Tableau vs XLCubed comparison

Salesforce and Fluence Technologies are both solutions in the Reporting category. Salesforce is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.6, while Fluence Technologies is ranked #29. Salesforce holds a 23.4% mindshare in RT, compared to Fluence Technologies’s 0.2% mindshare. Additionally, 89% of Salesforce users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 50% of Fluence Technologies users who would recommend it.

Tableau

Read 295 Tableau reviews

12,476 Views
10,551 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

XLCubed

Read 2 XLCubed reviews

198 Views
142 Comparison Views

50% willing to recommend

Tableau

XLCubed

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 2025

Tableau and XLCubed are competing products in data visualization and analytics. Tableau holds the upper hand with comprehensive analytics capabilities, while XLCubed's strong point lies in Excel-based workflows.

Features: Tableau provides extensive analytics, interactive dashboards, and robust data visualization. XLCubed offers seamless Excel integration, powerful data manipulation within Excel, and advanced pivot table functionalities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Tableau typically offers straightforward deployment with comprehensive support resources. XLCubed has simple deployment when interfacing with Excel, although it may require additional support for non-Excel applications.

Pricing and ROI: Tableau comes with higher setup costs but potentially offers greater long-term ROI due to extensive capabilities and integrations. XLCubed generally has a lower initial investment and offers significant ROI for Excel-reliant operations.

To learn more, read our detailed Tableau vs. XLCubed Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Tableau vs. XLCubed

March 2025

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Helped 842,592 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Tableau

Ranking in Reporting

2nd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.4

Number of Reviews

295

Ranking in other categories

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (2nd), Data Visualization (1st), Embedded BI (1st)

XLCubed

Ranking in Reporting

29th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of Tableau is 23.4%, up from 22.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of XLCubed is 0.2%, down from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Reporting

Featured Reviews

ROMIL SHAH

Deputy General Manger - Information Technology at Nayara Energy

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.

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it_user1391316

Head of Finance Systems at NHS

Cost effective with great capability, performance, flexibility and visuals

In general, we're happy with the solution but we're always looking to see what else is out there. The thing we've struggled with is our partnership with Tagetik UK, the consultants, and the issue we had gaining access to consultants to develop the solution on our behalf. Thankfully we connected directly with XLCubed and now have a pretty close and good relationship with them so the earlier problem we had of actually getting resources to help us develop has now been solved. One of the things that we've been asking for and would like as an additional feature is a sort of benchmarking functionality. The ability to be able to benchmark, directly against the company digital corporate numbers. That said, there seems to be improved functionality within the latest release that could help us develop that further.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution offers very good reporting."

"The most valuable feature is the 3D charting."

"Tableau Prep tool for data preparation is a most valuable tool."

"The solution allows for the possibility for end-users to do their own reporting."

"The most valuable feature is the user experience."

"Very user friendly."

"Self-service is most valuable. Users can pick up quickly and do the resolution. There are a lot of out-of-the-box features, and it satisfies most of the needs. If users are properly trained, they can deal with any situation."

"I like the calculation feature. I would not say it's such a good feature in Tableau, but if you have the knowledge, you can make that feature visible to everyone. It's not a feature that we can drag and drop and get the information. But whatever the data, whatever the calculation, I'm able to do. It's basically the knowledge base. Whatever knowledge I have, I can make that information public and publish it for management."

More Tableau pros

"Great capability, performance, flexibility, visuals, and the solution is also very cost effective."

"I am looking forward to testing their full graphics that are available, as they looked very interesting in the demo."

Cons

"Most of the problems in Tableau Online that I have noticed have to do with performance or weird, inexplicable bugs that I can't pin down. For example, you might try unloading some data, and you'll be waiting for a long time without anything happening."

"Improvements in schema security and row/column security need to be made."

"The solution could improve the scalability, it is difficult to make changes."

"It's already using 32 gigabytes of memory, but the performance is not so good. It's very heavy."

"The customization requires a lot of effort and should be simplified. The performance could be better."

"When you're working on a dashboard, you can't select multiple components at a time and align them, so you have to go one by one. This is very cumbersome."

"The integration with other program languages, like Python, needs to be better."

"In the next release, I would like to be able to have the option to see more raw data that I'm converting on the dashboard."

