What Sets Sigma Apart from Tableau (A Salesforce Company)

Does a Cloud-Native BI Platform Matter?

Let’s address the obvious first: Tableau has pretty nice looking data visualizations. And if it only needed to be a visualization tool, it would win every time. The problem is, business intelligence platforms need to do a whole lot more than make charts and graphs. Business intelligence platforms need to allow end users to use visualizations as a starting point, not an end point. And most importantly, in modern times, BI platforms need to be cloud native. 

Snowflake is cloud native. Databricks is cloud native. Sigma is cloud native. Salesforce is cloud native. Tableau is not. What it means to be cloud native is simple: the software was built from the ground up, starting with the first line of code in a public, private, or hybrid cloud.  

If you are cloud native, you as an organization will not have to install any software on your PCs, Servers, etc. The full platform can be reached over an Internet connection using a standard browser from any device. If you are truly cloud native, it means it will be easier for you to meet the specific needs of enterprises around the world, like making your SaaS offering available in not just one major public cloud, but all of them (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Azure). It will be easier for you to support specific compliance standards like FedRamp, GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and others.

Tableau is not a cloud-native business intelligence platform, yet it was bought in 2019 by what many consider the ‘grand dad’ of cloud, Salesforce. Tableau still only runs on one public cloud, AWS, and they don’t support many of the aforementioned compliance standards. In fact they only support HIPAA, which was introduced in Q4 of 2022, a full 9 years after they launched the Tableau Cloud product, originally called Tableau Online. Sigma supports many compliance standards, and can be deployed on AWS and GCP (Azure coming soon) because it is cloud native.

If you are an organization that has standardized on a cloud-native data warehouse like Snowflake, Databricks, or Google Big Query, then you should strongly consider pairing that with a cloud-native BI Platform like Sigma. There are many advantages in a Cloud Native BI platform outside of meeting the basic requirements of compliance and public cloud deployment such as innovative capabilities like live edit or input tables.

Do You Love Your Cloud Data Warehouse? Here’s Why to End the Extract.

You have a cloud data warehouse (CDW) like Snowflake that you are falling in love with, we know it and we see you. You love it because it does things you never imagined possible, and it makes your life easier than before. You bought it because it computes billions of rows of data with performance that only a cloud-native solution can deliver. It elastically scales. It provides workload isolation. It has become the new single source of truth and is unlocking use cases you could never solve for before.

So why are you cheating on your cloud data warehouse by making copies of data and putting them in extracts in Tableau? Why do you aggregate that data in those extracts? Why do you manage thousands of these things? Do you even like knowing what the backgrounder process is and what it does (hint; it manages extract refreshes among other things)?  Why do you rebuild security in Tableau because you are using extracts instead of leveraging the security you built in your CDW? Is it because you invested in Tableau before there was a cloud data warehouse? 

Shouldn’t you commit to live querying your CDW all the time? 

Sigma can help keep you faithful to your CDW. Sigma only performs live query on top of your CDW and never makes copies into a proprietary data store because we are cloud native and we know that your CDW is awesome and that you want to leverage its scale, performance and governance. You want to keep your data in your CDW! You don’t want it to leave and get copied out 10,000 times a day.  

With Sigma, you can end the extract (and show more love to your CDW too).