Tableau vs. Adriel: Which Should You Choose?

Tableau is an enterprise-level data analytics and business intelligence software. Here are some benefits:

1. Data Visualization: Tableau transforms complex data sets into interactive and visually appealing dashboards. Its drag-and-drop functionality makes it easy to create stunning visualizations, including graphs, charts, and maps.
2. Real-time Analytics: With Tableau, you can access and analyze data in real-time, ensuring that you are always working with the most up-to-date information.
3. User-Friendly: Tableau's user-friendly interface allows both beginners and experienced data analysts to navigate and create dashboards with ease. The learning curve is relatively low compared to some other analytics tools.
4. Seamless Data Integration: It supports a wide range of data sources, from spreadsheets to cloud databases. Connecting and blending data from multiple sources is a breeze.
5. Advanced Analytics: Tableau offers advanced analytics capabilities, including predictive analytics and machine learning integration, allowing data scientists to dive deeper into their data.
6. Wide Range of Chart Types: Whether you need a bar chart for comparison or a heat map for geographical data, Tableau provides a variety of chart types to suit your data visualization needs.What is Tableau comparable to?

But while Tableau is a powerful data analytics tool, it might not be the right fit for digital marketers.

We’ve talked to thousands of marketers and here are the main problems they’re facing with Tableau:

• Difficult to set up: To use Tableau, you need a good understanding of SQL series, as well as configure data connections, clean the data, and build your own data visualizations. This is a steep learning curve for digital marketers who are not programmers or data analysts, and who don’t have the time to learn the software in depth. You could hire a Tableau expert or agency to set it up for you but this can cost you thousands of dollars.
• Slow performance: If you have 10+ marketing channels and huge rows of data, it can take anywhere from 20 minutes to a few hours to import them into Tableau.
• Lack of real-time data refresh: As of 2021, Tableau’s dashboard doesn’t refresh ad data in real-time and doesn’t notify you of performance changes automatically. Its alert system is also very complicated and time-consuming to set up.
• Complicated dashboard design: While Tableau offers drag-and-drop charts and widgets, you need to do extra tweaks and configuration to design a dashboard, which can take up to months. Some marketers we’ve talked to have also said that Tableau’s dashboard looks formulaic and outdated, and is difficult to adjust to their brand tone.
• No ad creative insights: For digital marketers, analyzing ad creatives is critical to maximizing ROAS for their campaigns. On Tableau, it’s impossible to extract insights from your published ad creatives and you won’t be able to see what worked and what didn’t.
• Non-existent customer support: With over 86,000 customer accounts, Tableau struggles to offer individual support for their clients. Many online reviewers on Trustpilot have vented that it’s next to impossible to get issues resolved with customer support tickets staying open for months before getting a single reply.
• Costly: While Tableau’s official website lists prices per user, the final cost can come down to $5000-$6000/month due to hidden costs. You will need to pay for any extra data sources you need to connect, advanced features, and implementation costs (e.g. the cost of hiring a Tableau data preparation expert).
  

Although Tableau is one of the most popular data visualization and BI tools on the market, configuring Tableau is no easy feat, and requires SQL knowledge.

If you are a digital marketer or marketing agency looking for a simple, user-friendly, and real-time marketing dashboard, here are five industry-leading BI tools we recommend instead:

Adriel

Adriel is a marketing intelligence platform built for marketers, advertising specialists, marketing agency owners, and data analysts. It’s an all-in-one tool that integrates with hundreds of data sources to centralize real-time data, insights, and teams on a single workspace. With Adriel, marketers can move away from Google sheets, eliminate repetitive manual tasks, and get more returns from their digital advertising campaigns.

Adriel Features:

✅ 650+ easy data connectors through APIs

✅ Real-time, interactive marketing dashboards

✅ Custom alerts and metrics

✅ ETL and data prep

✅ Custom reports and dashboards

✅ Marketing reporting templates

✅ Ad creative insights

✅ Complete marketing command center (edit multichannel campaigns directly from Adriel)

Cost: From US$299 with custom scalable pricing options

DashThis

DashThis is a marketing reporting tool designed to simplify the process of gathering data from multiple platforms and presenting it in a coherent, easy-to-understand format. It offers customizable dashboards, automated reporting, and the ability to integrate with various digital marketing channels such as Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn and more.

DashThis Features:

✅ 34+ data connectors

✅ Custom metrics

✅ Custom dashboards

Cost: From $33/mo/3 dashboards to $1000+/mo

Google Data Studio (Looker Studio)

Google Data Studio serves as a centralized dashboard software for businesses of all sizes. It aggregates data from multiple sources, such as website analytics, social media metrics, and sales figures, transforming them into comprehensive, easy-to-interpret reports and dashboards.

Google Data Studio Features:

✅ 150+ data connectors

✅ Customizable dashboards

✅ Real-time collaboration

Cost: Free for basic use but advanced connectors may incur a fee.

Whatagraph

Whatagraph is a cloud-based reporting platform designed to simplify the process of generating marketing performance reports. It offers a range of pre-built templates and widgets, making it easy for users to create visually appealing, customized reports. The platform integrates with various data sources, allowing for real-time data visualization and sharing capabilities.

Whatagraph Features:

✅ 40+ data integrations

✅ Custom metrics

✅ Custom reports

Cost: From $223 to $585+/mo

AgencyAnalytics

AgencyAnalytics is an all-in-one business intelligence and reporting tool for SMBs and marketing agencies. It allows you to create customized dashboards and real-time reports for SEO, PPC, social media, and more. The software offers a full suite of SEO-related features for users to view essential KPIs and metrics in real-time.  

