How much does a data visualization tool cost?
Authored by John F Bremer Jr, Edited by Gina Bremer, Image by Ethan Norgard
THE LIFTEDVIZ DATA VIZ TOOL COMPARISON SERIES
PART 2: THE PRICE COMPARISON
If you are ready to start using dashboards in your organization, one of the first steps is to choose one or more data visualization tools. Licensing prices can and should be a consideration.
In Part 1 of our Tool Comparison Series, we introduced some key questions to start with in order to pick your best match. Now, we’ll be diving deeper into the first question on our list: Can you afford the premium price of Tableau and will you use the features that distinguish it from less expensive Microsoft Power BI or free Google Data Studio?
When purchasing licenses for Tableau or Microsoft Power BI for your team, you will most likely be signing up for licenses that are priced per user per month. At first glance, it would appear that Tableau at $70 a month per Creator license or $15 per Viewer license (Tableau Pricing for Teams & Organizations) is a lot more expensive than Microsoft Power BI Pro at $10 a month per user (Pricing & Product Comparison | Microsoft Power BI) or Google Data Studio for free.
Let’s look at an example to get 10 users on your team licensing. For Tableau, you sign up for 1 Creator license that is assigned to the person who will be developing the dashboards end-to-end, and 9 Viewer licenses that are assigned to the people who will view and interact with the dashboards in the Tableau Online platform. This will hit the bank account at $2,460/yr, billed annually. Microsoft Power BI comes in at less than half the cost for 10 users, all of whom are able to develop and distribute dashboards and visualizations with their Pro license, at only $1,200/yr (billed monthly at $100) or at no additional cost if you already pay for Microsoft 365 E5 licenses. As you scale to hundreds or thousands of users, the difference goes up quickly.
But wait a second... Do you really need all those licenses? Ask yourself: On what cadence are you updating your data? How often is your audience consuming it? How much interactivity are they actually leveraging and do they actually need? Depending on the mix of your audience, your tool license costs could be much lower and much less of a factor in choosing one visualization platform over another. At one end of the spectrum you could have self-service analytics, in which employees and executives can build their own custom reporting to find the insights they need. At the other end of the spectrum, you could have employees who reference the dashboard as a static PDF report on the web or as an email attachment just once a month, and don’t need any license at.
At LiftedViz, we make infrastructure and licensing recommendations considering first how the data visualizations will actually be used by your organization. In our LV5D development framework of Define, Design, Dataprep, Develop and Deliver, we don’t jump straight into a tool. We work to understand who the audience is, how they will use the data visualization in their role(s), and what development and distribution model will have the best chance of adoption and resulting positive impact on the business. While these tools are priced per user per month, you may or may not need a license for each user to get data distributed in your organization. From our examples above, this may look like just a couple of Tableau Creator licenses with static report distribution outside of the platform itself, significantly reducing the impact of licensing cost. Alternatively, this may indeed look like a license for each member of an organization to deploy self-service analytics, making license cost a very significant factor.
In summary, the more users that need to be able to create their own visualizations, the bigger the gap in licensing cost between the most-expensive Tableau, the less-expensive Microsoft Power BI, and the free Google Data Studio becomes. This may be a limiting factor for your organization, and may determine the tool you start with. If licensing cost is no object for you, or your creation and distribution model limits cost, then your choice of tools can be based more heavily on other factors including design capabilities, data connection and modeling features and cost, investment in training and maintenance, and more. Over the coming months we’ll dive deeper into those, so stay tuned!