Different purposes for different visualisations tools
For my latest assignment, I worked for a mortgage company. Here, I was supporting the reporting team to create new reports for both their internal- and external customers. The department mainly depended on Business Objects tooling to create their reports. Since the company wanted to let go of the solution, they started looking for alternatives. Soon they found out that PowerBI desktop was part of their Microsoft office 365 suite. After which, the decision was quickly made to go with this alternative. However, on further inspection, there were problems with the decision. For example, how were monthly paginated reports going to be scheduled to be delivered to customers? The tooling was only to be used by the reporting team and not the rest of the organization. Was the decision of Power BI made too quickly for this use case?
When deciding which data visualisation tool would be relevant for your team or organisations, there are a lot of factors that come into play. Does it need to be easy to use? Will it be used for data analysis? How big are the datasets that are to be processed? The current market has an increasing number of solutions that are available for BI and Analytics. In this blog, I will look at Qlik Sense, PowerBI, and Tableau and how they each have their own pros and cons for different use cases. The choice to analyse these three tools is made due to their market position and their growth in recent years. The Gartner quadrant shows them as leaders in their field of analytics and business intelligence platform.
Firstly, each of the tools started its development for different reasons, which gives them their biggest differences. Qlik Sense is mostly focussed on data analysis, Tableau on data visualisations, and PowerBI on its user-friendliness. This means that the interface of each of the tools is designed to accommodate exactly that. Qlik Sense opens to a screen that allows you to see data profiles and perform basic quality checks. Tableau lets you make separate visualisations and adjust them until they are correct individually before letting you put them on a dashboard and PowerBI uses the same ribbon menus as nearly all Microsoft Office products.
All three tooling have a lot of data connection options and also have near-monthly updates to their software that keep them up to date with the changing landscape of the variety in connections.
It is important to know the usability of each of the tools. Power BI is known to be very easy to use for beginners and allows for making simple dashboards and reports. However, this changes when the user wants to start making more complex dashboards. PowerBI is limited in the options it gives to the user directly as a clickable button. A lot of things can be done with expressions and DAX code, but this will still limit the user on the choice of visualisations. It is possible to get more visualisations from the visuals marketplace, yet these are not always usable for external reporting or hosting them on the Power BI reporting server. PowerBI has a big community that is always ready to answer possible questions when there is not already an answer for the problem. Due to a large number of PowerBI users, this community has a lot of contributors.
Tableau is slightly more difficult to use as the visualisations depend a lot on how each attribute of the table is defined. This allows for a wide variety of options where it can get complicated to get the exact right visualisations as you start using it. Compared to PowerBI, there are a lot more visualisations directly available that can be customised to whichever form or shape might be necessary. However, it is not possible to import custom visualisations. For example, donut charts are not readily available and need to be made by placing an empty pie chart on top of a larger pie chart with the correct colour. Luckily, Tableau also has a community that can help you get that exact visualisation that you need to do the job. In addition to PowerBI, Tableau provides a learning centre where users of the tool can participate in lectures and courses on how to use Tableau.
In comparison to PowerBI and Tableau, Qlik sense is a lot more difficult due to the customizability that is available to the user. It presents itself as an easy-to-use tool, but when you open a few menus, it becomes clear that every single aspect of a chart can be customised with expressions. Some charts are ‘hidden’ in other charts. Horizontal bar charts can be made by making vertical bar charts and then selecting the horizontal option in the style menu. For Qlik Sense, there is also a community available that is ready to help out the user. A Qlik Academy is accessible where certificates can be given when participating in self-study programs or lecturer-led courses.
The type of work defines which tool is best suited for your dashboard developer groups. PowerBI, due to its simple interface, could be used by any user in organisations with little training. This is not the same for Tableau, where the users that would benefit most from the visualisation-focussed tool are the business users and the data analysts. Data engineers would be less likely to use Tableau as it does not do a good job at data wrangling or manipulation. This is better left for Qlik Sense, which has amazing data profiling functionalities where the data can be thoroughly investigated. Mainly data analysts and data engineers can make better dashboards with Qlik Sense. These users can get more use out of the tool with all the expression options that are available to them.
Finally, it is good to know what kind of dashboard fits which tool best. Qlik sense is very helpful when a lot of data needs to be investigated. With its powerful slicer functions, it allows for showing a lot of information in very precise ways. However, Qlik sense will not be very effective to use for ad hoc reports as quite a lot of work is needed to get a working dashboard.
Tableau is a very good fit when making storyboards that have beautiful visuals. The downside of Tableau is that it does not handle more complex data models well, so data might need to be prepared before making dashboards in this tool.
PowerBI is perfectly fine for ad hoc reports that can be made quickly. However, PowerBI shows inaccuracies where it does not handle big data sets well. When having over a million rows, PowerBI starts using approximate values for that range. The strangest issue PowerBI has is the fact that the desktop version does not allow for exporting pages to other formats than PDF. The upside of PowerBI is that it is quickly catching up to other tools that do allow this function.
It goes without saying that all three tools have their pros and cons. The most important factor here is that all of these tools are rapidly changing and growing along their focus path. Roadmaps are available for PowerBI, Tableau, and Qlik Sense which show the direction and features that are planned. Furthermore, because these tools all have communities, people get a say on which functionalities they would like to see in the future. In the end, it is important to have a look at each of these tools and see how they suit your needs. However, remember to also have a look at the roadmaps of PowerBI, Tableau, and Qlik Sense to see if the functionality you need is planned for the future.
