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IBM Watson Explorer vs Tableau comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM SPSS Statistics
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
Data Mining (3rd), Data Science Platforms (10th)
IBM Watson Explorer
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Data Mining (10th)
Tableau
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
294
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (2nd), Reporting (2nd), Data Visualization (1st), Embedded BI (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

Data Mining
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

AbakarAhmat - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 21, 2023
Enhancing survey analysis that provides valued insightfulness
I use it to analyze questionnaire surveys related to a product, solution, or application, such as open data services, which I provide to consumers and end-users. These surveys contain evaluation assessments, and I use SPSS to analyze the responses The most valuable feature is its robust…
it_user840897 - PeerSpot reviewer
Mar 27, 2018
Ingests, retrieves information from a range of sources; enables dissecting questions in context and answering them
WEX is more a platform, I believe, than it is the application. I could talk about what I'm looking for in the application. We've done visualizations and we can do basic analysis with the system as it stands. Where we're looking to take it is implementing it into workflows, so the workers on the line can actually understand the risks that they're exposing themselves to and then address them on the fly. So that's fantastic. And then the final one is, it's not prediction, but maybe anticipation. So when people are put at risk, we'll be implementing solutions shortly that will help people anticipate the risks and the dangers they're exposing themselves to so they can control them.
ROMIL SHAH - PeerSpot reviewer
Mar 22, 2022
Provides fast data access with in-memory extracts, makes it easy to create visualizations, and saves time
When it comes to visualizations, Tableau has a limitation as compared to Power BI. It has a limited set of visualizations. Power BI has the entire marketplace, so you can connect and import many visualizations and use them, whereas Tableau has only 10 or 15 visualizations. There should be more visualizations, and there should also be data integration with more cloud providers. Tableau has recently launched a paid version for the documentation. So, documentation has become a little bit challenging when it comes to Tableau development because we do not have any tool to export the data out of it. It is a license-based feature that you need to purchase to prepare documentation. So, on the documentation front, for preparing clear documentation for any dashboard, it would help if we get an embedded option, rather than buying a license for each user for the documentation. To document anything, if I have to connect to each workbook and see what has been written as a formula and then document in the Word document, it is pretty time-consuming. We have the Microsoft stack, and we are currently evaluating Power BI because Tableau has a limitation of 50 columns for a drill-down report. If we want more than 50 columns, we have found a hack, but there is no ready-made option for doing it. So, we have to use another tool in case we need a drilled report with more than 50 columns. There are many instances where users need 80 or 90 columns for their analysis, and switching between two technologies becomes a challenge. It is not a cost-effective approach for us. Their support should be improved. We are not happy with their support. Whenever we raised queries, we were pointed to a few blogs, and we didn't get a proper solution from them. Their licensing should also be improved. They want us to purchase a Tableau Creator license for business users, whereas Power BI Desktop is free for business users. They should come up with a basic license with one or two connectors that our business users can use for preparing their visualizations. Tableau also charges us per user for users who want the data only through email.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The learning curve to using this product is not steep. The program is appropriate for those who do not have a lot of background in programming, yet have to perform basic statistical analysis."
"Some of the most valuable features that we are using with some business models are machine learning algorithms, statistical models given to us by the business, and getting data from the database or text files."
"The solution has numerous valuable features. We particularly like custom tabs. It's very useful. We end up analyzing a lot of software data, so features related to custom tabs are really helpful."
"The most valuable feature of IBM SPSS Statistics is all the functionality it provides. Additionally, it is simple to do the five-way analysis that you can into multidimensional setup space. It's the multidimensional space facility that is most useful."
"The software offers consistency across multiple research projects helping us with predictive analytics capabilities."
"The solution is very comprehensive, especially compared to Minitabs, which is considered more for manufacturing. However, whatever data you want to analyze can be handled with SPSS."
"It has the ability to easily change any variable in our research."
"in terms of the simplicity, I think the SPSS basic can handle it."
"I have found the auto-generated document very useful as well as the main keywords that are highlighted, which are used for the search functionality within IBM Watson Explorer."
"We take natural language that was happening in our repositories and our application and then feed it to the Watson APIs. We receive JSON payloads as an API response to get cognitive feedback from the repository data."
"The valuable feature of Watson Explorer for us is data entities, and to see the hidden insights from within unstructured data."
"The ability to easily pull together lots of different pieces of information and drill down in a smarter way than has been possible with other analytics tools is key. Watson is all based on a set of AI and deep learning, machine-learning capabilities, and it is looking behind the scenes at some relationships that you likely would not have spotted on your own. It's pulling things together, categorizing some things, that are not something that you might have seen on your own."
"Ease of use is pretty good as is the standardization of not actually having to have my own natural learning algorithms, just to use the Watson APIs."
"For me, as a user, the most valuable feature is the ability to ingest and then retrieve information from a range of separate sources; the ability to dissect questions in context and actually answer them."
"I like Tableau's heat maps and the storyboard. You can create data stories and tons of visuals with it, and it goes together really well. Tableau lets you manipulate the data in various ways."
"We found Tableau has the quickest learning time out of the few other BI reporting tools that we have used."
"It is a stable solution."
"The ease of presenting findings is very helpful."
"The data blending capabilities is a huge factor for our team."
"Tableau has data relationships that can be applied to a data source which helps build out a directory which is helpful. Data blending has also been valuable to us."
"The geospatial maps representation and the visualizations are nice."
"I believe one of the most valuable features of the solution is trend analysis."
 

