TABLEAU Vs IT’s COMPETITORS
Tableau vs Spotfire
Tableau was founded in Mountain View, California in 2003. Since then, they’ve grown
to 23,000 customers and about $413 million in revenue. Spotfire has been around since the
early 90s but didn’t really take off until 2007, when the brand was acquired by TIBCO
Software. An exact customer count is unavailable, but at $1 billion in revenue, it’s safe to
say TIBCO has a larger product portfolio and a larger market share.
Both products target a wide swath of customers and industries, including:

Financial services

Science and agriculture

Healthcare

Manufacturing

HR

Media

Consumer goods

Education

Retail

Energy and utilities

IT

Telecommunications

Logistics/transportation

Public sector

Nonprofit
Tableau Power Users: SpaceX, Deloitte, Coca-Cola, Dell
Spotfire Power Users: Proctor and Gamble, Cisco, NetApp, Shell
Systems and Pricing
Tableau and Spotfire are available in several different configurations to match the number
of users you have and whether you want the software locally installed or hosted online. If
you plan to have more than a few users and deploy the solution across your company, you’ll
need to request a custom price quote.
Both vendors use a three-tier pricing structure, but they differ on a few points. Tableau’s
software is available in Desktop, Online, and Server editions. Here’s aquote from one of
their sales reps explaining the differences:
“Tableau Desktop is used to visualize and analyze data, create workbooks, visualizations,
dashboards, and stories. Desktop can then publish these to Tableau Server [or] Tableau
Online.
Server and Online allow you to safely distribute [assets] to the right people. You can edit
workbooks, visualizations, dashboards, and stories in Server or Online, but you can’t produce
new ones. Server and Online can be used as high-performance data repositories for Desktop
users.”
Spotfire is available in Desktop, Cloud, and Platform editions:
Unlike Tableau’s Desktop edition, which requires an upfront license, Spotfire’s Desktop
edition offers annual subscription pricing, even though it’s installed on-premise. Spotfire’s
portfolio also offers more continuity between tiers — you can actually build dashboards
and analytics applications in each edition, whereas Tableau primarily uses its Online and
Server editions to distribute and edit work created in Tableau Desktop.
Both products can scale access from a single power user to an entire company, and even
stakeholders outside of the company (investors, customers, partners, etc.).
Dashboards
The dashboard is the linchpin of a BI platform. Dashboards give users the ability to organize
data sources, reports, and objects in one central location that (ideally) stays updated in real
time.
Tableau lets users easily create interactive dashboards using custom filters and drag-anddrop functionality. Dashboards can be shared through Tableau Online or Server, or
embedded into wikis, corporate portals, or web pages. Options include executive
dashboards, operational dashboards, dashboard applications (e.g., a “home finder” web
app), and ad-hoc dashboards. Here’s an example of a Tableau Customer Dashboard:
Spotfire offers a similar dashboard experience: intuitive design and the ability to publish
completed dashboards through a zero-footprint web client. For less experienced users, the
Spotfire Recommendations wizard can suggest best-practice visualizations based on the
data you select (an advantage over Tableau, which doesn’t offer much help with templates
or default object placement). With the Spotfire 7 update, users can also apply visual themes
and branding to dashboards:
Also Tableau has the capability to connect to Api,Web Data Connector .
This helps to get live data feed from Social Media Sites like Facebook,Twitter,Instagram etc
This can be done through a connection on a Web Server from where Tableau reads the data.
Amongst its competitors, only Qlikview has this capability which is also very complex as it
requires Hard Core ETL coding.
Reporting and Analytics Capabilities
Tableau and Spotfire are both incredibly powerful when it comes to processing raw data and
spitting out clear business insight and visualizations. They both use a hybrid model that
consists of in-memory and in-database (or “live connect,” as Tableau calls it) analytics
architectures. Translation? They adapt to your local processing power and database size and
sync data quickly under almost any circumstance.
Tableau
Tableau covers data discovery, data visualization, geocoding, survey analysis, time-series
analysis, social analytics, and more. It integrates with the R statistical programming
language, and provides mobile BI access with touch-optimized features for tablets.
Unique Feature:

