Why Omni over Tableau?

Tableau is a powerful tool, but it has become complex to use. Omni includes the same core features as Tableau, but it also offers a more intuitive UI that lets users switch seamlessly between point/click UI, SQL, Excel formulas, and AI querying. In addition, Omni has intelligent caching that results in faster load times and lower database costs.

Tableau’s library of visualizations is more extensive than Omni’s at the moment, but Omni covers all commonly used chart types and is constantly adding new ones.

You don’t have to maintain a semantic layer in Omni; you can query straight from raw tables or dbt models.

However, Omni’s shared model gives a key advantage over Tableau: metrics, relationships, and logic developed by users in Omni can be centralized and reused across the company. In Tableau, this business logic sits siloed in individual dashboards, creating inconsistent definitions and calculations.

While in theory you could have all business logic confined to the dbt semantic layer, in practice this creates bottlenecks.

To keep up with the pace of business, users constantly need new measures or dimensions. With Omni, your users can explore the data and get the answers they need. Then, if any ad-hoc metrics should be used by the broader organization, you can push them to Omni’s shared model or dbt to close the loop.

While Tableau offers some self-serve functionality, it doesn’t give users complete freedom in exploring data. For example, letting users drill into data requires labor-intensive prep work to pre-define drill paths. In addition, creating new analyses and visualizations is only possible with specialized knowledge that most teams in the company don’t have, so the data team becomes a bottleneck.

Omni, in contrast, lets anyone generate insights independently. Seamless drill-downs are available by default and can be customized if desired. And for users who want to go beyond the scope of the dashboard, they can start new analyses with one click from any chart or table to answer additional questions.

Coming from a workbook-based tool like Tableau, Omni will feel familiar from the start. In addition to familiar core features, Omni offers quality-of-life improvements that address common pain points of legacy tools (e.g. the Content Validator that allows you to easily identify and fix broken content in bulk when underlying data sources change).

The migration itself is easier than you might think; for example, one Omni customer recently switched from using both Looker and Tableau to Omni in just 3 weeks and immediately saw an uptick in BI usage across the company.

Omni meets every analyst where they are; data scientists can dive straight into raw SQL while less technical users can leverage Excel formulas or AI querying. No need to learn tool-specific syntax.

On the data engineering side, Omni not only seamlessly integrates with your existing workflows, but also streamlines the development process (especially if you’re using dbt). Instead of juggling separate “dev” and “prod” connections, data engineers can switch between development and production dbt environments in Omni to test and visualize the impacts of data transformations before shipping them.

The Tableau community forums have been a great example of analytics experts helping each other (although users note that the Salesforce acquisition and integration have made it difficult to locate relevant content).

At Omni, our support team will help you debug your problems in real-time. We’re also building a highly active community where both Omni customers as well as experts from the Omni team (including founder and CEO Colin Zima) share their expertise and solve issues.