Why Omni over Tableau?

Make beautiful, custom visualizations easily while benefiting from consistent metrics & a robust dbt integration.

Ease of use: Omni’s intuitive UI, SQL, Excel formulas, and AI querying meet everyone where they are, instead of requiring specialized skills and knowledge.

Speed: Get insights fast through intelligent caching and develop metrics as you go, without needing the data team to build everything beforehand.

Metrics consistency: Omni’s semantic layer and 2-way dbt integration provide seamless governance and eliminate metrics chaos.

White-glove support: Hands-on support in real-time for every customer — not just those who pay extra.

See Omni
Compared to Tableau and Looker, Omni was by far the best performer in terms of all-around functionality.Cody Pulliam, Senior Manager of Business Analytics, Aviatrix

How Omni & Tableau compare

Omni provides self-serve analytics for everyone — without a steep learning curve.

Tableau requires extensive training and specialized knowledge to use. Omni meets users where they are — they can use an intuitive point/click interface, Excel formulas, SQL, and AI querying.

Anyone can be effective with Omni. Use your preferred language to analyze data, create metrics, and contribute to a shared data model, without needing the data team to help.

Only the data team can go deep in Tableau. The data team becomes a bottleneck because Tableau requires specialized knowledge and extensive training to use.

[T]here have been very specific (and successful) analytics tools that cater to a governed model, iterative SQL analysis, or workbook BI. Omni supports all of these workflows simultaneously, which unlocks all departments within an organization to be empowered as data analysts.

- Omni customer

Tableau is not easy to learn [...]. Things that should be straightforward can take hours of research or trial-and-error to figure out.

- Tableau customer

The steep learning curve is the #1 issue mentioned by customers on G2, an independent review site.

With Omni, you don’t have to compromise on speed or data freshness.

Unlike Tableau, Omni automatically caches your query results so that you’re querying fresh data without adding compute costs. Tableau only lets you query directly from your database or in-memory extracts, which cost you more and slow you down.

Omni’s intelligent caching combines the speed of extracts and the data freshness of direct queries without added costs.

Tableau makes you choose between speed and cost, only letting you query in-memory extracts OR directly from database.

In Tableau, I would have to schedule the extract to get faster performance, but Omni always has the live version. It’s so nice that Omni’s caching doesn't have to execute a query every single time someone clicks something on a dashboard.

- Cody Pulliam, Senior Manager of Business Analytics, Aviatrix

Omni eliminates metrics chaos and provides seamless governance, without slowing you down.

Without a central data model, your Tableau instance quickly descends into chaos. Omni helps you control your data environment with a shared data model and robust dbt integration.

Omni’s built-in semantic layer and just-in-time data modeling ensure that everyone is using consistent metrics without creating a data engineering bottleneck.

Tableau doesn’t have a shared data model. Metrics need to be recreated in every dashboard, creating duplicative work, inconsistency, and confusion between teams.

You can push new metric definitions to dbt via a 2-way integration to make them universally accessible and optimize performance.

Business logic created in Tableau stays in Tableau, creating a data silo. There isn’t a native way to push it to the data warehouse or dbt.

Omni’s Content Validator lets you easily update your schema and references in bulk if you make changes to the underlying data sources.

Any changes to underlying data sources (e.g. changing a field name) will break your dashboards unless you manually reflect the change in every single workbook.

If what I build's good, we just promote the new metrics into the model so they can be reused everywhere by all users. The combination of the workbook and modeled BI approach is very powerful.

- Omni customer

Omni offers hands-on support in real-time — for free.

Omni’s team is there to support you at every step of the way, all included in your contract without any extra costs. Tableau requires you to pay extra for a premium support plan from Salesforce.

White-glove support is included for all customers.

Comprehensive support requires a pricey premium support plan from Salesforce.

Omni offers a truly incredible level of personal service where competitors seemingly offer little to none. Their team is constantly available in real time for anything from troubleshooting tricky issues to just helping you make your dashboards look better.

- Omni customer

When purchasing Tableau for an organization, you get no support unless you pay for it. Once you pay for support, it is still an 8 hour window before someone will reach out to you. If your enterprise dashboard fails or you have an outage, you're just out a day.

- Tableau customer

If you like dbt, you’ll love Omni’s dbt integration

Even if you’re using dbt, users will inevitably create some business logic in your BI tool.

With Omni, data teams can push logic to dbt and make it universally accessible. With Tableau, this will create metrics chaos instead.

See how Omni’s dbt integration compares to Tableau's

Using Tableau?

Migrating to Omni is easier than you think.

In just three weeks, Aviatrix migrated from Tableau, Looker, and Excel to Omni.

Since the migration, full adoption of BI has doubled as Omni lets business users get insights without knowing SQL or tool-specific syntax.

Despite having a complex model, a large backlog of content, and more than 100 users, we were able to complete the migration to Omni in just three weeks with the help of Omni’s team.Cody Pulliam, Senior Manager of Business Analytics, Aviatrix

Customer love

Julie B.Head of Data

"Omni Analytics is a sweet spot between Looker and Mode. It's easy for your team to use, like Looker, but also lets tech-savvy folks dig into data with SQL queries. Plus, the Omni team is super quick to support and brainstorm on new ideas."

Read full review
Verified User in Venture Capital & Private Equity

"I am not a BI tool user nor a data engineer but am able to model data and create dashboards much easier than other tools we tried. The tool is fast and responsive. The team is helpful and supportive and if you want get under the hood it's very easy to do so"

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Hari A.

A super powerful BI tool. Omni addresses many of the struggles in legacy BI tools with novel approaches. The team has built with the analyst in mind so well. With Omni, data engineering can end a step or two earlier and rest of the magic is taken care of by the Omni UI. I also love how quickly Omni iterates and launches new features. Customer support of the finest levels too."

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 FAQs

Omni is a relatively new tool. Does it have the same features as 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.

Maintaining a semantic layer in Omni sounds like a lot of work that I don’t have to do in Tableau.

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.

Why do I need a semantic layer in Omni if I’m using dbt? Business logic shouldn’t sit in the BI layer.

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.

We want to enable self-serve analytics for our business users. Which tool should I choose?

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.

I’ve been using Tableau for years. I’m worried it will be difficult transitioning to a new tool.

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.

Many analysts and data engineers already have experience with Tableau, but not so much with Omni since the tool is relatively new.

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.

We’re using Tableau and found the community helpful in troubleshooting issues. How does Omni’s compare?

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.

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