Domo vs Tableau

Domo is a cloud business intelligence platform founded in 2010 in Utah by Josh James, co-founder of Omniture, and listed on Nasdaq in 2018. It combines data integration, dashboards, low-code apps and AI in one hosted product aimed at business teams, not only analysts. In September 2026 Progress Software completed a $400 million acquisition of Domo's AI and data platform business, so Domo now sits inside Progress's data portfolio.

The platform includes 1,000+ prebuilt connectors, drag-and-drop Magic ETL, Cloud Amplifier for querying Snowflake, BigQuery or Databricks without copying data, charts and dashboards, scheduled reports and alerts, App Studio for low-code data apps, embedded analytics for customer-facing reporting, workflows and AI agents with governed model management. Pricing is credit-based: you buy a pool of credits consumed by storage, data refreshes, workflows and AI, with unlimited users and a 30-day free trial.

Domo fits mid-size and large companies that want one vendor for pipelines and dashboards and value mobile, executive-friendly reporting. Power BI is far cheaper for Microsoft shops, Tableau has deeper visual analytics, and Looker Studio or Metabase cover simpler needs for little or no cost. Credit consumption can be hard to forecast, and independent estimates put typical contracts in the tens of thousands of dollars per year.

Buying tip: because of the Progress acquisition, ask about roadmap, support continuity and contract terms before renewing or signing a multi-year deal, and model credit burn on your real refresh schedules during the trial.

Tableau is the visual analytics platform that set the standard for interactive dashboards. It was founded in 2003 as a spin-off of a Stanford University research project, grew up in Seattle and was acquired by Salesforce in 2019. Analysts connect to databases, spreadsheets and cloud sources, drag fields onto a canvas to build sophisticated visualisations, and combine them into dashboards that business users can filter and explore.

The product family includes Tableau Desktop for authoring, Tableau Prep for cleaning and shaping data, and Tableau Cloud or self-hosted Tableau Server for publishing, sharing and governance. Tableau Public is a free community version for public data. Tableau Pulse delivers AI-generated metric summaries to business users, and Tableau Agent adds natural language help for building visualisations and calculations. Licensing is role-based per user per year: Creator for authors, Explorer for self-service analysis on published data and Viewer for consumers, with Tableau+ adding premium AI and management features.

Tableau fits organisations with dedicated analyst teams that value visual exploration, design flexibility and a large community. It is expensive compared with Power BI, especially when many viewers need access, and getting value requires trained authors and well-prepared data. Power BI wins in Microsoft-centric companies on price and Office integration, Looker suits teams that want a governed semantic layer on Google Cloud, Qlik offers associative exploration, and Metabase or Looker Studio are lighter, cheaper options.