KNIME vs Tableau comparison

The compared Knime and Salesforce solutions aren't in the same category. Knime is ranked #1 in DM , with an average rating of 7.8, and holds a 25.7% mindshare in the category. Salesforce is ranked #2 in BIT , with an average rating of 8.5, and holds a 17.5% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Knime users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of Salesforce users who would recommend it.

KNIME

Read 59 KNIME reviews

1,856 Views
1,339 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Tableau

Read 296 Tableau reviews

17,456 Views
14,743 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

KNIME

Tableau

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between KNIME and Tableau based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Knime, Weka, IBM and others in Data Mining.

To learn more, read our detailed Data Mining Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Data Mining

March 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 845,406 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

KNIME

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Mining (1st), Data Science Platforms (2nd)

Tableau

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

296

Ranking in other categories

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (2nd), Reporting (2nd), Data Visualization (1st), Embedded BI (1st)

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. KNIME is designed for Data Mining and holds a mindshare of 25.7%, down 27.4% compared to last year.
Tableau, on the other hand, focuses on BI (Business Intelligence) Tools, holds 17.5% mindshare, down 19.1% since last year.

Data Mining

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

Featured Reviews

Laurence Moseley

Emeritus Professor of Health Services Research at University of South Wales

Has a drag-and-drop interface and AI capabilities

It's difficult to pinpoint one single feature because KNIME has so many. For starters, it's very easy to learn. You can get started with just a one-hour video. The drag-and-drop interface makes it user-friendly. For example, if you want to read an Excel file, drag the "read Excel file" node from the repository, configure it by specifying the file location, and run it. This gives you a table with all your data. Next, you can clean the data by handling missing values, selecting specific columns you want to analyze, and then proceeding with your analysis, such as regression or correlation. KNIME has over 4,500 nodes available for download. In addition, KNIME offers various extensions. For instance, the text processing extension allows you to process text data efficiently. It's more powerful than other tools like NVivo and Palantir. KNIME also has AI capabilities. If you're unsure about the next step, the AI assistant can suggest the most frequently used nodes based on your previous work. Another valuable feature is the integration with Python. If you need to perform a task that requires Python, you can simply add a Python node, write the necessary code,

Read full review

ROMIL SHAH

Deputy General Manger - Information Technology at Nayara Energy

Provides fast data access with in-memory extracts, makes it easy to create visualizations, and saves time

When it comes to visualizations, Tableau has a limitation as compared to Power BI. It has a limited set of visualizations. Power BI has the entire marketplace, so you can connect and import many visualizations and use them, whereas Tableau has only 10 or 15 visualizations. There should be more visualizations, and there should also be data integration with more cloud providers. Tableau has recently launched a paid version for the documentation. So, documentation has become a little bit challenging when it comes to Tableau development because we do not have any tool to export the data out of it. It is a license-based feature that you need to purchase to prepare documentation. So, on the documentation front, for preparing clear documentation for any dashboard, it would help if we get an embedded option, rather than buying a license for each user for the documentation. To document anything, if I have to connect to each workbook and see what has been written as a formula and then document in the Word document, it is pretty time-consuming. We have the Microsoft stack, and we are currently evaluating Power BI because Tableau has a limitation of 50 columns for a drill-down report. If we want more than 50 columns, we have found a hack, but there is no ready-made option for doing it. So, we have to use another tool in case we need a drilled report with more than 50 columns. There are many instances where users need 80 or 90 columns for their analysis, and switching between two technologies becomes a challenge. It is not a cost-effective approach for us. Their support should be improved. We are not happy with their support. Whenever we raised queries, we were pointed to a few blogs, and we didn't get a proper solution from them. Their licensing should also be improved. They want us to purchase a Tableau Creator license for business users, whereas Power BI Desktop is free for business users. They should come up with a basic license with one or two connectors that our business users can use for preparing their visualizations. Tableau also charges us per user for users who want the data only through email.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The solution is very easy to use"

"Easy to connect with every database: We use queries from SQL, Redshift, Oracle."

"I've never had any problems with stability."

