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Adaptive Insights vs Birst vs Tableau Enterprise comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of Adaptive Insights is 0.8%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Birst is 0.5%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tableau Enterprise is 20.2%, down from 23.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Reporting Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Tableau Enterprise20.2%
Adaptive Insights0.8%
Birst0.5%
Other78.5%
Reporting
 

Featured Reviews

Andrew Rosenberg - PeerSpot reviewer
Adaptive scales well, simple to create new budget versions and models
For the organization I used to work at, it streamlined the process of creating budgets. It's very simple to create a new version and do some more modeling based on your need for planning things like headcount, other expenses, and revenue, everything is configurable within Workday. So that made it easy. Reporting was pretty easy to set up as well. It streamlined the amount of time it took to do the budget as well as kind of making it simple to implement a rolling forecast process. So, it really was more just a productivity increase and time shortening for the budgeting and forecasting process.
Rick Hutchinson - PeerSpot reviewer
The dashboards and Visualizer are valuable.
The administration module was built using flash. It is clunky and outdated. By “clunky” I mean that it sometimes becomes confused and throw an error when I’m making a change. To clear it up, I will have to log out and log back in. We knew going into our purchase that the UI for the admin was not the strongest part of Birst at the moment. Power users often depend on the web services to complete admin tasks and the web services are robust. Birst knows they need to improve this area of their system and have been working on that. They began improving usability overall with the the front-end UI that report writers utilize and did an excellent job with that so I have good reason to expect the admin module UI refresh to be solid as well. From what I understand, the planned changes are more significant than a simple UI refresh also.
Uzair Faruqi - PeerSpot reviewer
Ease of developing dashboards and receiving strong technical support have enabled efficient data visualization
Introducing custom features, such as NLP-based reports, is not very good in Tableau. My MD has been asking us for a way to write in natural language to request reports that the system should generate, but that isn't very effective with Tableau. As a developer, I can develop an on-demand report in Python quite easily, but exposing a REST API on the Tableau platform is not a very easy task. AI enablement is an area for improvement for Tableau, and that is something they might have to work upon. I have heard that ThoughtSpot is quite better in this regard, but the cost of ThoughtSpot is much higher. ThoughtSpot has lots of natural language-based report generation features that Tableau lacks.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Automated reporting."
"Forecasting changes that instantly flow through all financial statements."
"Changes to corporate structure, account codes are updated in all versions including prior years, hence "one-version of truth" as claimed."
"It's very stable."
"The integration with our payroll system to complete staff modeling during our budget and forecast processes."
"It's very simple to create a new version and do some more modeling based on your need for planning things like headcount, other expenses, and revenue, everything is configurable within Workday."
"We utilize planning on a daily basis, therefore we find it to be the most valuable product for our organization."
"The important feature is integration with source data. It connects to various ERP systems, including Workday, Intact, and others. It can also import actuals and compare them to PlanPoint quite easily."
"Dashboards and self-service reports. These are widely used by customers in the EPM domain."
"One of the most valuable features of Tableau is that it's a visual analytics solution, not just a dashboarding solution. Compared to Power BI, which is a dashboarding solution, there are no limitations with Tableau. For example, when you add a chart or a map to Power BI, it has a 3,000-point limitation. When you try to track your whole vehicle on the map, you only see the first 3,000 rows on the map, and Power BI doesn't tell you which part of the data is shown on the map. But Tableau doesn't have any limitations, which means that you can see five million data points on a map. It starts the project by creating the visuals that directly converts to SQLs. In that way, all the components have no limitations. When we compared Tableau to Power BI, we also found Tableau to be more fancy. Fancy means you can create more visual graphics and more visual dashboards. With Power BI, this isn't so—it's just some tables and some simple charts together. Tableau is more for business users who want to analyze data. Tableau can directly connect the analytics systems, like R or Titan, and get the results in screen, so it's a good solution for analytics scientists. It has some predefined capabilities to understand the data."
"Tableau is highly scalable. Now that they've introduced Hyper, you can create an extract of more than 5 million rows in minutes and then do your analysis."
"Tableau is good for routine dashboards, and it has integration with Slack, through which it can send you daily updates."
"The best thing I like about Tableau is that you don't have to go for creating; it is calculated free."
"The maps and colors and interface are all fantastic."
"It's a very good, flexible product, and it's easy to learn."
"Its visualizations are good, and its features make the development process a little less time-consuming. It has an in-memory extract feature that allows us to extract data and keep it on the server, and then our users can use it quickly."
"It has made the reporting stage simple and enabled us to focus mainly on the ETL part"
 

