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Business Intelligence Battlecard: Power BI, Tableau, And QlikView

Written by Maria Gorini | Mar 25, 2019 11:00:00 PM

The rising of analytics and business intelligence adoption in companies is unstoppable, the number of analytics experts and data consumers is growing in a higher rate than resources in IT departments. So, analytics is evolving to a more user-friendly mode, using automation, natural language or voice processing; and to a most wide range of features including augmented analytics with ML-enabled, augmented alerting and anomaly detections being the new trends in the market.

STRENGHTS VS CAUTIONS 2

Many companies are willing to cover this need, and these are the three that do it better with its strengths and cautions:

Microsoft – Power BI
  • Strengths:
    • Low license cost
    • Good Sales experience
    • Ease of use for complex types of analysis
    • Powerful visuals
    • Robust user community
    • Supports complex data models with integrated advanced analytics
    • Comprehensive product vision: integration of all capabilities (augmented analytics, new AutoML features, Azure cognitive services, support for existing Reporting Services reports…)
  • Cautions:
    • Cloud only in Azure
    • Power BI Report Server enables users to share reports (not dashboards) and lacks some of the ML capabilities found in Power BI SaaS
    • Agile self-service analytics (Power BI) today is a different product than Scheduled-distributed reporting (Reporting Services) but they will be one in a short-term roadmap.
    • Some of the scale-up options require multiple products; for example, advanced conversational analytics require Cortana.
Tableau
  • Strengths:
    • Easy visual exploration and data manipulation while visualizing
    • Customers are fans
    • The company is growing in terms of revenue
  • Cautions:
    • Product gaps: Support for querying multiple fact tables and complex schemas in a single data source is absent from Tableau’s product. It does not support scheduled, bursted reports in a variety of output formats.
    • The quality of support is declining, the upgrading difficulty is raising.
    • Bad sales experience: expensive prices and lack of flexibility in contracts.
    • Agile self-service analytics (Power BI) today is a different product than Scheduled-distributed reporting (Reporting Services) but they will be one in a short-term roadmap.
    • Data scale-up options require multiple products; for example, advanced conversational analytics require Cortana.
Qlik – Qlik Sense
  • Strengths:
    • Product features and extensibility: augmented features as Cognitive Engine, Insight Advisor that help users find useful insights faster, automatic chart generation, …
    • Active user community
    • Product vision: extends and enhances its platform as the market evolves
  • Cautions:
    • QlikView and Qlik Sense require multiple products to complete the offering (Qlik Data Catalyst, Qlik Nprinting, …)
    • Bad migration experiences and a support service below average
    • Slight decline in interest in Qlik.

Source: Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms. Published 11 February 2019 - ID G00354763 -By Analysts Cindi Howson, James Richardson, Rita Sallam, Austin Kronz...