Looker vs Microsoft Power BI vs Tableau Enterprise comparison

The compared Google and Microsoft solutions aren't in the same category. Google is ranked #7 in EBT , with an average rating of 8.0, and holds a 8.0% mindshare in the category. Microsoft is ranked #1 in BIT , with an average rating of 8.0, and holds a 14.1% mindshare. Additionally, 80% of Google users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

Looker

Read 19 Looker reviews

2,582 Views
878 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

Microsoft Power BI

Read 326 Microsoft Power BI reviews

22,361 Views
13,864 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Tableau Enterprise

Read 307 Tableau Enterprise reviews

18,844 Views
2,827 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Looker

Microsoft Power BI

Tableau Enterprise

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Looker, Microsoft Power BI, and Tableau Enterprise based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Salesforce, Qlik, MicroStrategy and others in Embedded BI.

To learn more, read our detailed Embedded BI Report (Updated: October 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Embedded BI

October 2025

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Helped 869,202 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

Embedded BI Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Looker	8.0%
Tableau Enterprise	26.6%
Qlik Sense	12.2%
Other	53.2%

Embedded BI

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Microsoft Power BI	14.1%
Tableau Enterprise	10.3%
Amazon QuickSight	4.9%
Other	70.7%

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Tableau Enterprise	10.3%
Microsoft Power BI	14.1%
Amazon QuickSight	4.9%
Other	70.7%

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

Featured Reviews

Kishore Jhunjhunwala

Sr Analytics Consultant at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

A cloud solution for operational reporting but is expensive

Some basic feature that is available in other reporting tools is missing. Looker has the ability to show more than 5,000 rows for operational reporting. Some reporting tools allow users to scroll down to see more than 5,000 rows, but in Looker, you have to download the entire dataset. Looker should consider adding a scroll-down option to allow users to view large datasets on screen without downloading them. Looker has some options for granting users access as viewers. However, viewers cannot download the entire dataset. Only superusers can download the whole dataset on the Explore screen. This is a big limitation, as you cannot give any user viewer access. You can give access to superuser access, which is a cost to the company.

Read full review

Shoury Priyanshu

Senior Manager, Strategy & Consulting at Viacom18 Media Pvt Ltd

Facilitates seamless data aggregation with some outdated visual elements hindering user appeal

Real-time data integration is an area for improvement. Although I've worked on several solutions involving real-time integration, it's not very user-friendly and often lags, especially with over a million data rows. This makes Power BI difficult to manage as loading times can reach one or two minutes, which is problematic today. There are challenges with scalability, requiring multiple pages in dashboards to manage these issues. Visualization could be improved as it appears outdated. Users, especially newcomers, find it unappealing and not user-friendly.

Read full review

Uzair Faruqi

Head Of Analytics at Mjunction Services

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's quite effortless to navigate through various applications and review their updated data in real-time."

"I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. I didn't face any issues with stability."

"Looker allows you to generate the most optimal SQL queries in a DC through UI actions. We had signed a contract with Google Cloud to use BigQuery. That was the primary reason we adopted Looker. It works better with BigQuery than any other BI platform. We also like how this tool was developed. It was designed with an eye toward microservices architecture."

"We can centralize all our data models."

"The product is easy to use."

"From a developer's perspective, the way the functionality's being handled is great."

"The stability of Looker has been good since I have been using it. However, it depends on what components are being used."

"With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability."

More Looker pros

"The solution is stable with reasonable performance."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is an easy-to-use tool."

"My primary use is for view of the dashboard."

"What I like most is that I can do everything in Power BI that I can do in Excel."

"The best features of Microsoft Power BI include its integration with other Microsoft products and its ability to connect applications within the Microsoft ecosystem."

"There is also a chart store where we can download charts, which is extremely useful."

"Microsoft BI allows us to connect to any database or any dataset."

"I like the fact that Power BI lets me use Excel data. At least 90% of my state data is in Excel spreadsheets. Having the ability to just attach a spreadsheet as a data source is very, very important. It's also good for training and teaching. Sometimes you don't always have access to a live production database, so having a spreadsheet with sample data is always nice."

More Microsoft Power BI pros

"The UI part is the best. The end-users can easily get started with Tableau Desktop or Tableau Online because of its user-friendliness."

