Tableau, Qlikview, or Power BI?

Nowadays, there are lots of excellent products for turning fast-paced digital information into easily understood images and insights. So the common questions are: Which BI tool should I choose? Which BI tool has the most promising future? While waiting for this year’s Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platform, I’d like to share with you with Jen Stirrup’s opinion from a user or customer respect.

In her article Business Intelligence Barista: Mixing your choice of BI Coffee with Tableau, Power BI or Qlikview?, Jen compared Tableau, Qlikview and Microsoft Partner PivotStream from business criteria, data visualization criteria, and technical criteria. The comparisons are very clearly delivered in three tables for each category. She gave her scores in Excellent, Good, Yes/No, Limited for these three BI tools. If you would like to find why she gave the related scores, don’t forget to read her comments at the far right column.

Jen included the following as business criteria: time to implement, scalability, enterprise ready, long-term viability, free online help, big data support, size of partner network. As for visualization criteria, she compared data interactivity, visual drilldown, offline viewer, dashboard support, web/mobile clients etc. (It seems that Tableau has a “wow” factor in terms of eye-catching interactive visualization.) Last but not least, she discussed technical criteria in aspect of data integration, OLAP cubes, data modeling, data mining/science, multi-dimensional, xVelocity support, PowerPivot suppot, API, etc.

At last, Jen concluded that “There is no wrong choice, if it is the right choice for your organization.” The key to make decision on BI tools is to find out user requirement or buyers’ needs. I can't agree more on that. We need to know what we really need and what are the priorities before we go shopping for solutions.

Although Jen mentioned Power BI solution was not included in the comparison since it is still in preview, she mentioned Power View and Power Map as comparing to the other products. I wish that she could include product functionality and learning curve for developers for these three products as well.

Further reading for more qualitative analysis of BI market: 2013 Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI.