Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, and Qlik Sense — The Heavyweights of Self-Service BI
According to Stephen Few, a data visualization consultant at NASA — “Data visualization shifts the balance towards greater use of visual perception, taking advantage of our powerful eyes whenever possible”.
With so many data visualization tools available in the market, which one should you pick? Well, in this blog post, we will talk about the most popular ones — Microsoft’s Power BI, Tableau and Qlik Sense — on several parameters to help you decide the better one for your organization.
In the present scenario, the responsibility for analytics has shifted from IT to business analysts, with support from database administrators and data scientists. As a result, BI has changed from generating monthly reports from the system of record, to interactively discovering, sharing forecasts, and answering business questions based on data from a wide array of internal and external sources. Instead of making decisions in months, businesses that have adopted self-service BI can decide and take action in a few days.
But figuring out which self-service BI platform is suitable for your organization can be a tricky task. The best fit will be determined — from your business users’ point of view and your IT infrastructure.
Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, and Qlik Sense are the heavyweights of self-service BI. Here we take a look at these two platforms, and what factors might be important in determining which one is better for your organization.
Microsoft Power BI
Microsoft introduced its visualization tool in 2015 and named it as Power BI. Since its inception, it has been consistently recognized by the leading technology research firm- Gartner magic quadrant. Currently, Power BI is offered along with the office 365 suit to further add to its popularity.
It has become very popular among business analysts in small and big organizations. Someone who has profound knowledge of excel mostly prefers Power BI as a business user and technical users are prone to adopt the Microsoft office stack.
When it comes to building and displaying, Power BI is the most suitable tool as if offers visual-based data discovery, data preparation, interactive dashboards and augmented analytics.
It is available as a Power BI Reporting Server (PBRS) option or as a SaaS option running in the Azure cloud in Power BI Report Server. It is user-friendly, and you don’t have to put more time and effort into creating and sharing reports.
When talking about cloud, Power BI requires no such investments or infrastructure support, but for on-premise, you will need support regardless of the size of the organization.
Let’s look at some of the key features of Power BI, which make it stand out from the competition.
Attractive visualization and powerful data modelling
One of the prime features of Power BI is information dashboards which can be personalized to meet an organization’s exact needs. BI reports can be easily embedded into dashboards for enhanced user experience. You can effortlessly create in-depth and interactive visual analysis to create powerful data storytelling and lead your business users to do data discovery. You can choose from both in-built visuals or community-created custom visualizations. With perfect visualization, you can efficiently perform drill-downs and drill-ups.
As far as data modelling is concerned, Power BI has a query editor, an integrated ETL tool that helps you to shape data from multiple data sources to create robust data models. It has a powerful Data engine that is well suited for complex enterprise use cases. Power BI is also integrated with Python and R language for advanced analytics, visualization, and data mining.
Seamless Integration with Applications
Being a Microsoft product either cloud or on-premise- the integration with Power BI is seamless. Users get more architectural options around integration. Power BI integrates easily with both legacy and modern enterprise applications, for influential analytics and reporting capabilities; and leverage all available data in a visual manner quite easily. It comes with various in-built connectors which help to easily connect and join multiple on-cloud, on-premise, and streaming data sources for data preparation. It also supports integration with Cortana, Excel, and other applications and services. It allows you to take out dumps from Power BI in the excel format to go ahead with further analysis, which makes it very easy to work together with Excel and Power BI.
Robust Access control and Security
Power BI has set the industry data standards with the compliance verified by third-party audits and certifications. With built-in governance, Power BI offers row-level security which grants the ability to assign access rights at various levels. It keeps your data secure, giving people access to the data and insights they need. You can securely share the insights within or outside the organization over email. And this simplifies data management and ensures that your data assets are protected
DAX for balanced performance
DAX (data analysis expressions) scripting language refers to expressions for making calculations. Power BI use DAX expressions for creating data models to maintain simplicity and balanced performance. It is a language developed by Microsoft to interact with data in a variety of their platforms like Power BI, PowerPivot and SSAS tabular models. Users can compare it with Excel formulas. Using DAX will truly unleash the capabilities of Power BI.
SaaS offerings
Power BI comes with a structure of scalable and flexible SaaS offerings. The best part of using Power BI is that there is no usage license fee with installation and no configuration costs. Users don’t need to worry about updates at regular intervals. As per your usage, with Power BI, you can easily upscale and downscale your investments as needs and requirements change. This really saves your time to benefit from your purchase. You don’t have to manage and maintain expensive servers. Users don’t need to be concern about downtimes and interruptions. This makes it a very cost-effective solution for your enterprise requirements.
Solid product roadmap ahead
Microsoft’s Power BI has extensive features that can be added as the organization grows in its BI journey. With a monthly release cycle, relentless enhancements are made available. Microsoft keeps a close watch on requests concerned with the features and prioritizes those most widely requested. Microsoft Power Bi licenses come in different flavours- Power BI- Pro, Power BI- Premium and Power BI- Embedded. There are numerous Power BI communities available to users and admins which provide solutions and suggestions to a wide range of problems. So, If you are looking for a realistic estimate & execution plan in-line with your enterprise needs, then get in touch with Polestar Solutions.
Top industries using Power BI
- Consumer Goods
- Banking and Capital Markets
- Automotive
- Health
- Government
- Defence and Intelligence
- Insurance
- Retail
- Manufacturing
- Telecommunications
Tableau
Tableau Software is an American computer software company founded in 2003 by Christian Chabot, Pat Hanrahan and Chris Stolte, in Mountain View, California. The company is currently headquartered in Seattle, WA, USA. On June 10, 2019, Tableau was acquired by Salesforce in an all-stock deal worth over $15 billion. Customers have a fanlike attitude toward Tableau.
Tableau is an enterprise-scale business analytics platform with self-service capabilities for users. With Tableau’s easy to use dashboards, organizations get an interactive interface with a depth of colours, & visualization options, along with the robust analytics engine that delivers game-changing business insights on their data — fast. Tableau enables users to combine large data sources and access them with speed, reducing the reliance that they used to have on their IT team for reports. Tableau can be accessed with secure & native applications on both Android and iOS.
If your chief objective is data visualization, then Tableau should be your choice. Tableau is one of the popular visualization software in the market for Business Intelligence and analytics platforms. It offers easy deployment options, product support and product usability. It also gives users- Tableau community options to further make the work easy. Flexibility is offered by Tableau while designing dashboards.
Click Here For More Info: Microsoft Power BI vs Tableau vs Qlik Key Features
