Tableau vs Power BI vs CRM Analytics: What’s the difference?


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.

Author:
Edward Gay
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