"The best part about Tableau is the visualization."

"Tableau's most valuable features are its ability to summarize data, provide dynamic controls for navigating different charts, and showcase historical data trends. I appreciate the option to colour-code different charts for improved customer experience."

"Tableau is extremely good at dashboard creation, providing clear and concise visual presentations."

"When compared to Power BI, Tableau has more readily available resources."

"Tableau reduces manual labor and resources, providing cost-effective solutions for our operations."

"Data Interpreter: Which can identify issues or potential errors with your imported data."

"The ability to present data is very effective, providing great impact and good online information."

More Tableau Enterprise pros

Cons

"Integrations with other BI tools could be better."

"The product does not have documented material."

"Stability needs improvement."

"It needs to be more user-friendly."

"Looker doesn't connect to Excel, which is a huge disappointment because a lot of data is presented in Excel. Also, it can't consume data directly from REST APIs, which is necessary. Looker needs to expand its horizons when it comes to data sources. The inability to connect to different data sources is hampering our use cases. Currently, it only has an ODBC connection that connects to a database. It needs to connect to other data sources, such as Excel, APIs, and different platforms."

"The integration with different databases must be improved."

"The visualization capability of the product is limited."

"The main area of concern in Looker is probably related to blending the data from the different sources, including the data present internally in the company and on the cloud."

"The initial setup is a little bit technical."

"I would like for there to be some type of user manual that shows steps on how to navigate the solution."

"Microsoft BI's visualization could be better. Though Power BI's visualization has steadily improved over the years, it's not on the level tools like Tableau and SAS or some of the more expensive products on the market."

"Microsoft BI can improve some of the visual level filters or visual functionality, that are available in other BI tools, such as Tableau or Qlik Sense."

"The one thing that I noticed specifically was the graphical features, and some of the analytical features. They were stronger on the Tableau side."

"I think that there should be visuals for financial reporting videos. It should just be a plug and play because there is a lot of coding that goes into it with different clients."

"It is kept very current, and there is an update literally every month. However, the interface changes quite randomly with no documentation, which is difficult at the domain and architectural level where you're planning things and engaging the business. Things change frequently, and you wonder where has the button for the new report gone. They should provide better documentation on interface changes. It should be better optimized. It is supposed to be a data integration tool, but it is doing relatively simple queries. It has its limitations. For example, you can only pull a number of columns. So, there is room for optimization on its ability to integrate multiple data sources. The desktop tool is very memory-intensive, and again, this is not documented clearly. It requires a heavy CPU and memory use, and it causes your operating systems to become unstable. I would like to see the ability to create datasets within Power BI. Microsoft is promoting Azure as a cloud solution, but it is dependent upon a desktop component, which seems a little bit deceptive. Data set is the basic element that you report from, but it has to be created on the desktop and then published to the cloud. So, you're in the cloud, and you create a data structure or the data flow, but you can't report from that. You have to leave the cloud, go to your desktop, create the data set on your desktop, and publish it to the cloud. You go back to the cloud and create your report by using that published data set, which is very non-intuitive. If you go to the Microsoft Power BI community, this is a common complaint across the entire community."

"The look is simple, and could be a little more professional."

More Microsoft Power BI cons

"They need to improve the icons and the filters, because they look too old, resembling Excel from 1997."

"If you mainly need a tool for BI reporting, it's not the best option. Tableau needs better abilities to generate simple reports, integrate, create databases, and work with data lakes."

"From a customer's point of view, I have noted that after the acquisition by Salesforce, the customer service for Tableau has declined significantly."

"Its documentation can be improved so that a user can get a good hands-on experience. Tableau is well documented, and on their website, there are a lot of tutorials that are available for free. I started my learning process through those tutorials, but there are certain loopholes in those tutorials, which only got filled through a couple of good YouTube channels that talk about Tableau. YouTube helped me a lot. So, the documentation could be better, I understand that it is evolving day by day, and with more usage, there would be more such documentation."

"To be the best in the market, Tableau has to improve its user interface and also look into developing implementing the best machine learning algorithms."

"The architecture should be improved to better handle the data."

"The data preparation could integrate better with Tableau."

