Power BI has about 29 built-in visuals to Tableau's 24, but Power BI's custom visuals marketplace makes it faster to add specialized charts like Sankey diagrams. Most clients don't need custom visuals, but when they do, Power BI is easier to extend than Tableau.
Custom visuals. What are custom visuals and do you need them? Before we jump into that particular perspective, let's see the visualizations available into each product. So here in Power BI we can see in this section that power BI has 29 built in visualization options, charts, pie charts and whatnot, while tableau has 24. So power BI has a few more in. Why? Why Tableau doesn't have more? Tableau has been studying very heavily what visual representations are really meaningful for business. And their philosophy is to not include representations that are deemed potentially distracting or deceiving. Actually they broke the ground on many of these techniques of avoiding visualization techniques that can be deceiving. So they have a smaller set and according to them, these are the things that people really need. The way that their framework is designed is to facilitate the right option. While Power BI has a little broader range of built in visualizations. And then when you need to build reports and dashboards with this built in visualizations, it's pretty much drag and drop, point and click and each product will deliver that graphical representation. Having said that, let's go back to the custom visuals. What are custom visuals? Well, custom visuals are when organizations want some graphical representation that is not available as part of the build. Built in product in both Power BI and Tableau offer ways that people can build different graphical representations, usually more sophisticated. From that perspective, Power BI has an awesome framework while Tableau has a great framework. And the main difference is because Power BI created this portal. Let me go to the portal. So if you go to browser and you search for something like Microsoft Office App Store you can find this link here that will go to the Microsoft App Office App Store and if you click Power Bi Visuals, all of these options here are things that you can usually download for free from the Internet and they will have a built in template that is in a few very quickly half a minute or so you can add that particular different graphical representation into Power bi. And now without being an expert in Power bi, you can use different visual representations or custom visuals as they say. Just to give some examples here, this is a Sankey diagram that shows flow of information from one country to another to another to another. Very easy to set up. I actually did was very straightforward, didn't require any expertise in complex programming. Just plug and play use it. This other one is a custom map flow that shows from the origin to the destination and how things are flowing in a different region. Again super straightforward to do in Tableau you can do the same pre much the same things, but is a much more complex process usually takes a lot of minutes. And you have to be really careful what you're doing to use custom visualizations. There are a lot of options out there in Tableau, different graphical representation that people can use, but when you have to use one of them, it takes a lot more. It's a lot more complex process. So how important is this for your business? It depends. In our client base, we have hundreds of clients, and most of them do not use custom visualizations. They use what's available as part of the tool to do reports in dashboards. Only a small fraction of our clients use some custom visualizations. In a very small fraction of our clients do them a lot. So what you have to look is in your own needs. If you believe customer visualization will be something critical, then definitely Power BI seems to have a easier platform to tackle those. If you're not going to be using a lot, probably is not so critical. I actually myself have built some reports that I want to use some custom visuals. That to me was actually, even though we have Tableau as our main platform, I use Power BI to do some custom visuals because it was so much easier and faster than trying to build the same thing in Tableau. So sometimes the right thing is to use both. Use each product for where they shine, and definitely custom visuals. I love the Power BI approach.
