Tableau Creator at $75 a month against Power BI Pro at £10.80. What a Tableau or Qlik to Power BI migration costs, what drives it, and when it pays back.
Migrating from Tableau or Qlik to Power BI costs the time to rebuild the data model and the reports that matter, which for a mid-market estate of a few dozen workbooks or apps is typically ten to sixteen weeks of work, plus parallel running of both platforms for a month or two. Against that sits the licence saving: Tableau Cloud lists at $75 per month for a Creator, $42 for an Explorer and $15 for a Viewer on the Standard edition, and $115, $70 and $35 on Enterprise, while Power BI Pro is £10.80 per user per month, Premium Per User £18.50, and viewers are free on a Fabric capacity from F64. Qlik Sense is priced on capacity and data volume and is usually quoted. For a 100-person reporting audience the licence difference alone runs to tens of thousands of pounds a year, which is why the migration usually pays for itself within the first year or two. This post sets out what drives the build cost, where the saving actually comes from, and the mistakes that make a cheap migration expensive.
The licence arithmetic
Take a business with 10 report builders and 90 viewers. On Tableau Standard that is 10 Creators at $75 and 90 Viewers at $15, around $2,100 a month at list, before Explorers for the people who want to edit. On Power BI it is 100 Pro licences at £10.80, £1,080 a month, or 10 Pro licences and an F64 reserved capacity at £4,404 a month if the audience grows past about 400 and the business wants the Fabric platform underneath. The list prices move and most businesses have negotiated discounts, so the exact gap is yours to calculate, but the shape is consistent: Power BI is cheaper per seat, and the saving scales with the viewer count. How much does Microsoft Fabric cost? has the Fabric side in full.
What drives the build cost
The number of workbooks is the wrong measure. In every migration we have done, most workbooks are unused, duplicated or superseded, and the first step is to count the ones that are actually opened. The real drivers are:
The data model. Tableau extracts and Qlik's associative model have to become a star schema in Power BI. If a model exists in a warehouse already, this is weeks; if each workbook holds its own blended sources, it is the bulk of the project. Star schema explained sets out the target.
Calculations. Tableau calculated fields and level-of-detail expressions, and Qlik set analysis, do not translate line for line into DAX. They have to be understood and re-expressed as measures, which is where experienced people earn their fee. Qlik to Power BI: lessons learned covers why transliteration fails.
Security. Row-level security has to be redesigned, not ported, because the mechanisms differ. This is a few days if the rules are documented and a few weeks if they live in someone's head.
The long tail. The last 20% of reports, the odd one-offs that one person depends on, take as long as the first 80% if you insist on moving them all. Most should be retired or rebuilt by their owners once the model exists.
Rebuild, not lift and shift
The cheapest-looking option, a tool that converts workbooks automatically, produces Power BI reports that look like Tableau reports and perform like neither. The migrations that come in on budget rebuild the model once and rebuild the reports on top of it, which also fixes the problems the old estate had. Should you rebuild or lift and shift? goes into the decision.
The costs people forget
Parallel running: both platforms are licensed for the overlap period, usually one to three months, and that should be in the budget rather than a surprise. Training: Power BI is familiar to most Excel users but not identical, and a day of training per team is cheaper than a quarter of low adoption. The old platform's exit: Tableau Server infrastructure, Qlik licences on annual terms, and data extracts nobody owns all need a retirement date. How long does a BI migration take? covers the timeline that keeps these in view.
What a typical migration looks like in money terms
For a mid-market business with one ERP, a CRM, around 30 live workbooks and 100 users, a Tableau or Qlik to Power BI migration is a defined project of ten to sixteen weeks, a four-week Establish phase to agree definitions and the target model before it, and licence savings that recover the cost over the first year or two depending on the deal you had. A large estate with hundreds of workbooks, several data sources and complex security is a programme rather than a project, and the honest advice is to migrate by business area rather than all at once. We price this work as fixed phases rather than a day rate, which our pricing post explains, and our free audit will give you a number for your own estate.
Related reading
How do you migrate from QlikView to Power BI? Lessons learned the hard way
Should you rebuild or lift and shift your reports when migrating BI platforms?
Choosing a Power BI consultancy: the questions that actually matter and what it costs
Isobel Bowers
Analytics Consultant
Part of the Hopton Analytics team, delivering governed analytics programmes for UK mid-market organisations.
