Many times decisions are based upon existing Features. 'The Only Thing That Is Constant Is Change', we do not want to base a decision on existing product features. When comparing we take into consideration how other competitive products/services are evolving. Are they adding new features? How frequently?
Which applies, a business analyst will have at least 13 tables joins to make a meaningful story. He/she has to slog (to understand the tables/views/relationships) if there is content pack, to get data from source. There are plenty of app connectors available on all three tools- Power BI, Tableau and Qlik. Power BI has more app connectors than others, you can quickly and easily get the required data from apps. Microsoft has understood the importance of participating in open source, as it has officially joined the Linux foundation today. Not only it has connections to existing Microsoft stack (cloud/on premise), but also other others - Salesforce, Google Analytics, Github and many others.
Tableau and Qlik historically had lead over Power BI in Data Visualization. I am now convinced that Power BI has the edge over others, here is the Gartner BI and Analytics magic quadrant report which ranks Power BI as visionary.
This is why I believe Power BI has edge over other
1. Organizations uses on an average '13' apps (data sources) - Okta Research finding
2. We need to store the data before consuming it, need to save data in SQL and other formats
ETL will be more relevant than ever before, to make a sense from multiple data sources - a good (join) relationship is required. Tableau and Qlik can read files and other data source, but they lack the ETL layer. Microsoft stack (SQL, Azure SQL and others) provides tools to transform and save the data in SQL and other formats. The complex transformation can Microsoft stack, leaving the light transformation to Power BI. Power BI as a part of Microsoft family has tremendous advantage.
3. Price, Price, Price
Look no further. At $9.99/Month is the Power BI pro version, the least expensive of the all products.
There are features which Power BI lacks currently - as discussed here by Tableau. This features comparison will not be relevant in the future, Power BI will catch up quickly. For some scenarios maybe Power BI is not the best Data Visualization tool. As a generalist which most of us are, we will find Power BI to be flexible, powerful and affordable.