Data Preparation: Let’s you connect to “messy” spreadsheets and fix/configure data while
you sync. Pivots cross-tab data back into normalized columns, removes extraneous titles,
text, and images, and reconciles metadata fields.
Spotfire
Spotfire’s analytics capabilities include interactive data visualization, diagnostic analytics,
data augmentation, predictive/prescriptive analytics, content analytics, real-time event
analytics, location-based analytics, and other areas.
Unique Feature:
o
Content analytics: Decipher unstructured, text-based data from any source (e.g., CRM case
notes, support tickets, weblogs, social media feeds, emails); mix unstructured content with
other data to understand root cause and identify new opportunities.
Data Connectors
Business intelligence applications are built on the idea of aggregating and interpreting data
from outside sources, so they’re only useful insomuch as they integrate with data sources
and other business systems (like CRM or marketing automation), servers, and databases.
Each vendor provides a set of native data connectors, which means it can seamlessly pull
data from those sources without custom configuration or coding.
Here’s what you’ll get from Spotfire:
A few of Spotfire’s connectors for the Platform edition aren’t specified on this list (which
represents the Desktop edition): Apache Spark SQL, Cisco Information Server, and OData.
And here’s what you’ll get from Tableau:
As you can see, both solutions provide a good mix of big data, relational database, and cloud
integrations. Any databases or applications not listed would presumably require API
integration and/or middleware to sync.
Tableau does offer a handful of native connectors that Spotfire does not: DataStax, EXASOL,
Firebird, Google Analytics and BigQuery, Microsoft Azure, and SAP Sybase.
Tableau
Time to implement
Spotfire
Assessment score
Comment
Assessment score
fast
7
average
6
Good
6
Hardware limit
8
Price for Developer
$1,999
6
about $4000
5
Server License/user
Support fees / year
SaaS Platform
Overall Cost
$1K, min 10 users
20%
Core or Digital
Above Average
5
5
9
5
$500, vol.discount
12% or more
Spotfire Silver
High, needs R&D
5
5
9
4
Good for SMB
6
Excellent
8
Long-term viability
Fastest growth
6
TIBCO is viable
8
Mindshare
Partner Network
Tableau Public
Below Average
7
3
Tableau
Very Good
Very Good
8
8
Offline Viewer
Free Reader
8
Analyst's Desktop
Dashboard Support
Web Client
Mobile Clients
Visual Controls
Tableau Pro
Excellent
Excellent
Very Good
Very Good
9
9
8
7
8
Good, no MDI
8
Tableau
Excellent
8
Tableau Pro
5
Very Good
Excellent
7
8
Scalability
Enterprise Ready
Visualization Criteria
Data Interactivity
Visual Drilldown
UI Interactivity
Technical Criteria
Data Integration
Development
64-bit in-memory DB
Integration with GIS
Both increase
productivity
Spotfire is more
mature
Tableau is less
expensive
Tableau costs less
Spotfire is more
scalable
TIBCO is large,
public
Tableau Leads
Visual Analytics
5
Below Average
4
Visualization Criteria
Spotfire
Very Good
8
Very Good
7
Tableau has better
Enterprise Viewer
7
option
Spotfire Pro
8
Very Good
8
WebPlayer; best
9
Very Good
7
Very Good
8
Multi-Document
Good, no MDI
8
Interface!
Technical Criteria
Spotfire
Very Good
7 Tableau is a winner
Spotfire has API, SSpotfire Pro, API
8
Plus
Very Good
7
Very Good
7
Tableau:good
Data Mining
Multidimensional
xVelocity Support
PowerPivot Support
API
Best Feature
Total Score
Limited
Very Good
Good
Good
None
Easy Visualization
3
Limited
7
None
7
None
7
None
1 Large learning curve
Visual Analytics, S+
201
Mapping
Tableau reads SSAS,
7
infrastructure of
Cubes
1
1 Tableau is a winner
1
5
188
Tableau Vs Qlikview
In a competitive global business environment, performance-driven executives have seconds
to convince a skeptical audience. A typical business presentation may combine text,
graphics, animated charts and graphs, and interactive dashboards to sell its story. Thus, the
“visual elements” of the presentation play a vital role in adding clarity and comprehension
to complex business messages. Graphics-enabled presentations are evolving and becoming
more robust. Today’s business presentations often leverage advanced visualization tools
that make the brilliant stand out of the ordinary.
The modern-day audience is not happy with just glossy interactive graphics. They want
more—they want graphics that analyze the presented data and tell a story! So, the
