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Microsoft Power BI vs Plotly vs Tableau 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 May 2025, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of Microsoft Power BI is 26.7%, up from 25.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Plotly is 1.3%, down from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tableau is 22.2%, down from 23.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Reporting
 

Featured Reviews

James Balbach - PeerSpot reviewer
Robust system consistently elevates data visualization and seamlessly updates with user-driven advancements
Power BI is a general-use visualization system. I can express the performance of our network through high-level key performance indicators. It allows me to show detailed improvements in quality and safety and patient experience. I create improvement dashboards for task forces and work teams. I have built analytic dashboards that guide analytics, enabling research and dataset manipulation.
Hassan Kamkar - PeerSpot reviewer
An interactive and easy-to-use solution that can be used to create dashboards
The solution cannot be deployed on the website and shared with others through its own platform. We need a third-party platform to share the application that we develop. In Tableau and Power BI, we can simply share the website with others as long as we use the paid version. However, for Plotly, we need to deploy our app on a cloud-based service like AWS or other third-party websites to share with others.
Nattawat Choosuwan - PeerSpot reviewer
Real-time data connection enhances workflow and decision-making process
An area for improvement in Tableau is the Explorer license type. It is not as useful, and the product owner should enhance its benefits or clarify its role. Additionally, the frequent updates with many versions available for download can be confusing and could affect stability. They should avoid providing access to older versions on their website.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I like the downloadable visualizations a lot. I think that they give the user a very nice starting point in creating awesome dashboards, with the right way to tell their data story."
"The most valuable features are the flexibility, how many ways you can interrogate the data, and the the graphical visualization."
"The main feature I find valuable is the possibility to work with an extensive amount of data."
"The most valuable feature is definitely the visual aspect and the DAX capabilities to virtually do anything."
"The solution makes it easy for me to develop reports and publish them."
"The advantages of Microsoft Power BI stem from the fact that it is really easy to use. The drag and drop facilities provided by the product are good."
"Its ease of use is most valuable."
"The solution is stable with reasonable performance."
"It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten."
"The level of interactivity that the product provides is valuable to me."
"When reviewing and interpreting data, I typically examine it in a tabular form to understand its structure. However, when explaining or presenting the findings to others, I often use visualization tools such as Plotly. These tools allow me to create visual representations of datasets."
"It most valuable feature is its ease of developing visualizations, not just charts and graphs."
"Partner support is very good."
"While using this solution I have found the valuable features to be ease of use and the visualization. It is a complete solution."
"The Web Editing capabilities allow us to grant end users enough capabilities for them to do self-serve discovery without the added cost of needing to get everyone desktop licenses."
"Easy for beginners to use"
"It is very good for data visualization. It has very powerful visualizations and is easy to use."
"It is very easy to create dashboards, charts, and graphs."
"The platform's most important feature is predictive analysis."
 

