Hi, I’m hoping the community can give me some advice. I’m a long-time Plotly dash fan & user. Recently I took a new job at a big 4 firm. They are heavily committed to tableau and powerBI. I have done my best to use the company’s preferred tools but I still prefer Plotly dash. I have been challenged to present a case to the partners for why Plotly Dash is better than tableau or PBI. This should be simple but I’m finding it hard to articulate, particularly in non-technical terms. Any advice?
Hello @MikeK,
Welcome to the community!
I havent used Tableau, but I have used PowerBI (still am for some things).
As far as I am concerned, there are more features and customizations available from Plotly Dash than there are in PowerBI. For example, if you were to plot a trendline of values in PowerBI, you cannot attain the slope of the line.
If you are trying to export your filtered data from PowerBI, good luck. Showing Tables only gives you the data points that are currently being displayed in the chart. Whereas Dash, you can export all the relevant data via and excel file.
PowerBI is also very strict on the unique id’s, if you try to import something with a duplicate, it will break down until you fix your data.
Now, what is nice about these is the level of flexibility in the sense of people designing and charting their own dashboards, etc. Dash Enterprise does allow for a lot of customization and flexibility, but obviously, there is a charge for it. I have a Dashboard-Helper that is PowerBI-ish. In that you can save layouts and create charts on the fly, of course, you have to massage the data in the background to get everything to populate properly as far as generating the dataframes.
PowerBI, you can setup how the tables join and how things trickle down, this allows for easier designing of data and mixing data from different sources easily.
Via Dash, you can build all of these tools and how they work together to create a more flexible ecosystem and eventually get to the point where it surpasses PowerBI.
Hope I made some sense, haha.
Any ways, I think it mainly comes down to time, and also your employers use of their Dashboards. Are they using all the features that PowerBI and Tableau have, or are they just using basic dashboards which you could easily replace?
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@MikeK Dave at Plotly here … my email is dave@plot.ly … I can send you info about how I personally position Python/Dash vis-a-vis BI … TL’DR I position it as COMPLEMENTARY vs COMPETITIVE … it’s not so much “which is better” … but “which is better for what circumstance”
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Well I would say it’s because you have access to amazing python-libraries. With Dash I can implement advanced calculations, ML, algoritms etc.
Also the dash app can be built to be more interactive where the user inputs and makes choices that you can’t do with PowerBi and Tableau. I mean live advanced calculations. Power BI and Tableau are good for presenting a final result, but not actually producing the final result.
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Oh, just thought of another thing I don’t like about PowerBI…
Using their formulas… Such a bear, and it is its own language. Plus if everything isn’t right, it breaks.
Obviously, with Dash you have python formulas and also JavaScript.
And… rolling date filters, you can’t say I want everything in the future from 3 months ago. You have to go in as that you want everything after a certain date. Then update it every so often as desired…