Tableau Desktop is a leading new generation Business Intelligence (BI) application which is also dubbed as a “self-service” data discovery tool as it can be used to achieve with almost no support from IT staff. This product shines as a graphical tool or a visualization tool, where you would have relied on various other tools and takes longer durations to represent the bar charts or the pie charts.

Microstrategy is another leading Business Intelligence (BI) application vendor whose product claims to provide support to world-class interactive dashboards, scorecards, and highly formatted reports which can be generated using Adhoc queries, thresholds, and alerts.

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Tableau Vs Microstrategy - Which is Better?

MicroStrategy vs Tableau

With an initial understanding of what Tableau Desktop and Microstrategy are, let us get down to business in understanding the comparison between these two tools. The Comparison can be different based on the kind of organization you represent when you go forward in making the purchase of any of these business intelligence software offerings from Tableau or Microstrategy.

Let's Compare the Tableau Desktop and Microstrategy:

*Tableau Desktop*	*Microstrategy*
Tableau Desktop provides a considerable big set of visualizations	Microstrategy provides an equal number of visualizations as Tableau Desktop and also provides the same features like it.
Tableau Desktop has a provision to connect to any kind of data source and provides numeral native data source connectors to retrieve data from	There is not much difference on these features with Tableau Desktop, as Microstrategy is equally competent in providing as many data source connectors as like Tableau Desktop
Tableau Desktop has the capability of doing a quick, ad-hoc analysis on data using its two ways of data collection – Live Connection or by In-memory. Both of these rely on the local database and do the retrieval of the required data the quickest.	Microstrategy lacks in this context when compared with Tableau Desktop software offerings
Tableau Desktop (Personal Edition) is priced $35 per user per month which enables us to connect to Excel and Google sheets. Tableau Desktop (Professional Edition) is priced $70 per user per month which enables to connect to various data sources like files, databases, and applications	Microstrategy Web package is priced at $600 per named user and $300K per CPU core Microstrategy Mobile package is priced at $600 per named user and $300K per CPU core Microstrategy Architect package is priced at $5000 per named user Microstrategy Server package is priced at $1200 per named user and $600K per CPU core
Tableau Desktop provides options for its payments in the form of time payments, Annual Subscriptions, and also on Quote based payments	Microstrategy provides payment options in the form of Monthly payments or Quote based payments.
Tableau Desktop is on an average of 9.2 out of 10 based on all the customer reviews that are collected by various comparison sites	Microstrategy stands tall at 8 out of 10, standing next to Tableau Desktop on all the customer reviews that are captured by various comparison sites
Though Tableau Desktop provides supports to extract data from various kinds of data sources, combinations of data sources for data analysis are still considered not so strong.	Not a competent offering from Microstrategy on this front
Tableau Desktop is a perfect example to be able to provide a provision to analyze data going offline, where there is no requirement for internet connectivity.	There is no such option here in Microstrategy, as this is a complete Cloud-based offering in the Business Intelligence and Data Visualization lines of businesses.
Tableau Desktop is the on-premise variant and Tableau Cloud is the cloud-based variant, thus providing an offering in both ways of communication	Microstrategy does provide an on-premise variant of its offerings and is pretty much on a similar power range on its features.
Tableau provides integration with R and Google Analytics. R models can be run as-is, just after the Tableau integration with R.	Microstrategy Provides integration with Microsoft Office suite of applications
Tableau Desktop works on both Windows and Macintosh OS environments and also has a web-based version	Microstrategy works only on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh OS environments
Tableau Desktop is targeted to be used in Small, Medium to Larger enterprises	Microstrategy is targeted to be used in Small and Medium enterprises.
Tableau Desktop provides features like Customizable Dashboard, Financial Forecast / Budget, Graphic Benchmark Tools	Microstrategy Provides features like Customizable Features, Performance Measurements
Tableau Desktop provides a free trial version for a month’s usage to understand the power of the tool	Microstrategy on the other hand also provides a similar offering to make the customers feel the power of their product.

Conclusion

In this article, we have tried to understand what areas of the business each of the products Tableau Desktop or Microstrategy cater to. We have tried to look at an eagle view of the features that each of these products offers to their customers and tried to understand a clear-cut winner out of the compared products.

Tableau Desktop is a clear winner in this comparison of features, pricing, and availability of the product offerings as such. Though Microstrategy supports Linux environments over and above what Tableau Desktop does, it does not stand tall to compete with Tableau Desktop software product offerings and at the same time can’t offer their offerings at a price that has been benchmarked by Tableau.

Related Pages

List Of Tableau Courses

Tableau Advanced

Tableau Server

Data Visualization and Dashboarding Fundamentals

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Last updated: 04 August 2023

About Author

Saikumar

As a Senior Writer for Mindmajix, Saikumar has a great understanding of today’s data-driven environment, which includes key aspects such as Business Intelligence and data management. He manages the task of creating great content in the areas of Programming, Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, Oracle BI, Cognos, and Alteryx. Connect with him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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