It seems that virtual desktops have fallen out of fashion, but I still use them and found that they made tiling entirely unnecessary to me. Each program is on its own desktop (Firefox, thunderbird, ...) and the terminal is everywhere through Guake (or Yakuake). Most 'comparative' views are already managed by specialized programs, but if you really need to 'tile' two windows, using meta+left or meta+right to take half the screen is very fast.
Compared to tiling with i3, it's a workflow that requires almost no configuration or learning.
Compared to tiling with i3, it's a workflow that requires almost no configuration or learning.