This week we have been trying out a couple of different Tableau alternatives: Power BI and CRMA. After having spent a day on each of them, testing out both of their data prep and dashboard creation capabilities I couldn’t help but compare them to Tableau.
Here is a list of pros and cons when comparing each of them to Tableau:
Power BI
The pros:
- The canvas is very easy to use. Being able to drag and snap sheets into place makes dashboard creation much easier.
- Within Power BI is the Power Query Editor which is a very easy to use data prep tool. Whilst Tableau has Tableau Prep, it’s nice to have both tools contained within one programme.
- Web scraping for data is very easy and intuitive to do within Power BI.
The cons:
- Building visualisations is less intuitive compared to both Tableau and CRMA.
- Formatting visualisations can be very difficult as the options seem to be hidden behind lot’s of drop-down menus.
- Lack of calculated fields within the Power BI Desktop software, with calculations having to be made at the data preparation level.
CRM Analytics
The pros:
- Building visualisations is very intuitive, it makes building charts such as the Sankey diagram incredibly simple in comparison to Tableau.
- Building up a dashboard is very simple as all sheets snap into grid blocks.
The cons:
- Data prep in CRMA is very limited in comparison to what you can do in Tableau Prep.
- Dashboard formatting is quite limited.
Conclusion
Overall, while both software's had some interesting features that made them stand out, I think Tableau covers all the bases that any analyst could ever need and has thought a lot more about what tools an analyst needs to succeed in creating a good visualisation.
I look forward to exploring both Power BI and CRMA further to discover the full capabilities of these tools.