Thanks Michael, useful read and yes I appreciate it’s difficult to validate each response, especially when the vendors themselves provide the feedback.

I think the challenge here is actually in this “tick box” exercise which we often see from vendors in the market, they’ll race to complete features (we’ve seen it recently from Power BI) but in my experience the feature set is no where near complete. Doing an accurate comparison and finding the usefulness of each feature can be difficult without trying each solution.

Secondly software can be penalised for not providing features, e.g. on paper Tableau not providing scripting capabilities is not a good thing. All it’s competitors do. Though when you consider that Tableau competes (and betters) Qlik View and Power BI without the need for scripting then the view might be different. For example, take something as simple as changing custom colours — in some products this requires code. Clearly not a good feature vs a simple button push.

Likewise we also need to consider audience, getting BI and Visual Analytics software in the hands of ordinary users (librarians, marketers, etc) is very different, and requires different solutions to running BI out of an IT team of 30 coders. The results, by which I mean speed to insight for the end users, are also very different.

That said I appreciate any effort to compare the tools, especially in an independent way — no method is going to be perfect and thanks for sharing the results of your analysis. If you repeat the analysis please don’t hesitate to reach out on Twitter (Chris Love) I’d love to review.