"We leverage KNIME flexibility in order to query data from our database and manipulate them for any ad-hoc business case, before presenting results to stakeholders."

"KNIME is quite scalable, which is one of the most important features that we found."

"Usability, and organising workflows in very neat manner. Controlling workflow through variables is something amazing."

"The product is open-source and therefore free to use."

"It also has very good fundamental machine learning. It has decision trees, linear regression, and neural nets. It has a lot of text mining facilities as well. It's fairly fully-featured."

More KNIME pros

"It most valuable feature is its ease of developing visualizations, not just charts and graphs."

"The most valuable part of the solution is the general dashboard features."

"When compared with Power BI, Tableau is much easier."

"All features are valuable. It is very user-friendly, and it is mostly drag-and-drop. If we have the dataset available, then we can develop any dashboard very quickly."

"It has a shallow learning curve and so you can go to market very, very, very quickly."

"It is a very stable product. It doesn't break."

"Data Interpreter: Which can identify issues or potential errors with your imported data."

"It's intuitive and highly mature"

More Tableau pros

Cons

"It's very general in terms of architecture, and as a result, it doesn't support efficient running. That is, the speed needs to be improved."

"KNIME is not good at visualization."

"Not just for KNIME, but generally for software and analyzing data, I would welcome facilities for analyzing different sorts of scale data like Likert scales, Thurstone scales, magnitude ratio scales, and Guttman scales, which I don't use myself."

"The data visualization part is the area most in need of improvement."

"Sometimes, we needed more space to handle larger operations, especially since our machines had limited space and memory due to Kubernetes clusters."

"I'd like something that would make it easier to connect/parse websites, although I will fully admit that I'm not as proficient in KNIME as I would like to be, so it could be I'm just missing something."

"The documentation needs a proper rework. "

"It's difficult to pinpoint one single feature because KNIME has so many. For starters, it's very easy to learn. You can get started with just a one-hour video. The drag-and-drop interface makes it user-friendly. For example, if you want to read an Excel file, drag the "read Excel file" node from the repository, configure it by specifying the file location, and run it. This gives you a table with all your data."

More KNIME cons

"From the developer perspective, the data connection handling the target data set is what most needs to be improved."

"I would like to be able to set the parameters in a more specific manner."

"In the next release, I would like to be able to have the option to see more raw data that I'm converting on the dashboard."

"Include forecasting on table calculation fields."

"I would like to have the product be more flexible in terms of creating online shared dashboards."

"The data preparation could integrate better with Tableau."

"Its integration with Microsoft products such as Teams should be improved."

"With performance tuning, it generates a pretty complex query when it is not required."

More Tableau cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"At this time, I am using the free version of Knime."

"KNIME is an open-source tool, so it's free to use."

"With KNIME, you can use the desktop version free of charge as much as you like. I've yet to hit its limits. If I did, I'd have to go to the server version, and for that you have to pay. Fortunately, I don't have to at the moment."

"KNIME is free as a stand-alone desktop-based platform but if you want to get a KNIME server then you can find the cost on their website."

"They have different versions, but I am using the open-source one."

"For beginners, the free desktop version is very attractive, but the full server version can be more expensive. I have only used the free version and it offers a fair pricing system. I have been promoting it to others without any compensation or request from the company, simply because I am enthusiastic about it. I am not aware of the pricing for the server version, but it seems to be widely used."

"This is an open-source solution that is free to use."

"The price for Knime is okay."

More KNIME pricing and cost advice

"I rate the product price in the Indian region a seven to eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price, and ten is a high price."

"The cost of the solution should be improved."

"In general, if someone is new and wants to learn Tableau, it's around $70 per month."

"There is a license for the use of this solution and it is on a per-user basis. The server is free but the users you have to pay for."

"For the use and the capability of the software, it's $70 per month, and that is quite inexpensive."

"The price of this solution could definitely be lower. It's quite expensive."

"It is fairly expensive. I have no idea what they paid. We were on an enterprise license, so whatever it is they licensed at the enterprise level is what we paid."

"The licensing model of Tableau has changed since we initially purchased it three years ago and it is more complicated, and I have found it to be more expensive. They have lost market shares to Microsoft BI. My company will probably change solutions this year because of the increased pricing model."

