The amount of data created have skyrocketed. More data was generated in the last two years than in the entire human history. In fact, according to IDC, the world's data generated will grow from 29 Zettabytes in 2018 to 175 Zettabytes by 2022. Data is the new oil. Do data back your organization's business decisions? Enterprises that leverage data stay ahead of the competition by making better business decisions, increase the quality of products & services, and enhance customer experience. How does an enterprise derive insights from such a massive volume of data?

Business Intelligence and Analytics tools help enterprises understand trends and derive actionable insights from data to make strategic and tactical business decisions. These tools ingest a large volume of structured and unstructured data from multiple sources, transform it, identify patterns, and help gain business insights. But the question is, how do you know which business intelligence and analytics tool are suitable for your enterprise?

Selecting the right BI tool for your enterprise makes all the difference in deriving insights and make better business decisions. So how do you start and choose?

Power BI vs. Tableau vs. QlikView

Whether your organization is starting or in the middle of selecting the data visualization tools, I am sure you might have already heard about Power BI, Tableau and QlikView – top 3 popular BI tools. Data visualization capabilities no longer differentiate these BI tools. Differentiation has shifted to how well these platforms support augmented analytics. Augmentation leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence for data preparation, insight generation and explanation to explore and analyze data more effectively.

Let us start to look the features and advantages of the afore-mentioned BI tools.

1. Power BI

Power BI is Microsoft’s analytics and data visualization tool that helps enterprises analyze and visualize massive volumes of data. The product was launched by Microsoft in 2011.

• It brings together apps, connectors, and software services to turn structured, semi structured, and unstructured data into visually immersive and interactive insights.
• Power BI helps you easily connect your data from different sources – Text files, streaming data, Microsoft Excel, on-premises data warehouses, or cloud-based data warehouses, etc.
• It is a robust enterprise-grade tool enabling extensive modeling and real-time analytics.
• Native integration with Microsoft technologies enables powerful data preparation and data querying capabilities.

Power BI is positioned as a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms. For the last 13 consecutive years, Microsoft is holding the spot as a Leaders in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant Leader in analytics and business intelligence platforms.

Power BI is increasingly adopted by global organizations, including Fortune 500, enabling everyone to make data-driven decisions and drive data culture.

2. Tableau

Tableau is a data visualization tool that excels in helping organizations turn data into actionable insights through interactive dashboards and stories. The product was launched in 2003.

• Tableau’s intuitive interface allows non-technical users to quickly and easily create dashboards that provide insight into a broad spectrum of enterprise information
• It helps convert raw data into meaningful business insights and provides interactive dashboards.
• It includes native connectors for important enterprise platforms such as Microsoft Excel, MySQL, Google Analytics, Amazon Redshift, etc.

3. QlikView

QlikView, a data discovery and analytics platform, provides data insights from a large volume of data sets. It was launched in 1993.

• Broadly connects to both on-premises and cloud data sources.
• Native connectors to enterprise applications, including Microsoft Office, Azure, Snowflake, SAP, and others. Connectors need to install separately by downloading from the Qlik website.
• Being an older application/tool, dashboards are limited in interactivity and customization. However, it certainly brings advanced dashboarding features such as drag-and-drop data through QlikSense - Qlik’s SaaS-based platform.

Features Comparison

Which BI Tool has an edge?

Overall, Microsoft's Power BI stands out ahead of Tableau and QlikView compared to the features mentioned above and requirements. Each tool has a few strengths, similarities, and differentiation that might suit your organization's needs. The budget also plays a crucial factor when choosing the tool.

Why our customers prefer Power BI?

We have been helping several enterprises deploy Power BI as their key analytics and data visualization tool, and they prefer Power BI over the other two for the following reasons:

1. Ease of operating – Microsoft Excel Workbook background and seamless integration with Microsoft Technologies – Office 365 and Microsoft Teams.
2. Power Query – Connect data from multiple sources due to hundreds of built-in connectors.
3. Cost-effectiveness - Power BI has less expensive membership fees compared to the other two.
4. Azure Synapse Analytics – Helps build systems of intelligence.
5. Microsoft Power Platform – Go from insight to action with few clicks.
6. Security – Only BI tool with built-in data loss prevention capabilities leveraging Cloud App security and Microsoft information protection.
7. Mobile Experience - Best in class mobile experiences with Power BI Mobile

What is your opinion of the Power BI vs. Tableau vs. QlikView comparison? Which features matter to you the most? Who is the winner? Please share your feedback by leaving a comment below.

Raghava Vedangi

Vice President - Azure Analytics