.webp)
Experience the power of Luzmo. Talk to our product experts for a guided demo or get your hands dirty with a free 10-day trial.
.webp)
Choosing BI software for your business is a crucial decision that impacts your everyday operations, internal workflows, and revenue. If you’re shopping for BI solutions, two names that may frequently come up are Domo and Tableau.
While different by design, these BI tools offer many similar features and cater to similar audiences. Today, we compare them and see which one is the better choice for your business.
Tableau is one of the giants in the world of business intelligence, rubbing shoulders with other big players like Microsoft Power BI and Qlik. It was founded in 2003 and acquired by Salesforce in 2019.
By definition, Tableau is an on-premise, desktop tool. However, they have tools such as Tableau Server and Tableau Online which allow business users to create and share dashboards in the cloud.
Domo was founded in 2010 and at the time of writing, boasts over 2,600 customers. Notable examples include Unilever, NBA, UPS, DHL, and many others. Unlike Tableau, Domo is built as a cloud-based platform for the start, although it does have on-premise features too.
When it comes to interactive visualizations, Tableau is one of the best in the game. There is a wide choice of formats, such as graphs, charts, histograms, heat maps, and many others. In a Tableau dashboard, there is a variety of ways to display your metrics and KPIs.
Customization is not that simple, with many users stating that drilling down, changing views, applying different filters, and doing advanced data discovery requires a lot of learning.
There are also machine learning and automation capabilities, where the end-user can ask Tableau to answer questions and generate visualizations through natural language processing.
Domo has fewer visualization choices as a starting point, but the drag and drop dashboard builder is fairly easy to use. You don’t need to know programming languages such as SQL to get the most out of this tool. However, Domo's performance is not stellar, so it may take some time for the dashboards to load fully in your browser or software tool.
Much can be said about the ease of use of both tools as they’ve been around for a while. Tableau is based on SQL and the general interface is pretty intuitive. You don’t need to be a data analyst to do data modeling and create visualizations.
Many users praise it for its ease of use compared to something like Excel or Python. However, that’s just for the most basic use cases. For advanced analytics or creating complex dashboards, you’re going to spend a lot of time setting things up.
In other words: if you need only the basic BI features, Tableau is fairly user-friendly. For anything advanced, it’s best to look for a seasoned Tableau developer.
Domo is more focused on self-service, so the initial impression is that the drag-and-drop builder and visualization tools are easy to understand and use. Indeed, creating basic dashboards and reports on already prepared datasets is very simple, according to many Domo reviews.
But much like Tableau, using it for anything slightly more advanced proves that truly mastering Domo requires a lot of time and effort. How easy Domo is to use depends on your knowledge of data science, data analytics, and basic programming.
In summary, both tools are simple to use for basic business intelligence operations, but advanced users may have a very steep learning curve. Additionally, Tableau has a much larger market presence. This means that finding a developer specializing in Tableau will be significantly easier compared to finding a Domo expert.
Over time, Tableau has built up an extensive network of platforms and data sources that you can connect with this BI tool. It connects with AWS, Azure, Snowflake, SAP, Alteryx, Databricks, and many other data warehouses and ETL tools.
In terms of business applications, you can connect with Excel, Salesforce, Google Analytics, Splunk, Google Sheets, and many others.
In the other corner, Domo reigns supreme. On top of its API, it has well over 1,000 different integrations in its Appstore with various data sources and business applications. If you need real-time insights in your dashboards, Domo lets you go beast mode with your chosen data integration. Connecting them with the visualizations is fairly simple too.
Tableau does data handling pretty well thanks to its in-memory data engine, especially when you use proper data modeling techniques such as star schema.
However, performance in visualizations is not that stellar, especially with large data sets and pipelines. If you have a large number of spreadsheets, use complex calculations, and have many custom SQL queries. In other words, simpler dashboards will be fine but more complex ones may have longer load times.
One of the major complaints of Domo users is the performance of their dashboards and reports. Data analysis works decently fast, but the bigger the datasets are, the longer the visualizations take to load. It can sometimes take a few seconds upon opening a dashboard for everything to load completely.
While this may not be a huge deal with internal reporting, it can be a major user interface issue for embedded analytics.
As we’ve written before, figuring out Domo pricing is anything but easy. Their website is intentionally cryptic and you are forced to get in touch with sales to learn what you’ll end up paying. We know that depending on your needs, it will run you anything from $20,000 to $100,000 annually.
The most important thing to know is this: Domo charges license fees, which come in at $750 per license. The licenses are not tiered, so you’ll pay the same for a developer and a viewer who uses just one functionality.
On top of licenses, you pay for credits for a year. Depending on the features you use, you consume certain credits. Technically, you can have unlimited users but the credits are limited.
Tableau offers more flexible pricing plans which require you to first determine what you want to do with this tool. There are three main types of licenses in this BI platform:
Every account requires at least one Creator who is in charge of data preparation, data modeling, data visualization, setting up and using data connectors, and more. This plan includes Tableau Desktop, Tableau Prep Builder, Tableau Pulse, and all of that on Tableau Cloud.
Explorer licenses can access finished dashboards and reports and do data explorations based on existing datasets. This plan comes with Tableau Pulse.
Viewers can do just that: view completed dashboards and reports.
Other features, such as self-service embedded analytics have separate pricing. To find out how much you’ll have to pay, you need to get in touch with their sales team.
There is also a free product called Tableau Public.
In terms of pricing, Tableau is the clear winner on two accounts. It’s cheaper and more flexible, and it’s transparent.
If budget is not a constraint, Domo is the better choice. It has more data integrations, is fairly easy to use, and has a decent set of visualizations to choose from. However, it’s very expensive compared to Tableau.
On the other hand, Tableau has many types of visualizations you can use, has low and flexible pricing, and has a solid number of data sources. If you have an advanced use case, finding a Tableau developer should be a piece of cake.
However, if you’re looking for an embedded analytics tool, neither are optimal. Instead, get Luzmo. Our tool is easy to use, connects to your software with our API and numerous integrations, and has predictable pricing and superb performance.
But don’t take our word for it - sign up for a free trial of Luzmo and see why we’re better than Domo or Tableau for embedded analytics.
Experience the power of Luzmo. Talk to our product experts for a guided demo or get your hands dirty with a free 10-day trial.