graphics-heavy documents cannot simply contain visual elements; the graphics must be
neatly integrated to show insights or trends and patterns that are obviously visible to both
the expert and the novice. In this context, two visualization tools worth mentioning are
QlikView and Tableau, both of which have been defined as leaders in Gartner’s 2014 Magic
Quadrant. Both these tools have scaled beyond the average capabilities of embellishing the
text with glossy, interactive dashboards and ad-hoc reports.
QlikView and Tableau
Both offer above-average graphic manipulation tools in their arsenal, and also offer BI
capabilities for interactive analytics with segmented business data, though these capabilities
are limited in case of Tableau. However, QlikView and Tableau have some fundamental
differences that make them unique and appropriate for specific types of applications.
QlikView Plus Points
IDC reports that QlikView is one of the most popular BI tools —adding 14 customers per
working day across the globe. QlikView’s unique selling points are that it ranks highest in
customer loyalty, provides satisfactory performance, offers a wide variety of features, and is
known for its product quality and overall market position. QlikView is probably of the few
visualization tools that offers an integrated BI platform and comes bundled with adequate
demos, training manuals, and tutorials that can easily fascinate clients and new customers,
giving them insight in a fraction of the time they expect.
QlikView Minus Points
These observations may vary from user to user:
QlikView menus have too many tabs that lack a logical structure. Tableau has a cleaner,
clutter-free GUI.
An abundance of ineffective features like 3D charts, gauges, or faded bar charts exist, which
have no real business value.
The visual outputs require time-intensive formatting—not intuitive drag/drop as in Tableau.
The community development is slow and immature compared to that of Tableau.
Tableau Plus Points
The visualization capabilities of Tableau are diverse and highly insightful. Features such
as “word clouds” or “bubble maps” are great tools to enhance comprehension. The tree
maps provide the facility to add context for graphics. The tree maps are chiefly used to show
relative proportions of multiple categories of information. The capability for laying out a
dashboard via “overlaps” is also a very powerful feature. This feature enables efficient use
of screen space.
Other benefits Report sharing for free (with some hard data limitations) Instant connection
to more than 30 data types.It also supports cubes. Additionally it can also be integrated with
R .Tableau is excellent in mapping. It also has many ready-made drivers for many databases
Tableau gives a good pace of R & D–several technology upgrades a year Based on training
videos, blog/forum posts, and twitter buzzes – Tableau certainly leads the community
building efforts, compared to Qlik
Tableau Minus Points.
There is a lack of a single business view of information. An enterprise BI solution should
provide a logical metadata layer for creating a single definition of business entities such as
customer and revenue when the data resides in different formats in different systems.
There is no enterprise reporting, scheduling alerting and notification of time-sensitive
information. Tableau is slower than QlikView when it comes to its in-memory calculations.
Tableau vs. QlikView: Prime Differentiation
Tableau’s strength lies in enabling novice users to create instant, real-time dashboards.
Its intuitive, visually driven interactive data-exploration platform can easily transform the
ordinary business user into a “data superhero.” Powerful features like filters and drill-down
analysis are only matters of a few clicks. Tableau also enables seamless sharing of
dashboards on Tableau Server or Tableau Online. Like a good doctor, the Tableau executive
dashboard can provide a reality check for your business’ health, and can send alerts in
times of emergencies. The filter panels on a dashboard can facilitate further navigation of
the data with custom parameters, giving you greater control over your information. The
interactivity of these dashboards enables a powerful decision-support system to busy
executives looking for quick solutions to day-to-day problems.
Tableau Vs Power BI
Tableau is a data visualization software which allows the user to quickly create live
