Tableau Migration ROI Calculator: The Formula and a Worked Example
August 10, 2026
Migration ROI runs on three variables and one constant: how many dashboards move, how many hours each takes to rebuild by hand, the blended hourly rate, and a flat per-dashboard conversion fee. On the defaults used here, 100 dashboards at 80 hours and $85 an hour, a manual rebuild costs $680,000 against $88,000 with a conversion tool, a difference of $592,000 or 87 percent.
The arithmetic is short enough to check by hand. Manual cost is dashboards × hours × rate. Tool-assisted cost is dashboards × $200 + dashboards × hours × 0.1 × rate, where the second term is the review effort left after automation. Savings are the gap between them, and the percentage is that gap over the manual figure. Every figure on this page can be re-run against your own estate in the interactive ROI calculator, which is this arithmetic with sliders on it.
Tableau migration ROI: worked example on default inputs
Defaults are 100 dashboards, 80 hours per dashboard, $85 per hour, and a $200 flat fee per source dashboard.
| Line item | Manual rebuild | With a conversion tool |
|---|---|---|
| Conversion labor, 100 by 80 hours by $85 | $680,000 | Not applicable |
| Conversion fees, 100 by $200 | None | $20,000 |
| Review effort, a tenth of the manual hours | Included above | $68,000 |
| LLM usage, billed by your own provider | None | Typically under $20 per dashboard, paid to your provider, not included in the total below |
| Total | $680,000 | $88,000 |
| Difference | $592,000, or 87 percent of the manual figure | |
One number in that table deserves a label. The review share of a tenth is Antares' own product claim for its conversions, stated as 90 percent less manual work, and it is a claim about a tool rather than a property of migrations in general. Everything else is multiplication. If you test one assumption on your own estate before a business case rests on it, test that one.
How the ROI result moves with complexity and rate
Dashboard count and hourly rate scale both columns, so they change the size of the answer without changing which column wins. Hours per dashboard behaves differently, because the fee stays flat while manual cost does not. The scenarios below hold the count at 100 and vary the other two inputs across the range the calculator allows.
| Scenario | Manual | With a tool | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4 hours, $85 an hour, a simple estate | $34,000 | $23,400 | $10,600, or 31 percent |
| 80 hours, $85 an hour, the default | $680,000 | $88,000 | $592,000, or 87 percent |
| 160 hours, $85 an hour, a complex estate | $1,360,000 | $156,000 | $1,204,000, or 89 percent |
| 4 hours, $40 an hour, simple and cheap to staff | $16,000 | $21,600 | The tool costs $5,600 more |
The last row is the useful one. Where dashboards are genuinely trivial and internal effort is cheap, a per-dashboard fee is a large share of the work it replaces, and the arithmetic stops favoring the tool. What pushes an estate the other way is calculation logic such as level-of-detail expressions, which raise the hours input rather than the fee. The break-even comes out of the same formula: conversion pays when nine tenths of the manual cost of a dashboard exceeds the fee, which is hours × rate > $222. At $85 an hour that is about two and a half hours of manual work per dashboard, and at $40 an hour about five and a half.
Which side of that line your estate sits on is measurable rather than arguable. Scoring, described on dashboard complexity analysis, produces the hours input this model needs, and the wider comparison of the two approaches, including where a hand rebuild remains the right call, lives on automated versus manual migration.
What the ROI model leaves out
Licensing is absent by design. The subscription delta between Tableau and Power BI has its own drivers and its own timing, and it belongs with parallel running, training and data-platform rework on cost estimation. A total cost of ownership figure is those lines plus the conversion figure above, not one in place of the other.
Productivity and adoption benefits are absent too. They are real, and there is no defensible number to attach to them without measuring your own before and after, so nothing is invented here to fill the gap. A model built on one measurable input set holds up in a finance review better than one padded with estimated gains.
Three exclusions round it out. Redesign is new development: it cannot be validated against the original and should be funded separately. Data-platform rework appears when sources are not reachable from the target tenant or need a gateway, which the proof of concept stage is meant to reveal. And acceptance by dashboard owners sits outside the developer review term, as Microsoft's guidance on creating and validating content implies. Duration is a separate output from the same inputs, worked through on how long a migration takes.
What Antares does with these numbers
Both constants in this model come from the BI migration tool itself. Conversion is priced at a flat $200 for each source Tableau dashboard, nothing is charged per user and nothing expires, which is what makes the fee term a constant rather than a quote. The LLM bill stays inside your own environment, charged by your provider at typically under $20 for each dashboard, private endpoints available. Because the engine works deterministic-first with guardrailed, validated AI steps to a like-to-like result, review time stays in the model instead of being claimed away.
The variables are yours, and the free Analyzer measures them: deterministic and metadata-only, it returns a dashboard count and a complexity distribution to put into the hours input instead of a guess. Run the free Analyzer, then rerun the calculator on measured inputs.
Related reading: the Tableau to Power BI migration guide, cost estimation, the planning guide and the Analyzer. Primary sources: Microsoft's Power BI migration series, its guidance on gathering requirements and planning a deployment, Power BI pricing and Tableau pricing as of August 2026, and features by license type.
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Frequently asked questions
How do you calculate ROI on a Tableau to Power BI migration?
Compare two totals. Manual cost is dashboards times hours per dashboard times the blended rate. Tool-assisted cost is the flat fee per dashboard plus the review effort that remains, modeled here at a tenth of the manual hours. The difference over the manual total is the percentage. Everything else in a business case is added around that core.
What savings does the default calculation show?
On 100 dashboards at 80 hours each and $85 an hour, a manual rebuild totals $680,000. The same estate through a $200 per dashboard conversion is $20,000 in fees plus $68,000 in review, or $88,000, leaving $592,000 of difference, about 87 percent. Those are default inputs rather than measurements of any particular estate.
When does automated conversion stop paying for itself?
When a dashboard is small enough that the fee approaches the labor it replaces. Conversion pays while nine tenths of the manual cost per dashboard exceeds the fee, roughly two and a half hours of work at $85 an hour or five and a half at $40. An estate of trivial dashboards staffed cheaply can land on the wrong side of that line.
Is the 90 percent figure an industry benchmark?
No. It is Antares' product claim about its own conversions, and this model uses it as the assumption that a tenth of the manual effort remains as review. Treat it as the number to test first. Licensing changes, redesign work and data-platform rework are outside the model entirely and need their own lines.