"If they could add global filters in the stories, more chart types, and default colours, it would help."

More Tableau Enterprise cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is cheap."

"The price of Looker usually depends on the solution's provider, but it is usually cheaper than the other products in the market. Looker is offered at different prices for different companies."

"Looker is expensive and could be made better by reducing it."

"It's not cheap, but it's not expensive for big companies."

"I do not have to make any payments to use the solution."

"We have premium licenses, but you can use it for free. You can share the content with anyone else, so you can use it for free."

"We are end-users, and we don't take care of the prices and accounting. We get a product and pay the fee to our internal service provider, but its price should be reasonable. Otherwise, they wouldn't have bought it."

"Microsoft BI is very cost-effective and this is why we use it."

"Compared to others, I think it is reasonable."

"You don't need a license for development, but if you want to publish to external users, you need a license. The licensing is very costly, but I think that since the advantages and benefits of Power BI are so high, people are willing to pay. I can't blame them."

"The solution's costs are quite reasonable given the range of features provided."

"We're charged a monthly subscription fee of 500 rupees per person."

"Microsoft BI for desktop is free to use, and you can download and use it."

More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice

"The solution's licensing is based on user-basis. It depends on the business ROI it offers. It's not on the higher side or too cheap; it falls in the medium-cost range. The price is determined by user usage, so the cost will also increase as the number of users increases."

"At $70 per month, I think the price is a bit scary. I have a small consulting firm in Ghana, working in about 15 different African countries, and when it comes to our part of the world, $70 a month is a lot of money for software."

"If they want to be competitive in the market, the price must be improved."

"It is a bit difficult for some people when they hear $70.00 per month, as some solutions are available for less than $10.00 or for free."

"Tableau is not as cost-effective as Microsoft BI."

"I like the payment model. For the people who need to create, they buy their licenses. Everyone else can use the free Tableau Viewer. This is much better than some of the competitor products, which require full licences for everything."

"The pricing of Tableau should be better to remain competitive in the market, especially when compared to alternatives."

"ROI is very high, but it requires a data preparation/blending tool."

More Tableau Enterprise pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user79932

Senior Manager - BI Head at NVidia

Feb 4, 2015

Comparison of SAP BO, Tableau, QlikView, Cognos, Microsoft, OBIEE and Pentaho

1. SAP BO/BI Enterprise scalability Security Ease of use Semantic layer 2. Tableau Visualization Data discovery Turnaround time 3. IBM Cognos Enterprise scalability Security In-memory feature 4. MS BI - Flexibility 5. Pentaho - Open source but still enterprise grade 6. QlikView Data…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

11%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

Government

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

10%

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	134
Midsize Enterprise	57
Large Enterprise	165

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	117
Midsize Enterprise	66
Large Enterprise	182

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Looker?

With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Looker?

I do not have to make any payments to use the solution. In the beginning, Looker may work fine for its users. If adva...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Looker?

The visualization capability of the product is limited. From an improvement perspective, the product should have more...

See all answers

Seeking lightweight open source BI software

There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I wou...

See all answers

Is Power BI a complete platform or only a visualization tool?

Power BI is an advanced visualization tool oriented to big data with a very complete set of widgets to visualize info...

See all answers

How does Oracle OBIEE compare with Microsoft BI?

Oracle OBIEE is great in allowing design and creativity per the individual needs of the organization. Dashboards are ...

See all answers

Seeking lightweight open source BI software

It depends on the Data architecture and the complexity of your requirement. Some great tools in the market are Qlik ...

See all answers

Tableau vs. Business Objects - Which is a better solution for visualization and analysis?

Both tools have their positives and negatives. First, I should mention that I am relatively new to Tableau. I have be...

See all answers

Which would you choose - Tableau or SAP Analytics Cloud?

Tableau is easy to set up and maintain. In about a day it is possible for the entire platform to be deployed for use....

