Authors: Arjun Mehta
Abstract: Business intelligence (BI) has evolved significantly from static reporting to interactive, self-service analytics, enabling organizations to make data-driven decisions efficiently. Among the leading BI platforms, Tableau and Power BI have emerged as dominant solutions, each offering unique capabilities, strengths, and limitations. This review provides a comprehensive comparative analysis of these tools, focusing on architecture, data integration, visualization, performance, scalability, pricing, and industry applications. Tableau is recognized for its advanced visualization, interactive storytelling, and flexibility in handling complex datasets, making it ideal for organizations that prioritize deep data exploration and narrative-driven insights. Power BI, tightly integrated with Microsoft ecosystems, offers cost-effective, self-service analytics with AI-assisted features, real-time dashboards, and ease of deployment across cloud and hybrid environments. The study examines practical applications across finance, healthcare, and retail sectors, highlighting real-world benefits and use cases. Challenges such as performance bottlenecks, data modeling complexity, user adoption, and platform-specific limitations are discussed, along with mitigation strategies including governance, optimized data management, and training. Finally, the review explores emerging trends in BI, including AI-driven analytics, predictive modeling, cloud-native deployments, real-time streaming, and mobile BI, providing guidance for organizations planning future-proof BI strategies. By offering actionable insights and best practices, this review assists enterprises in selecting the most suitable BI tool to maximize operational efficiency, analytical depth, and return on investment.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17277257
