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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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

"We can centralize all our data models."

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

"It is a pretty stable solution because it is a cloud-based product."

"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."

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

"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."

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

More Looker pros

"With Power BI, you're able to store your data within spreadsheets and SharePoints, and then have Power BI pull the data out and report on it. So we actually saved a ton of money not needing to load the data into databases, which is a big prerequisite for many other reporting tools."

"The most valuable feature is shareability, where we can publish work to the cloud and share it with team members."

"The capability to add custom visuals and create Power BI apps. You can package datasets, synchronization details, and dashboards into a single app."

"Reports, dashboards, and visualizations are most valuable."

"I find Power BI's reporting feature the most valuable. The solution has improved a lot. There are new features getting added day by day. In the past, they didn't even have the printing feature, but now they have it."

"The solution makes it easy for me to develop reports and publish them."

"I like data modeling. You can connect with your database, which is quite useful for me. It is a good tool if you have a large amount of data and you want to gather different data and interconnect it. The Power Query functionality is quite an interesting feature. If you have a query in Excel, you can also copy your query and run it in Power BI. Its dashboard is also very nice and not complicated. You don't need to be a developer to be able to use it. I am not an IT guy, and it is quite easy to use for somebody who is not an IT person."

"What Power BI is, is a whole collection of templates of small amounts of data that can be used to do something for a real world project, that can be easily set up and become the business intelligence environment or a data warehouse for a large amount of data, for a real world customer. That's what is remarkable."

More Microsoft Power BI pros

"Show Me is a feature to help with knowing which chart is an appropriate one for the selected variables, and it makes helps in creating appropriate visuals."

"It most valuable feature is its ease of developing visualizations, not just charts and graphs."

"Tableau is an advanced specialized tool. One of the best features I've seen is the lack of an intermediate semantic layer. I think that's an advantage compared to any other tool like BusinessObjects or Power BI, which are Tableau's biggest competitors."

"The best use case for us is the solution's integration with Salesforce because we are also partners of Salesforce."

"Tableau has greatly enhanced our organization's data-driven decision-making processes by enabling us to create visually compelling reports and dashboards."

"Tableau's visualization features let you present information insights quickly and practically. So it's something which I prefer with Tableau. In terms of reporting, I have to point out the sheer quality and function of the Tableau server, but the first impression is that it's a great visualization tool."

"The most valuable feature is the drag and drop, then the simplicity to build dashboards which allows us to provide more usable data to our customers."

"It's the ease of use. It is also a self-service tool so it decreases the burden on having centralized IT-type teams or developers."

More Tableau Enterprise pros

Cons

"The integration with different databases must be improved."

"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 visualization capability of the product is limited."

"The product does not have documented material."

"Stability needs improvement."

"Integrations with other BI tools could be better."

"It needs to be more user-friendly."

"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."

"here are some limitations with the data models needed to build the report."

"Integrating it with the physics build model or the engineering model should be included."

"Power BI doesn't support some open-source data sources that are new, such as SnowSQL, Iceberg, or ClickHouse."

"It is too slow. I hope in future it will be a comparable big data tool, such as, for example, Data Lake."

"The admin view could be improved by making it more simplified to manage a users' activity and other things."

"I am a SAP user and I would like this tool to have more connectors - and to more easily connect to - the ERP or SAP environment."

"Some kind of expression wizard, where the user can build a complex expression without any knowledge of DAX, can be a good addition to the product."

"In the future, Microsoft BI can be better by increasing user-friendliness"

More Microsoft Power BI cons

"Its price is a concern. It is more expensive than Power BI. The other thing that I never liked about Tableau is its ability to handle large sets of data. To present the data in the dashboards, we have to stage it up exactly like it is going to come into the dashboard. We use another tool called Alteryx that does that for us. So, we manipulate the data, get it staged, and then push it into Tableau. Tableau is terrible at handling large data sets, and we knew right away that we couldn't use Tableau to do data manipulation."

"Its integration with Microsoft products such as Teams should be improved."

"If you wanted to create something without making it an extra column in the data set, you can't just rename it to a more user-friendly short name."

"When it comes to large datasets, the data should be extracted faster."

"Firstly, the high cost of Tableau licenses makes it inaccessible for many mid-scale clients. Secondly, the server requires at least 128GB of RAM, which can be impractical for some systems. We need a dedicated system to use Tableau."

"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."

"Other tools are more competitively priced."

"The solution could use more features in data analytics."

More Tableau Enterprise cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is cheap."

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

"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."

"Remove the cost of a licence to show a dashboard within SharePoint. Why should readers of a dashboard have to pay to view? "

"Regarding cost, the initial investment wasn't too high, but ongoing licensing could add up."

"I am satisfied with its price. Its price is very less as compared to Tableau and QlikView."

"The pricing for the solution is relatively higher compared to other alternatives."

"Power BI is cost-effective compared to other reporting tools."

"Microsoft BI is not expensive."

"The price of Microsoft BI is expensive. We found the price of Tableau to be less expensive."

"The premium licensing is approximately $5,000 per month which is pretty expensive."

More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice

"Pricing could be better. I believe they should offer better pricing for deployment in small to mid-sized companies."

"The initial cost that is set according to CPU cores is expensive."

"The price of this solution could definitely be lower. It's quite expensive."

"We are on an annual license which costs us $1,400 which is very expensive. Microsft BI is less expensive."

"It is a bit overpriced."

"The price of Tableau is high, although there are different types of licenses available."

"Tableau's licensing is pretty straightforward and simple."

"The product's price is relatively inexpensive and manageable for enterprise-level companies."

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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