More Tableau pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Data Mining solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Comparison Review

it_user6330

Product Manager at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

May 2, 2013

MicroStrategy vs. Tableau

After a recent presentation, several attendees asked me about the applications of Visual Insights and Tableau. Many companies are investing in both tools and are trying to figure out the right tool for specific applications Tableau has found its sweet-spot as an agile discovery tool that analysts…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Computer Software Company

University

Educational Organization

44%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about KNIME?

Since KNIME is a no-code platform, it is easy to work with.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for KNIME?

I rate the product’s pricing a seven out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with KNIME?

For graphics, the interface is a little confusing. So, this is a point that could be improved.

See all answers

Seeking lightweight open source BI software

It depends on the Data architecture and the complexity of your requirement. Some great tools in the market are Qlik Sense, Power BI, OBIEE, Tableau, etc. I have recently started using Cognos Enter...

See all answers

Tableau vs. Business Objects - Which is a better solution for visualization and analysis?

Both tools have their positives and negatives. First, I should mention that I am relatively new to Tableau. I have been working on and off Tableau for about a year, but getting to work on it consta...

See all answers

Which would you choose - Tableau or SAP Analytics Cloud?

Tableau is easy to set up and maintain. In about a day it is possible for the entire platform to be deployed for use. This relatively short amount of time can make all the difference for companies ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Altair RapidMiner vs KNIME

Compared 27% of the time

Microsoft Power BI vs KNIME

Compared 15% of the time

Dataiku vs KNIME

Compared 14% of the time

Alteryx vs KNIME

Compared 8% of the time

Amazon SageMaker vs KNIME

Compared 1% of the time

More KNIME Competitors

Microsoft Power BI vs Tableau

Compared 19% of the time

Domo vs Tableau

Compared 13% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs Tableau

Compared 7% of the time

Databricks vs Tableau

Compared 6% of the time

SAP Analytics Cloud vs Tableau

Compared 5% of the time

More Tableau Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

KNIME

March 2025

Download KNIME product report

Buyer's Guide

Tableau

March 2025

Download Tableau product report

Also Known As

KNIME Analytics Platform

Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online

Overview

KNIME is an open-source analytics software used for creating data science that is built on a GUI based workflow, eliminating the need to know code. The solution has an inherent modular workflow approach that documents and stores the analysis process in the same order it was conceived and implemented, while ensuring that intermediate results are always available.

KNIME supports Windows, Linux, and Mac operating systems and is suitable for enterprises of all different sizes. With KNIME, you can perform functions ranging from basic I/O to data manipulations, transformations and data mining. It consolidates all the functions of the entire process into a single workflow. The solution covers all main data wrangling and machine learning techniques, and is based on visual programming.

KNIME Features

KNIME has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Scalability through data handling (intelligent automatic caching of data in the background while maximizing throughput performance)
High extensibility via a well-defined API for plugin extensions
Intuitive user interface
Import/export of workflows
Parallel execution on multi-core systems
Command line version for "headless" batch executions
Activity dashboard
Reporting & statistics
Third-party integrations
Workflow management
Local automation
Metanode linking
Tool blending
Big Data extensions

KNIME Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing KNIME. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Integrated Deployment: KNIME’s integrated deployment moves both the selected model, and the entire data model preparation process into production simply and automatically, allowing for continuous optimization in production and also saving time because it eliminates error.

Elastic and Hybrid Execution: KNIME’s elastic and hybrid executions helps you reduce costs while covering periods of high demand, dynamically.

Metadata Mapping: KNIME enables complete metadata mapping of all aspects of your workflow. In addition, KNIME offers blueprint workflows for documenting the nodes, data sources, and libraries used, as well as runtime information.

Guided Analytics: KNIME’s guided analytics applications can be customized based on reusable components.

Powerful analytics, local automation, and workflow difference: KNIME uses advanced predictive and machine learning algorithms to provide you with the analytics you need. In combination with powerful analytics, KNIME’s automation capabilities and workflow difference prepare your organization with the tools you need to make better business decisions.