See all answers

Comparisons

Databricks vs Looker

Compared 14% of the time

Qlik Sense vs Looker

Compared 10% of the time

MicroStrategy vs Looker

Compared 8% of the time

IBM Cognos vs Looker

Compared 7% of the time

QlikView vs Looker

Compared 7% of the time

More Looker Competitors

Amazon QuickSight vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 11% of the time

Databricks vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 7% of the time

Domo vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 5% of the time

KNIME Business Hub vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 4% of the time

Oracle OBIEE vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 3% of the time

More Microsoft Power BI Competitors

Domo vs Tableau Enterprise

Compared 8% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs Tableau Enterprise

Compared 6% of the time

Databricks vs Tableau Enterprise

Compared 5% of the time

SAP Analytics Cloud vs Tableau Enterprise

Compared 4% of the time

Julius AI vs Tableau Enterprise

Compared 3% of the time

More Tableau Enterprise Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Looker

September 2025

Download Looker product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI

September 2025

Download Microsoft Power BI product report

Buyer's Guide

Tableau Enterprise

September 2025

Download Tableau Enterprise product report

Also Known As

No data available

SSRS, SSAS, MSBI, MS Reporting Services, Microsoft BI Tools, Microsoft Big Data, Power BI Pro, MS BI

Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online

Overview

Looker is a powerful data analytics platform that empowers businesses to explore and analyze their data in real time.

With its intuitive interface and robust features, Looker enables users to easily create and share interactive dashboards, reports, and visualizations.

The product's advanced data modeling capabilities and seamless integration with popular data sources make it a top choice for organizations looking to gain valuable insights from their data.

Google

Microsoft Power BI is a powerful tool for data analysis and visualization. This tool stands out for its ability to merge and analyze data from various sources. Widely adopted across different industries and departments, Power BI is instrumental in creating visually appealing dashboards and generating insightful business intelligence reports. Its intuitive interface, robust visualization capabilities, and seamless integration with other Microsoft applications empower users to easily create interactive reports and gain valuable insights.

Microsoft

Tableau Enterprise offers powerful features for creating interactive visualizations, dashboards, and maps, including drag-and-drop functionality and easy integration with multiple data sources, promoting real-time collaboration and self-service analysis.

Tableau Enterprise stands out with its ability to create user-friendly, interactive visualizations, making it pivotal for business intelligence applications. Users benefit from its seamless connectivity and advanced analytical functions, facilitating data blending and storytelling. Despite a complex learning curve and high licensing costs, its features like geospatial analysis and efficient content distribution drive its indispensable value for data-driven insights. Enhancements in predictive analytics and support integration with machine learning tools further its capabilities across industries.

What are the most valuable features?

Interactive Visualizations: Enables users to create engaging reports.
Drag-and-Drop Functionality: Simplifies data analysis processes.
Data Integration: Offers seamless connectivity with multiple sources.
Real-Time Collaboration: Supports synchronous data sharing.
Advanced Analytics: Provides predictive analytics and geospatial analysis.

What benefits and ROI should users look for?

Informed Decision-Making: Facilitates data-driven insights.
Efficiency in Reporting: Streamlines dashboard and reporting tasks.
Cost-Effectiveness: Despite high licensing, value in robust analytics tools.
Customizable Options: Tailors analytics to specific needs.

Tableau Enterprise is widely used for business intelligence, supporting industries like healthcare, telecommunications, and finance. Organizations utilize it to analyze performance indicators, operational insights, and financial analytics, enhancing decision-making through interactive reports and real-time data integration.

Salesforce

Sample Customers

Yahoo!, Etsy, Kohler, Hipcamp, Hubspot, Kickstarter, Venmo, Dollar Shave Club, 600+ customer

Accenture Adidas Aetna AIG Airbus Alibaba Allstate Amazon American Express Aon AT&T Audi Bank of America BASF Bayer Berkshire Hathaway Boeing Coca-Cola Comcast Cisco Coca-Cola Dell Disney Emirates Equinix FedEx Ford GE Google H&M Home Depot Honda IBM Intel JPMorgan Chase Kellogg's Kroger L'Oréal McDonald's Merck MetLife Microsoft Nike Oracle P&G PepsiCo Procter & Gamble Prudential Financial SAP Siemens Snapchat Spotify Starbucks Target Toyota T-Mobile Unilever Visa Walmart WeWork World Bank Xerox

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.

Find out what your peers are saying about Salesforce, Qlik, MicroStrategy and others in Embedded BI. Updated: October 2025.

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