dashboards and reports, available across multiple platforms. The capabilities of Tableau for
deep analytics and visualization is unmatched in the BI industry. Connections to data
sources can be created live, or imported directly into Tableau.
Tableau is a more robust product and will give you more reporting options.
Options for charts and dashboard creation include:
Tree charts
Bubble graphs
Heat maps
Background Geo mapping
Products Offered
Tableau Desktop
Tableau Server
Tableau Online
Tableau Reader
Tableau Public
Pricing:
First year entry level: Starts at $1000 for one desktop user or $3,000 for one desktop user
with 5 cloud consumers
Three year pricing: One Desktop user: Starts at $2,000 One Desktop+5 Cloud: Starts at
$8,000
Additional Cost for adding in connectivity to databases (beyond local files) $1,000 for first
year and $2,000 for three years
Advantages:
Speed
Live or refreshable connection
Highly customizable, flexible analytics and visualization tools
Custom geocoding for advanced dashboards
Supported on multiple platforms
Front End calculations
Subscriptions for emailed dashboards
SharePoint Web part
Over 80 million data points on a chart
Disadvantages:
Cost
No ETL tool available
Power BI is newer and does not have quite as many features yet. However it is being
updated very quickly (every month), and is quickly catching up.
Power BI is a business analytics service provided by Microsoft. It provides interactive
visualizations with self-service BI capabilities, where end users can create reports and
dashboards by themselves, without having to depend on any IT and Database
administration
Power BI provides cloud based BI services - known as Power BI Services, along with a
desktop based interface - called Power BI desktop. It offers Data warehouse capabilities
including data preparation, Data discovery and interactive dashboards In March 2016,
Microsoft released an additional service called Power BI Embedded on its Azure cloud
platform.
PowerBI is a combination of robust business intelligence tools offered by Microsoft in
conjunction with Office 365.
Tools Offered:
PowerMap – 3D mapping experience used for exploring and navigating geospatial data
PowerPivot – create sophisticated data models and calculations using excel and DAX
formulas
PowerView – create reports and analytical views with interactive data visualizations
PowerQuery – discover and connect to data from public and corporate data sources
Pricing:
Purchased with Office 365, the Power BI package is $52 per user/month.
Advantages:
Data Modeling Diagram View
Up to 1,000 data points on a chart
Multiple platforms through App Store (limited)
O365 is included in PowerBI purchase
Disadvantages:
Slow
Minimal formatting and visualization in PowerView ability
Not very user friendly
Learning Curve for some features (e.g., DAX formulas, dimensional modeling)
Limited visualization for forecasting and statistical analysis
No SharePoint Web part yet available
The Bottom Line
PowerBI is best used for simple data visualizations or for Scorecards and Dashboards that
will not change significantly over time. PowerBI, and the Q/A feature specifically, can be
very valuable for users who are not interested in diving into data sets, but who are looking
for specific analytics, quickly. Another benefit to PowerBI is the value add of Microsoft Suite
in the purchase, making it a great value for businesses working with a smaller budget.
Tableau is a much faster and more flexible tool that works best for deeper analytics and
enterprise dashboard solutions. The flexibility available for creating a wide variety of
dashboards makes Tableau the optimal choice for business that need quick results from
reporting and analysis. Tableau also offers customizable geo-mapping, background images
and polygon maps for visualizing unordinary data models. Tableau would be most useful to
analysts and organizations that require fast adaptation to changes in their business, and
have multiple users who need constant access to this data.
Also the filter integration and application is smoother in Tableau as compared to Power Bi.
In both the tools, we can use sheets as action filter. The advantage in Tableau being that you
can modify the action filter to apply to a specific sheet/sheets. Also integrating parameters
and calculations in Tableau is much easier in Tableau as compared to Power BI.
Additionally the data sources supported by Tableau are much more than in Power BI.