Cons

"The default parameters of the prompt could be improved by including a dynamic option."
"Right now, their premium pricing is keeping us out of the premium market. The premium price per user just doesn't make sense for us, but we haven't reached the limit of 500 users to justify the premium."
"I found data cleaning in the solution to be quite difficult. If I could add a feature, I'd include Excel's Flash Fill function. This allows you to set a formula for one row and column and automatically apply it to thousands of rows, making data sorting much easier."
"Technical support could be a bit better."
"It was easy to implement Microsoft Power BI into our existing infrastructure, but integrating it with Oracle Cloud was very difficult. The integration with Oracle Cloud required us to build a sophisticated database replication process because the APIs for Oracle Cloud are very restricted in terms of volume, depth, and complexity of queries. However, the part of implementing Power BI into our infrastructure was very easy. It required almost no tech input because it was all part of Office 365. To overcome the integration issues, we developed an extract and update process, although it was quite complicated and involved a lot of IP. Power BI excels in integrations and its ability to handle various data sources. It would be beneficial if it could integrate more seamlessly with cloud interfaces like Oracle Cloud, although I understand the challenges with Oracle's policies on database access. Another area for improvement would be enhancing error messaging, especially when working with Dataverse and M Code for automation."
"The visualization aspect, while being the most visible to business users, also happens the be the weakest point in the entire Microsoft BI stack."
"When you go to the cloud, its licensing is not intuitive. It is a little bit complex. When you have to purchase a new license, it is difficult to understand on their website what exactly you need to pay and how you can group. It is something that is applicable to all Microsoft products. They're not always so simple and clear when it comes to licensing. Their support can also be better in terms of explaining how they resolved an issue and what steps they took to resolve it. They are able to resolve the issue, but they can be better at explaining the approach they took to resolve the issue. It could have something in the direction of machine learning. It can have some kind of integration with machine learning where you can ask for some reports with natural language."
"The handling of the workspaces can be made more granular for user access rights. It can be managed a little bit better in terms of the connection to Active Directory so that we have more granular access rights. I am not sure if this is really possible or if we can solve it differently, but we need a lot of workspaces, and we are not sure how we can deal with it from the access rights perspective."
"The tool needs to improve its pie charts. Regarding Plotly, I find the online documentation somewhat challenging to navigate, especially when dealing with many parameters. Searching through thousands of parameters can be a tedious and less straightforward process. While the documentation is available online and serves its purpose, I often encounter difficulties in finding the information."
"I believe that the prices of the tool's paid services could be on the premium side, so the pricing model can be considered for improvement."
"The solution cannot be deployed on the website and shared with others through its own platform."
"The charts in Tableau are quite limited."
"Creating empty extracts is not easy."
"It is not so great when it comes to data exchange/integration, data mining, etc."
"Formatting controls could use some improvement."
"Licensing and pricing options could be made better so that more users would be able to use it."
"The user story model is the most deceptive part of Tableau. It is a big marketing option, however, the reality is that it is not enough."
"The architecture should be improved to better handle the data."
"Could have more integrations with different platforms."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would rate them 4 out of 5 for their current pricing. There are no additional costs to the standard licensing fees."
"In the beginning, the solution cost approximately $1,000 per month, we have a Microsoft startup subscription. There is a subscription pack for startups company which we are able to have for one year."
"I have never worked on licensing, but I have heard that it is reasonable."
"The price for this solution is reasonable. However, there is an additional cost if you want to publish the dashboard privately."
"Power BI's price is reasonable, especially if you can put it in some bigger package and use it with other products. The value of a solution doesn't just come from its features as a standalone product. The price should also reflect how easy it's to set up, clean data, and integrate with other solutions."
"My company needs to make monthly payments towards the licensing costs attached to the product."
"We have a premium Power BI license in-house that's quite an expensive license. It's $10 a month for four users and then I think 35,000 at the premium rate."
"I used a two months free trial to see if it had what I needed."
"It is an open-source tool. My company hasn't explored Plotly's premium services yet, but I believe the prices could be on the premium side."
"I only use the free tier of the product."
"It is a bit overpriced."
"Tableau is an expensive solution."
"I wish there was more of a subscription model with the pricing when it comes to Tableau, so you can get all the latest version upgrades/features if you pay monthly/annually."
"One of the biggest drawbacks of Tableau is the price, it is expensive. The price should be reduced."
"I downloaded the solution online for free."
"This license is on a yearly basis."
"It is more expensive than other solutions."
"Its price is a concern. It is more expensive than Power BI. My guess would be that it is $1000 or less per year. We might go for Power BI in the future because of its umbrella with Microsoft licensing. It is much cheaper for us to use Power BI, and some folks will go in that direction because they don't want to pay the higher license."
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Comparison Review

it_user79932 - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
40%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
Government
5%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Computer Software Company
8%
University
7%
Educational Organization
43%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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...
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...
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 ...
What do you like most about Plotly?
It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Plotly?
It is an open-source tool. My company hasn't explored Plotly's premium services yet, but I believe the prices are on ...
What needs improvement with Plotly?
I believe that the price of the tool's paid services is on the premium side, so the pricing model can be considered f...
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 ...
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...
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....
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

SSRS, SSAS, MSBI, MS Reporting Services, Microsoft BI Tools, Microsoft Big Data, Power BI Pro, MS BI
No data available
Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
Google, Goji, VIT, Smpl Bio, U.S. Air Force, C12 Energy, New York University
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 Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle and others in Reporting. Updated: April 2025.
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