Are you using the Correct Tool for Data? Power BI, Tableau or Data Studio

3 min readFeb 23, 2022

What is your Budget?

Power BI: Today anyone can download Power bi for free on Windows. Power BI is not officially supported on Mac OS.

Therefore one has to use it on the server. Power BI server is free for 60 days, after that period it is available on subscription.

Here is the website for Power BI plans https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/

Data Studio: Data studio is free to use. There are over 300 connectors which include data connectors by other developers or community members. There could be some fee to pay to use these connectors, the rest of everything is free in the Data studio.

Tableau: The software has a free version ‘Tableau Public’. However, this free version does not have all features. One cannot save Tableau's public

hard drive. Tableau is available in subscription plans.

Here is the Website from where you can purchase the plan: https://www.tableau.com/pricing/individual

Conclusion: Data studio is free, Power BI is free for Windows, and Tableau Public is free with very limited features.

How many other people are familiar with the tool?

Clearly Power BI is the popular tool in this category. I also feel that Microsoft have the upper hand with Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Excel which make it more attractive for users.

Lastly, Google has done almost zero marketing for Data Studio which make it least popular in this comparison.

Which profile uses the Tool?

Tableau: After its Aquasition with Salesforce, Tableau is the first choice for every CRM user. Overall Tableau is a versatile tool, and highly compatible because of features such as: embedding in the web, sharing the dashboard, and uploading the dashboard to Tableau Public.

You should choose Tableau for Data analysis, CRM data analysis.

Data Studio: There are many templates that are available for Digital Marketing, YouTube Analysis, Web Analysis. Data Studio is a good choice for anyone in these domains.

By using templates anyone can quickly configure a dashboard and draw data-driven decisions.

Power BI: Famous for every profile however, data analysts do not prefer Power BI! The Power BI is a reporting and Dashboarding Tool that does not have the capabilities to analyze data.

But, because of its features such as Extracting — Cleaning-Transforming — Loading capabilities Power BI is an all-in-one that can overcome many challenges faced in life of those users who have to work on multiple Data sets such as Excel sheets, SQL DB, text files, and others.