Cons

"Adaptive Insights has a limit of 1,00,000 rows for HTML reports. It should be improved because we will have multiple dimensions that need to be populated to enhance the image."
"The upload feature exists, but isn't terribly useful."
"Users continue to become more advanced and are looking for more advanced solutions."
"Adaptive Insights could improve the data designer interface to make integrations easier to set up."
"Being able to drill down when using OfficeConnect needs work."
"The integrations could be simpler. It takes quite a bit of internal and IT know-how to set up."
"Better user interface (UI)."
"Their customer support team is slow to respond and not extremely confident."
"Customer support takes lot of time to get a solution."
"The look and feel of the tool itself, including the dashboard features and data visualization, could be improved. The graphs in Tableau also have room for improvement."
"Tableau is a company that does not respect partners."
"I would like to be able to set the parameters in a more specific manner."
"I don't have the ability in Tableau to create a tooltip and see the picture of a piece of jewelry or watch that is a best seller."
"I also work as an SME on the platform side. Tableau is very nice and jazzy for the end-users, but there are pain points for the admins. Performance is something about which we hear a lot of complaints, such as the dashboard doesn't open in time. It performs well on the desktop but not on the server. I know that there is always a limitation when it comes to a huge amount of data or the complexity of the calculations, but we often hear from end-users about the performance on the server side. It is easy to drag and drop all the columns and do what we want, but if it is not going to load better on the server, users are not going to like it."
"From a customer's point of view, I have noted that after the acquisition by Salesforce, the customer service for Tableau has declined significantly."
"It should offer better features for customization."
"Introducing custom features, such as NLP-based reports, is not very good in Tableau. My MD has been asking us for a way to write in natural language to request reports that the system should generate, but that isn't very effective with Tableau."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Everything is negotiable, but this solution is low cost compared to others."
"Adaptive Insights' pricing is relative to its peer competitors. It's certainly competitive compared to a spreadsheet template that you build in Excel. It can be expensive if you need to have 100-500 budget holders giving input and building financial plans. However, in that case, it becomes an extremely good bargain. Compared to its competitors, it offers an excellent value."
"Ensure that you have the proper pricing plan in place."
"It's affordable."
"Licensing seems to be worth the cost considering the efficiency Adaptive brings."
"Adaptive Insights' pricing is reasonable."
"Prior to purchasing licenses, make sure you understand which users will only need planning and which users will need both planning and OfficeConnect."
"Pricing is in line with other cloud-based EPM tools. It is a subscription-based model based upon the number of users and site type if it's an admin or end-user type thing."
"Please negotiate on the price and purchase the latest version."
"Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis."
"Be careful with the Tableau Viewer's licenses, and stay with the right number of users."
"For the use and the capability of the software, it's $70 per month, and that is quite inexpensive."
"In Indian Rupees, Tableau costs about 30,000 to 40,000 per year."
"Paying for users you never setup or buying expensive desktop licenses for users who can solve their users with web editing on the server are the two biggest expenses."
"Tableau has core-based and user-based licensing, and it is tied to scalability. The core-based licensing is about you buying a certain number of cores, and there is no restriction on the number of users who can use Tableau. The restriction is only on the number of cores. In user-based subscription licensing, there is a restriction on the number of users. Big companies and government organizations with a lot of users typically go for core-based licensing. User-based subscription licensing is a more common model. It has user roles such as creator, explorer, and viewer. A creator is someone who does the groundwork or development work. An explorer is someone who is into middle management but is not technically savvy, such as a category head. A viewer is like a typical decision-maker in senior management. For each role, Tableau is priced differently. The viewer role has the minimum price, and the creator role has the highest price. This pricing is available on their website. Everybody can see it."
"Tableau is free."
"We are on an annual license which costs us $1,400 which is very expensive. Microsft BI is less expensive."
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Comparison Review

it_user6330 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 2, 2013
MicroStrategy vs. Tableau
After a recent presentation, several attendees asked me about the applications of Visual Insights and Tableau. Many companies are investing in both tools and are trying to figure out the right tool for specific applications Tableau has found its sweet-spot as an agile discovery tool that analysts…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Real Estate/Law Firm
7%
Healthcare Company
7%
No data available
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
University
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise10
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise12
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business117
Midsize Enterprise66
Large Enterprise182
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Adaptive Insights?
It's very simple to create a new version and do some more modeling based on your need for planning things like headc...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Adaptive Insights?
12 years ago, it was very affordable. Workday has definitely increased its price since it acquired Adaptive a few yea...
What needs improvement with Adaptive Insights?
The integrations could be simpler. It takes quite a bit of internal and IT know-how to set up. So, there could be roo...
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Also Known As

Workday Adaptive Planning, Adaptive Discovery , Workday Adaptive Planning
No data available
Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

1. Cisco Systems 2. Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated 3. Deloitte 4. DocuSign 5. Dropbox 6. Electronic Arts 7. Fender Musical Instruments Corporation 8. Fitbit 9. Fossil Group 10. Groupon 11. Hilton Worldwide 12. HP Inc. 13. Intuit 14. Johnson & Johnson 15. LinkedIn 16. Lyft 17. McAfee 18. Medtronic 19. Netflix 20. Oracle 21. Pandora 22. PayPal 23. Pinterest 24. Red Hat 25. Salesforce 26. ServiceNow 27. Slack Technologies 28. Spotify 29. Symantec 30. Tableau Software 31. Twitter 32. Workday
Citrix Systems, Jive Software, SunnyD, Toshiba Medical Systems, Cisco OpenDNS, RB, Sunny D, Vertafore
Accenture, Adobe, Amazon.com, Bank of America, Charles Schwab Corp, Citigroup, Coca-Cola Company, Cornell University, Dell, Deloitte, Duke University, eBay, Exxon Mobil, Fannie Mae, Ferrari, French Red Cross, Goldman Sachs, Google, Government of Canada, HP, Intel, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Macy's, Merck, The New York Times, PayPal, Pfizer, US Army, US Air Force, Skype, and Walmart.
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