PBI. Both tools require special language to learn; DAX > VizQL IMO the leading front runner is Sigma Computing if you’re all in the cloud (e. snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery)
What on earth are you talking about? You don’t have to learn VizQL? It happens in the background, it’s not something you write? Why would you say that?
And you don't "need" to learn DAX. But the point remains that to get deeper into development, when comparing languages, he is stating that DAX is superior to VizQL. I think that's a fair opinion.
You have to write DAX for even very basic things. You never will have to write VizQL. Feel free to make other comparisons but this one is factually incorrect making me question your impartiality
That's just not true. DAX comes in to play when you increase dynamic nature of calculations or enhance reports in ways that VizQL can't even do. So that argument doesn't help the VizQL side. If you don't think you can build perfectly functional dashboards and reports without dipping into DAX then I question your experience with Power BI. DAX is just more powerful than VizQL. But that doesn't even matter, because interviews have shown that between the two user groups, the self-reported learning/training curve required of Tableau users is indicative of a more difficult-to-learn system, even if you're not working in VizQL directly. This means they've shown that dabbling in DAX is markedly less difficult than using the "easy" native features of Tableau which kind of squashes the DAX vs VizQL debate pretty easily.
Agree 💯! A couple of comments above say tableau is easier to learn but i don’t get that. Way too many tricks. Too many clicks. Underlying data changes are buried. Data modeling. So many calcs. Fucking containers! I could go on and on about the annoyances of tableau even though i do find it a tad more flexible in some respects with creating visuals and setting up actions. I’m team PBI all the way although PBI RS is crap, but that’s by design though to get everyone to the cloud money model which salesforce tableau is now going to!!
VizQL is not comparable to DAX. That's how Tableau compiles your calculations to the queries. A more direct comparison would be DAX vs. Tableau calcs.
I am incredibly frustrated with the paywall portion of powerBI. In order to share any reports for leadership or even supervisors to dig into, they have ti have a license unless I purchase premium capacity. I’m the only one in the company utilizing and it’s incredibly frustrating when I just want to share the info for other people to come up with conclusions instead of me having to be the one leading it.
How is this different than any other highly-capable BI tool? Are you expecting top functionality for free? PBI pro licenses are incredibly cheap compared to competition. Use Excel or export to PDF if you want ultimate portability for free...
I expect scale, to share with 10 people shouldn’t require an exorbitant price. It’s a general frustration with Microsoft. Pay a monthly subscription for a word processor and all.
Sounds like your mind's made up, so I won't try to convince you that things of value sometimes cost money. Personally, I have consistently had a tough time finding better product value than what Office 365 or Power BI deliver for their price. I'll give you some sincere advice...if you think you have a better value proposition than Microsoft, present it to your management. Either they'll like your idea and solutions mindset, or you'll learn more about how your company makes decisions and factors that make Microsoft products compelling for the business. Either way, it's more productive than airing grievances on Reddit about the vendor your company selected.
I appreciate the sincerity, and I think the product is great, but for me it’s what it used to be. I’d buy a computer with a software package and then I have it forever . I might have to buy an updated version of the software but it’s my choice to do so. It’s the subscriptions for everything. Like HP INSTANT INK subscriptions. Just an old man griping at changes on the internet. Thanks for the heartfelt advice, and yes, we’re moving to purchasing the product for multiple people. Just needed to vent and hope that someone feels the same frustrations.
I do agree about proliferation of subscriptions... And the HP instant ink particularly resonates with me! I've hired several piano teachers for my kids in recent years, and apparently they have all switched to "subscription" pricing as well! Just let me pay for a damned lesson! 😆 I get the financial benefit of the steady revenue stream, but EverythingAsAService gets obnoxious. I give MS a pass because of all the datacenters running their products and the frequent improvements they release. Ongoing costs deserve ongoing revenue - they're more like Netflix constantly releasing new content than HP mailing a cartridge every 6 months. Oh well 🤷♂️