Supports enterprise-wide data science practices: The deployment and management functionalities of KNIME make it easy to productionize data science applications and services, and deliver usable, reliable, and reproducible insights for the business.

Helps you leverage insights gained from your data: Using KNIME ensures the data science process immediately reflects changing requirements or new insights.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the KNIME solution.

An Emeritus Professor at a university says, “It can read many different file formats. It can very easily tidy up your data, deleting blank rows, and deleting rows where certain columns are missing. It allows you to make lots of changes internally, which you do using JavaScript to put in the conditional. It also has very good fundamental machine learning. It has decision trees, linear regression, and neural nets. It has a lot of text mining facilities as well. It's fairly fully-featured.”

Benedikt S., CEO at SMH - Schwaiger Management Holding GmbH, explains, “All of the features related to the ETL are fantastic. That includes the connectors to other programs, databases, and the meta node function. Technical support has been extremely responsive so far. The solution has a very strong and supportive community that shares information and helps each other troubleshoot. The solution is very stable. The initial setup is pretty simple and straightforward.”

Piotr Ś., Test Engineer at ProData Consult, says, “What I like the most is that it works almost out of the box with Random Forest and other Forest nodes.”

Knime

Tableau is a tool for data visualization and business intelligence that allows businesses to report insights through easy-to-use, customizable visualizations and dashboards. Tableau makes it exceedingly simple for its customers to organize, manage, visualize, and comprehend data. It enables users to dig deep into the data so that they can see patterns and gain meaningful insights.

Make data-driven decisions with confidence thanks to Tableau’s assistance in providing faster answers to queries, solving harder problems more easily, and offering new insights more frequently. Tableau integrates directly to hundreds of data sources, both in the cloud and on premises, making it simpler to begin research. People of various skill levels can quickly find actionable information using Tableau’s natural language queries, interactive dashboards, and drag-and-drop capabilities. By quickly creating strong calculations, adding trend lines to examine statistical summaries, or clustering data to identify relationships, users can ask more in-depth inquiries.

Tableau has many valuable key features:

Tableau dashboards provide a complete view of your data through visualizations, visual objects, text, and more.
Tableau provides convenient, real-time options to collaborate with other users and instantly share data in the form of visualizations, sheets, and dashboards.
Tableau ensures connectivity to both live data sources and data extraction from external data sources as in-memory data. This gives users the flexibility to use data from more than one source without any restrictions.
Tableau gives many data source option, ranging from spreadsheets, big data, on-premise files, relational databases, non-relational databases, data warehouses, and big data, to on-cloud data.
Tableau has a lot of pre-installed information on maps, such as cities, postal codes, and administrative boundaries.
Tableau has a foolproof security system based on authentication and permission systems for data connections and user access. Tableau also gives you the freedom to integrate with other security protocols.

Tableau stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Some of these include its fast data access, easy creation of visualizations, and its stability. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

Romil S., Deputy General Manager of IT at Nayara Energy, notes, "Its visualizations are good, and its features make the development process a little less time-consuming. It has an in-memory extract feature that allows us to extract data and keep it on the server, and then our users can use it quickly.

Ariful M., Consulting Practice Partner of Data, Analytics & AI at FH, writes, “Tableau is very flexible and easy to learn. It has drag-and-drop function analytics, and its design is very good.”

Salesforce

Sample Customers

Infocom Corporation, Dymatrix Consulting Group, Soluzione Informatiche, MMI Agency, Estanislao Training and Solutions, Vialis AG

Accenture, Adobe, Amazon.com, Bank of America, Charles Schwab Corp, Citigroup, Coca-Cola Company, Cornell University, Dell, Deloitte, Duke University, eBay, Exxon Mobil, Fannie Mae, Ferrari, French Red Cross, Goldman Sachs, Google, Government of Canada, HP, Intel, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Macy's, Merck, The New York Times, PayPal, Pfizer, US Army, US Air Force, Skype, and Walmart.

Find out what your peers are saying about Knime, Weka, IBM and others in Data Mining. Updated: March 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.

We monitor all Data Mining reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.