BI platformSample
Tableau
Salesforce
A visual analytics platform built around drag-and-drop exploration, known for polished and highly interactive dashboards.
Licence
Commercial
Built by
Analysts
Languages
Calculated fields, LOD expressions
Runs on
Desktop, Tableau Cloud, Tableau Server
Scores
Out of 5. The tick marks the average for BI platforms in the library.
- Ease of use
- 4
- Visual control
- 4
- Interactivity
- 5
- Sharing
- 4
- Governance
- 4
- Low cost
- 2
- Data scale
- 4
Strengths
- Fast visual exploration by dragging fields onto shelves
- Fine control over marks, colour and layout
- A large community and the Tableau Public gallery
Limitations
- Licensing is expensive at scale
- Heavy data preparation needs Tableau Prep or upstream work
- Level of detail (LOD) calculations take practice
Best for
- Exploratory analysis
- Design-led dashboards
- Analyst teams
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Microsoft’s BI platform: model data in Power BI Desktop, publish interactive reports to the Power BI service and share them across Microsoft 365.
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A BI platform built on Qlik’s associative engine: every selection shows at once which values are related, and which are not, across the whole dataset.
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Looker
Google Cloud
An enterprise BI platform centred on LookML, a modelling layer that defines metrics once and generates SQL against the database.
CommercialLookMLSQL