Tableau vs Power BI

Tableau vs…

• September 2008: I’m building dashboards using Excel with VBA and ActiveX and decide that there’s gotta be something easier than this. So I start to look around and hit upon a copy of Tableau v4. Intrigued I ask my manager if I could test “this cool new tool I’ve tried at home called Tableau”
  ”Tab-what?” Came the response

• July 2011: Hired by a charity to revamp their visual solution after a calamitous start with another firm wanting to install SAP Xcelsius (later to become SAP Dashboards), I suggest Tableau. So they ask me to perform a 3-month evaluation testing all the available tools including Qlik View and Tableau v6.1, and after an intense 3 months decide, “yeah Tableau seems right for us”

• October 2025: My current employer is asking “after 9 years, is Tableau still right for us”

So over time I’ve gone from “Tab-wha?” just four years after Tableau was released to “Tableau is too expensive lets look at Power BI”.

I was tasked with creating the evaluations comparing Tableau to Power BI, and so, if you’ve found yourself in a similar situation, take a look at these