Hey folks,
I’m back with another blog around BI and what options are currently on the market. We all know that selecting a BI product can be difficult as they’re so similar where the only difference appears to be pricing. Hopefully I’ll be able to allay some doubt by providing a high-level overview of Power Bi and its competitors Tableau and QlikView. So, what is BI, in a nutshell it’s business intelligence to help drive insight from your data. Each of the below products can achieve this “simple” task and each have their merits and downfalls.
Power Bi
As you all probably know Power Bi is the tool that risual champions and the tool that risual uses on a day to day. It’s excellent at analysing vast amounts of data and delivering data driven insight. Not only this but with the host of visuals available these reports can look stunning and engaging. Utilising an already familiar language anyone can pick up this product for free and get started. For larger organisations other licenses are available which is where there are some downfalls especially around the Premium licensing model. Here however is where most people turn away, what you need to understand is that you get so much more with the Premium license. You can increase you’re refresh rate to essentially 1440 times a day every minute. You can share with a near unlimited number of users. You also have the benefit of dedicated hardware preventing any performance impact. Although this can be a difficult sell, once customers understand the benefit of this increased pricing they are able to justify the cost.
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/
Tableau
Although risual don’t use tableau and it isn’t a product in our catalogue of “things to sell” we understand that this is a BI tool commonly used by many of our customers. Their motto is “Designed for the individual, scaled for the enterprise” and that’s where I find their downfall along with price. The actual application looks beautiful it’s just a tad difficult to get started. I found that I had to go away and learn a lot more about the product before I could start using it which wasn’t something I experienced with Power BI. When it comes to cost they’re trials available however they’re limited and don’t always provide enough time to learn everything about the product. Priced at $12/$35/$70 per user per month it’s also one of the more expensive products on the market.
QlikView
Again, risual don’t use QlikView however it is a tool used by some customers admittedly very few though. There main objective is to take querying away from the user and allow them to simply “ask a question”. This form of BI is extremely powerful especially for those who don’t have a deep understanding of their data. Essentially the more questions you ask the more you learn about your data set. The issue I find is that it usually takes a data scientist or the like to analyse the data before making it available to the wider organisation. This way, better understanding can be achieved faster with more understanding on how it influences other potential data sources. What’s good though is that QlikView has a Free license to get you started and is priced at $15 per month albeit paying annually. As it goes for an annual cost this can get a tad annoying if you want to cancel your subscription half way through.
Review
As you can see there are a couple of options out there that may or may not hit what you company wants or needs. I’ve added the links below each product so that you can get a better understanding on what they’re all about. Power Bi is still the leader on both quality and price and that this is the product you should be going for. As you probably know Microsoft are the leaders when it comes to Business Intelligence.
If you have any queries or want to know more, contact enquiries@risual.com.
Thanks,
Jay
