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I don't know jack about Tableau, but if the alternative is Power BI, I got a feeling they may be safe.

My current company sells telephony and call-center analytics for MS Teams using our software, and during pre-sales meeting, one of the staple questions is "So we can avoid Power BI entirely?" followed by a minor thanksgiving ceremony and presentation of credit card. I get a feeling it's not too dear to the hearts of its users.

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If you haven't used PowerBI recently, let me tell you it is better than Tableau. In my previous work, using PowerBI I can easily drag and drop dimensions and it can suggest data visualization in browser. Now I have tableau and I have to open the laggy Tableau Creator, wait for a sync, then build a visualization from scratch. Maybe its poorly implemented at the new place, but I avoid it when I can - its easier and faster to download the raw data and visualized it in Google Sheets even

This is so interesting as my experience with PowerBI is that it’s just not as good. Not just that the figures look worse and have worse default colors, but functionality-wise it’s just more of a hassle.

What’s nice is that it’s better than Excel so if you want to replace Excel, PBI is great. But if you want a functional data viz that you’re not embarrassed to put on your web site, I’m not sure PBI works.

I'm the opposite. I love Tableau Creator and hate working in the browser. There's also no Power BI creator desktop app for Mac (nor will there ever be, I guess), so I refuse to use it.

neither qlick nor tableau ever came up with a language even remotely as powerful as DAX. that's all i need to know. the rest is excel.

And, you can use DAX inside Excel with PowerPivot.

I work for $LARGE_ENTERPRISE_CONSULTING_FIRM and I'd really could do without Power bi. It's so sluggish and a time-waste. If your product is even half-good, I can see why they like it. What does it do exactly?

Power BI is great, and so is Tableau. (Or at least when I used them a few years ago.)

Most people just don’t to analyze data and hardly even know how to use Excel, so something like Power BI or Tableau looks like rocket science when really these tools should make you feel like you’re upgrading to power tools from basic hand tools.

There's Looker too which is a much more cohesive stack when paired with BigQuery and DBT/Dataform

Looker might look attractive, but it is missing so many basic features it is not competitive. You can't even query a view in BigQuery, you can't use window functions in data sources. All error messages are entirely opaque. Access management is very limited etc.

PowerBI / Tableau is much more full-featured.

Why do they want to avoid PowerBI?

I'm going to hazard a guess based on my experience of being the one who brought it to my current employer after learning it at a previous employer: it's really hard to understand for awhile, especially coming from Excel. The paradigm required to build anything more than SUM or AVERAGE can be very unintuitive and feels almost like black magic.

It takes a lot of trial and error and patience to finally grasp how Power BI handles calculations if you are used to the freedom of Excel.

That being said, once it clicks, it feels like you are a magician, and you can do really advanced analytics on giant tables, which is great.

We pull a bunch of data out of the guts of MS Project 2010 and do a lot of custom analysis on it. It took about two years to go from scratch to a set of reports that served everyone's needs that also required minimal maintenance.

Then we got purchased by a larger company, so now the work is in rolling out a similar set of reports for the sister companies, as well as rolling them up into corporate-wide reports. It's a lot of fun.

I'm not sure, I just see it happen.

To put things in context, our small claim to fame is anyway getting some aggregate data about lost calls and attempts that is not possible to produce in Power BI directly[1]. So it's likely that they would buy or not buy it even if it was based on Power BI itself.

[1] https://www.queuemetrics.com/teams.jsp

My understanding is that people prefer power bi to tableau. So that says everything.