Tableau is Red, PowerBI is Yellow & Qlik is Blue.
A quick note on methodology – I’m looking for Qlik (Software Company), Tableau (Data Visualisation Company) and Power BI (Software). I restricted the search to the US because Tableau is also French for “Table” so a worldwide search gets noise from that as well.
State of the Self Service BI Market
What you can see is that PowerBI has caught up with and slowly started overtaking Tableau as of early 2021. Tableau no longer appears to a leader in the self service field, with PowerBI looking to dominate. Qlik is continuing its slide into irrelevance. From this data we get a bit more insight – search volume across all three has been declining from its peak in 2019, now at 80% of its height in 2022.
Next up if we look at market share rather than sheer numbers, we see something interesting. In 2016 Tableau held about 70% of the searches, which has now dropped in 2021 to 46% (and still falling). More interestingly Qlik’s share has fallen to about 5% of the market (compared to 18% in 2015) but Power BI’s share has grown to about 49% (and still rising), compared to 8% in 2015. From the chart there was quite a change in velocity in Tableau searches from early 2020 (in line with the acquisition by Salesforce). It is also worth underlining the fall in share for Qlik is also based on declining search volumes overall.
What does the future hold for Popular BI tools?
Based on trends to date I would make the following headline predictions for the Popular BI tools market in 2022:
- The Self Service BI market is not as hot as it once was, the hype having moved on
- Power BI will continue to experience strong growth and will consume more market share, whereas Tableau’s growth will fall
- QlikView will continue to decline, and no major competitors will arise either
These findings confirm my view held since 2018 – confirmed by my market feedback – that Qlik is a dead platform walking. It’s failed to catch up with market changes and is simply a legacy product. It’s squeezed between the two with no compelling reason to be chosen. However with Salesforce acquiring Tableau, it seems to have gone into a vendor locked decline (in a similar manner to products that have fallen into the SAP or IBM fold in older days). PowerBI has an almost empty field in which to compete.
Competing with PowerBI is going to be a tough proposition as any challenger will need the all encompassing Data Platform juggernaut of Azure behind it (excuse my hyperbole) which gives it the enterprise capability needed to succeed long term. Effectively only Google or Amazon could hope to do so.
However, Google and Amazon’s offerings, (Data Studio & Quicksight respectively) still lack much market traction at this point. The acquisition of Looker seems not to have impacted Googles presence much, despite having 3 years to do so.
My previous predictions have pretty much held true, but as Yogi Berra famously said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future”. I can be certain that it will be another exciting year in Data & AI. We specialise in Enterprise PowerBI so contact us if you need some help on your journey.