Cons

"Most of the package will give you the fixed value, or the p-value, without an explanation as to whether it it significant or not. Some beginners might need not just the results, but also some explanation for them."
"The solution needs more planning tools and capabilities."
"The solution needs to improve forecasting using time series analysis."
"Perhaps in terms of visualization. It's not really easy to do some data visualization, just simple, descriptive analysis in SPSS. I think that could be an area for improvement."
"The statistics should be more self-explanatory with detailed automated reports."
"If there is any self-generation data collection plan (DCP), it would be helpful in gathering data. It would also be useful if there is a function to scale it up to, let's say, UiPath and have it consolidate and integrate into a UiPath solution."
"SPSS slows down the computer or the laptop if the data is huge; then you need a faster computer."
"It would be helpful if there was better documentation on how to properly use the solution. A beginner's guide on how to use the various programming functions within the product would be so useful to a lot of people. I found that everything was very confusing at first. Having clear documentation would help alleviate that."
"It needs better language support, to include some other languages. Also, they should improve the user interface."
"Much of IBM operates this way, where they have sets of tools that are in the middleware space, and it becomes the customer's responsibility or the business partner's responsibility to develop full solutions that take advantage of that middleware. I think IBM's finding itself in that spot with Watson-related technologies as well, where the capabilities to do really interesting and useful things for customers is there, but somebody still has to build it. Is that going to be the customer? Are they going to be willing to take on that responsibility themselves"
"Small businesses will probably have a little harder time getting into it, just because of the amount of resources that they have available, both financial and time, but it really is a solution that should work for them."
"The solution is expensive."
"I would say, give some kind of a community edition, a free edition. A lot of companies do, even Amazon gives you some kind of trial and error opportunities. If they could provide something like that, it would be good."
"It is a little bit tricky to get used to the workflow of knowing how to train Watson, what can be provided, what can't be, how to provide it, how to import, export, and what it means every time you have to add a new dictionary"
"Stability is actually one of the areas that could use improvement. Setting it up is always tough. Setting Explorer requires experts, but also the underlying platform is not that stable. So it really needs a good expert to keep it running."
"More cognitive feedback would be good. The natural language analysis is great, the sentiment analyzers are great. But I would just like to see more... innovation done with the Watson platform."
"The user experience for less savvy or non-technical people (from my experience)."
"The solution could use more features in data analytics."
"Formatting controls could use some improvement."
"We did have issues with Tableau 10.1 server with the brokers failing on heavy load but since moving to 10.2, then to 10.3, this issue seems to have been resolved and the environment is now quite stable."
"I would like Tableau to handle geospatial data better in terms of multiple layers and shapefiles."
"Firstly, the high cost of Tableau licenses makes it inaccessible for many mid-scale clients. Secondly, the server requires at least 128GB of RAM, which can be impractical for some systems. We need a dedicated system to use Tableau."
"Whenever it comes to specialized visualization, Tableau is an absolute failure."
"The development part should be better. We are putting a lot of effort in during development, so if we face any struggles, we have to find workaround solutions on the internet."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We think that IBM SPSS is expensive for this function."
"SPSS is an expensive piece of software because it's incredibly complex and has been refined over decades, but I would say it's fairly priced."
"The price of IBM SPSS Statistics could improve."
"Our licence is on a yearly renewal basis. While pricing is not the primary concern in our evaluation, as products are assessed by whether they can meet our user needs and expertise, the cost can be a limiting factor in the number of licences we procure."
"I rate the tool's pricing a five out of ten."
"While the pricing of the product may be higher, the accompanying service and features justify the investment."
"If it requires lot of data processing, maybe switching to IBM SPSS Clementine would be better for the buyer."
"It's quite expensive, but they do a special deal for universities."
"The solution is expensive."
"It is fairly expensive. I have no idea what they paid. We were on an enterprise license, so whatever it is they licensed at the enterprise level is what we paid."
"Tableau is an expensive solution, though it comes with its advantages."
"Its price is higher than Power BI and QlikView. Tableau costs around $70 per user per month, whereas Power BI is around $8 to $9. QlikView is around $30. Tableau has various prices for various models such as Creator, Designer."
"The pricing is $70 per month. You have to pay about $800 or something in that ballpark annually for one license."
"It is reasonable based on what it offers."
"The solution is expensive but it depends on the customer's needs which will determine the cost of the licensing."
"Tableau is a little cheaper as compared to Power BI and other technologies that we have used in the past. However, if the business users in our organization want to make presentations, Tableau has been asking us to purchase a Tableau Creator license, and $35 per month is expensive for business users. Power BI is giving a free desktop version for business users to connect to any data source and build their own dashboards. That's why we have proposed to use Power BI for most of the business users in our organization."
"The company chose to purchase a creator license for me, which was $70. With that license, you can also be an administrator. We also have 20-25 extra licenses and they cost around $20-$35 each. Those are for normal users who will be viewing the dashboards. Those are monthly charges."
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Comparison Review

