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Smartsheet vs Tableau: What are the differences?
Introduction
Smartsheet and Tableau are both popular software tools used for data management and visualization. However, they differ in several key aspects, including their features, primary functions, and target user base.
Integration: Smartsheet provides native integrations with various applications and platforms, making it easy to connect and collaborate with other tools used in the organization. On the other hand, Tableau offers more robust integration options, allowing users to connect to a wide range of data sources, databases, and applications, enabling advanced data analysis and visualization capabilities.
Functionality: Smartsheet is primarily designed as a project and task management tool with basic data visualization capabilities. It provides a collaborative platform for managing projects, tracking tasks, and sharing information. Tableau, on the other hand, is a powerful data visualization and business intelligence tool that enables users to analyze and present complex data sets in interactive and meaningful ways.
Visualizations: While Smartsheet offers basic graph and chart options, Tableau provides a wide range of advanced visualizations, including heat maps, tree maps, geographic heat maps, and more. Tableau allows for greater customization and flexibility in creating visually appealing and interactive dashboards, which can be shared with others.
Data Handling: Smartsheet is mainly focused on handling structured data and providing project management functionalities like task assignment and progress tracking. In contrast, Tableau excels in handling large and complex data sets, with capabilities for data blending, transformation, and advanced calculations. It provides a more comprehensive set of tools for data analysis and exploration.
User Interface: Smartsheet has a user-friendly and intuitive interface, making it easier for non-technical users to start using the software quickly. Tableau, while also relatively easy to use, has a more advanced interface with a steeper learning curve, requiring some technical expertise to fully utilize its capabilities.
Pricing and Licensing: Smartsheet offers subscription-based pricing, with different plans based on the number of users and features required. Tableau, on the other hand, offers both subscription-based licensing and perpetual licensing options, giving users more flexibility in choosing the best pricing model for their needs.
In Summary, Smartsheet is primarily a project management tool with basic data visualization capabilities, while Tableau is a powerful data visualization and business intelligence tool with advanced features for data analysis and exploration. Tableau provides more comprehensive integration options, advanced visualizations, data handling capabilities, and a steeper learning curve compared to Smartsheet.
Very easy-to-use UI. Good way to make data available inside the company for analysis.
Has some built-in visualizations and can be easily integrated with other JS visualization libraries such as D3.
Can be embedded into product to provide reporting functions.
Support team are helpful.
The only complain I have is lack of API support. Hard to track changes as codes and automate report deployment.
Power BI is really easy to start with. If you have just several Excel sheets or CSV files, or you build your first automated pipeline, it is actually quite intuitive to build your first reports.
And as we have kept growing, all the additional features and tools were just there within the Azure platform and/or Office 365.
Since we started building Mews, we have already passed several milestones in becoming start up, later also a scale up company and now getting ready to grow even further, and during all these phases Power BI was just the right tool for us.
Pros of Smartsheet
Pros of Tableau
- Capable of visualising billions of rows6
- Intuitive and easy to learn1
- Responsive1
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Cons of Smartsheet
Cons of Tableau
- Very expensive for small companies3