AgencyAnalytics Features:

✅ 75+ data connectors

✅ Real-time dashboards

✅ Custom, whitelabeled reports

Cost: From $12/mo/campaign to $900+/mo

Microsoft Power BI

Microsoft Power BI is business analytics platform that serves as an integral part of Microsoft's broader suite of business applications. Designed for a wide range of users—from data analysts to C-suite executives—the Power BI platform enables organizations to aggregate data from multiple sources, create interactive dashboards, and generate insightful reports.

Microsoft Power BI features:

✅ 100+ data connectors

✅ Real-time dashboards

✅ ETL and data prep

✅ Custom alerts and metrics

Cost: $14/user/mo or $6800+/capacity/month

For a full breakdown, please check out this Tableau alternatives article.

Here’s why Adriel is the best alternative to Tableau software:

Save time and Costs:

On Adriel, you can set up dashboards in less than a week through 650+ no-code data connectors. Adriel automatically visualizes analysis-ready data in minutes. You don’t need to have SQL or data science knowledge at all. You also don’t need to hire any external “dashboard experts” to start seeing your data.

Effortless Report Creation and Sharing:

Adriel offers pre-made templates and drag-and-drop widgets so you can build and share visually appealing reports within minutes. What’s more, you can customize both your static reports and live dashboards on Adriel. Add your client’s or brand’s colors, visuals, and images and truly make your workspace your own.

Streamlined Cross-Channel Campaign Management:

Adriel is more than just a data visualization tool — you can edit your cross-channel campaigns directly from the dashboard. Reallocate budgets, activate or deactivate campaigns, and schedule ad creatives, with changes automatically applied across all channels.

Real-Time Performance Alerts:

Stay on top of ad performance 24/7 with real-time alerts which notify you of every performance change based on preset commands. Customize your alerts for specific data sources, campaigns, ad sets, individual ads, or custom metrics, and make quick budget adjustments to optimize ROI.

Creative Intelligence for Maximized ROAS:

Cherry on the top? Adriel’s Creative Intelligence Suite shows you granular ad creative insights that you can’t get anywhere else. See which keywords, colors, and emojis drive engagement and conversions on your ads, and use them in your future campaigns. Drive the highest ROI and satisfaction for your clients.

Grab a demo here.

Tableau and Microsoft Excel are both powerful tools for data analysis and visualization, but they have distinct differences in terms of functionality, use cases, and capabilities. Choosing between Excel and Tableau depends on the specific needs and complexity of your data analysis tasks.

Here are some key differences between Tableau and Excel:

1. Data Volume and Complexity:

• Excel: Excel is suitable for managing and analyzing relatively small datasets with moderate complexity. It's often used for tasks like creating budgets, financial modeling, and basic data analysis.
• Tableau: Tableau is designed to handle large and complex datasets with ease. It can connect to various data sources, including big data platforms and databases, making it suitable for organizations dealing with extensive data.

2. Data Visualization:

• Excel: Excel offers basic charting and graphing capabilities, but its visualization options are limited compared to Tableau. It may not be as effective for creating interactive and visually appealing dashboards.
• Tableau: Tableau excels in data visualization, offering a wide range of customizable charts, graphs, maps, and dashboards. It provides a more dynamic and interactive way to explore data, making it ideal for creating visually engaging reports and dashboards.

3. Interactivity:

• Excel: Excel provides limited interactivity in terms of filtering and sorting data. Users can create pivot tables and slicers for some level of interactivity.
• Tableau: Tableau is known for its interactivity. Users can create dynamic dashboards with filters, actions, and parameters, allowing viewers to explore data and gain insights in real-time.

4. Data Modeling and Calculation:

• Excel: Excel has robust capabilities for creating complex calculations and formulas. It's often used for financial modeling, forecasting, and scenario analysis.
• Tableau: Tableau has basic calculation capabilities but may not match Excel's advanced formula capabilities. Tableau is more focused on visualization and data exploration.

5. Collaboration and Sharing:

• Excel: Excel files are typically shared via email or file-sharing platforms. Collaborative editing can be challenging, and version control can be a concern.
• Tableau: Tableau Server and Tableau Online offer collaborative and secure environments for sharing and collaborating on dashboards and reports. Multiple users can work on the same dashboard simultaneously.

6. Learning Curve:

• Excel: Excel is widely used and relatively easy to learn for basic tasks. However, mastering advanced Excel functions and features can be time-consuming.
• Tableau: Tableau has a steeper learning curve, particularly for users new to data visualization tools. Training and practice may be required to use Tableau effectively.

7. Use Cases:

• Excel: Excel is commonly used for financial analysis, budgeting, small-scale data analysis, and basic reporting.
• Tableau: Tableau is preferred for data visualization, interactive dashboards, business intelligence, and large-scale data analysis. It's often used in organizations for making data-driven decisions.

In summary, Excel is a versatile spreadsheet tool suitable for small to medium-sized datasets and basic data analysis, while Tableau is a powerful data visualization and business intelligence tool designed for handling larger datasets and creating interactive, visually rich dashboards and reports.

The Microsoft equivalent of Tableau is Microsoft Power BI. Both tools offer extensive integrations and support custom integrations, making them versatile for various data sources.

They share similar ease of use, which can be challenging for beginners. Both Tableau and Power BI provide account overviews of key metrics and support data blending and custom metrics.

However, Power BI distinguishes itself with real-time data refresh frequency and an alarm system for proactive monitoring, while Tableau lacks these features.

Additionally, Power BI excels in customer support quality compared to Tableau's slower support.

While both tools offer client reporting and a mobile app, Tableau allows for white labeling, unlike Power BI.

Cost-wise, Tableau can range up to $5000-$6000 per month, while Power BI offers a free version with limited capabilities and paid plans starting from $10 per user per month up to $8400+ per month, making it a more flexible option for various budgets.