it_user6330 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 2, 2013
MicroStrategy vs. Tableau
After a recent presentation, several attendees asked me about the applications of Visual Insights and Tableau. Many companies are investing in both tools and are trying to figure out the right tool for specific applications Tableau has found its sweet-spot as an agile discovery tool that analysts…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
University
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
19%
Educational Organization
12%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Educational Organization
40%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about IBM SPSS Statistics?
The software offers consistency across multiple research projects helping us with predictive analytics capabilities.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM SPSS Statistics?
While the pricing of the product may be higher, the accompanying service and features justify the investment. However...
What needs improvement with IBM SPSS Statistics?
In some cases, the product takes time to load a large dataset. They could improve this particular area.
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Seeking lightweight open source BI software
It depends on the Data architecture and the complexity of your requirement. Some great tools in the market are Qlik ...
Tableau vs. Business Objects - Which is a better solution for visualization and analysis?
Both tools have their positives and negatives. First, I should mention that I am relatively new to Tableau. I have be...
Which would you choose - Tableau or SAP Analytics Cloud?
Tableau is easy to set up and maintain. In about a day it is possible for the entire platform to be deployed for use....
 

Also Known As

SPSS Statistics
IBM WEX
Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online
 

Learn More

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

LDB Group, RightShip, Tennessee Highway Patrol, Capgemini Consulting, TEAC Corporation, Ironside, nViso SA, Razorsight, Si.mobil, University Hospitals of Leicester, CROOZ Inc., GFS Fundraising Solutions, Nedbank Ltd., IDS-TILDA
RIMAC, Westpac New Zealand, Toyota Financial Services, Swiss Re, Akershus University Hospital, Korean Air Lines, Mizuho Bank, Honda
Accenture, Adobe, Amazon.com, Bank of America, Charles Schwab Corp, Citigroup, Coca-Cola Company, Cornell University, Dell, Deloitte, Duke University, eBay, Exxon Mobil, Fannie Mae, Ferrari, French Red Cross, Goldman Sachs, Google, Government of Canada, HP, Intel, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Macy's, Merck, The New York Times, PayPal, Pfizer, US Army, US Air Force, Skype, and Walmart.
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Watson Explorer vs. Tableau and other solutions. Updated: March 2020.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.