Power BI and Tableau are both business intelligence solutions with a lot of capabilities in common. There are two significant differences between Power BI and Tableau:

1. Power BI is exclusively available for Windows, but Tableau is available for both Windows and MacOS.
2. Power BI and Tableau have different pricing choices. Tableau, on the other hand, is often the more expensive option.

While Excel provides much of the same essential capabilities as Power BI, it has limited visualization options and lacks the ability to refresh, share, and view reports and dashboards online. Let’s look at a table where we compare some features between Power BI, Tableau and Qlik Sense.

Job Roles using PowerBI

The way you utilize Power BI is determined by your role in a project or team. Other people in various roles may utilize Power BI in a different way.

You might, for example, utilize the Power BI service primarily to examine reports and dashboards. Your number-crunching, business-report-creating coworker may use Power BI Desktop or Power BI Report Builder extensively to build reports, which are subsequently published to the Power BI service, where you can access them. Another coworker in sales may primarily use the Power BI Mobile app to track sales quota progress and to dig into fresh sales lead data.

As a developer, you may utilize Power BI APIs to feed data into datasets or to incorporate dashboards and reports in your own custom applications. You may also use each component of Power BI at different time frames, based on your goals or your role in a given project.

Which Power BI feature or service is the right tool for your situation will determine how you utilize Power BI. For example, you may use Power BI Desktop to build reports about customer engagement data for your own team, and you can view inventory and manufacturing progress in a real-time dashboard in Power BI service.