More Tableau cons

"There should be a better or an easier way to establish that connection to external sources."

"Would like the ability to be able to benchmark."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I downloaded the solution online for free."

"We always consider pricing when considering a new solution. We are a non-profit and price is a huge concern."

"We are paying an annual licensing fee."

"I'm using Tableau Public, which is free."

"The solution's licensing is based on user-basis. It depends on the business ROI it offers. It's not on the higher side or too cheap; it falls in the medium-cost range. The price is determined by user usage, so the cost will also increase as the number of users increases."

"Its price is reasonable. Everything is included in the license."

"The license is very expensive."

"Pricing is not bad. It's competitive."

More Tableau pricing and cost advice

"14,000 Pounds per year for licensing."

"I am still using the two-week trial, but at first sight, the price is reasonable."

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Comparison Review

it_user6330

Product Manager at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

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…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

44%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

20%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Mining And Metals Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

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 Sense, Power BI, OBIEE, Tableau, etc. I have recently started using Cognos Enter...

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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 been working on and off Tableau for about a year, but getting to work on it consta...

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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. This relatively short amount of time can make all the difference for companies ...

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Comparisons

Microsoft Power BI vs Tableau

Compared 20% of the time

Domo vs Tableau

Compared 13% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs Tableau

Compared 7% of the time

Databricks vs Tableau

Compared 6% of the time

SAP Analytics Cloud vs Tableau

Compared 4% of the time

More Tableau Competitors

Microsoft Power BI vs XLCubed

Compared 100% of the time

More XLCubed Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Tableau

March 2025

Download Tableau product report

Buyer's Guide

Reporting

March 2025

Download XLCubed product report

Also Known As

Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online

No data available

Overview

Tableau is a tool for data visualization and business intelligence that allows businesses to report insights through easy-to-use, customizable visualizations and dashboards. Tableau makes it exceedingly simple for its customers to organize, manage, visualize, and comprehend data. It enables users to dig deep into the data so that they can see patterns and gain meaningful insights.

Make data-driven decisions with confidence thanks to Tableau’s assistance in providing faster answers to queries, solving harder problems more easily, and offering new insights more frequently. Tableau integrates directly to hundreds of data sources, both in the cloud and on premises, making it simpler to begin research. People of various skill levels can quickly find actionable information using Tableau’s natural language queries, interactive dashboards, and drag-and-drop capabilities. By quickly creating strong calculations, adding trend lines to examine statistical summaries, or clustering data to identify relationships, users can ask more in-depth inquiries.

Tableau has many valuable key features:

Tableau dashboards provide a complete view of your data through visualizations, visual objects, text, and more.
Tableau provides convenient, real-time options to collaborate with other users and instantly share data in the form of visualizations, sheets, and dashboards.
Tableau ensures connectivity to both live data sources and data extraction from external data sources as in-memory data. This gives users the flexibility to use data from more than one source without any restrictions.
Tableau gives many data source option, ranging from spreadsheets, big data, on-premise files, relational databases, non-relational databases, data warehouses, and big data, to on-cloud data.
Tableau has a lot of pre-installed information on maps, such as cities, postal codes, and administrative boundaries.
Tableau has a foolproof security system based on authentication and permission systems for data connections and user access. Tableau also gives you the freedom to integrate with other security protocols.

Tableau stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Some of these include its fast data access, easy creation of visualizations, and its stability. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

Romil S., Deputy General Manager of IT at Nayara Energy, notes, "Its visualizations are good, and its features make the development process a little less time-consuming. It has an in-memory extract feature that allows us to extract data and keep it on the server, and then our users can use it quickly.

Ariful M., Consulting Practice Partner of Data, Analytics & AI at FH, writes, “Tableau is very flexible and easy to learn. It has drag-and-drop function analytics, and its design is very good.”

Salesforce

Produce insightful, interactive reports on, company-wide metrics for any business audience. Now all in Excel.
Pixel-perfect financial reporting with the skill sets you already have. No IT required.
Meet XLCubed: The data-connected Excel add-in for all your reporting needs.

Fluence Technologies

Sample Customers

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.

Marshalls Ltd, BP Exploration and Production, Thorntons, Ted Baker, Bristol-Myers, Rank Group, ING Bank Genve, Cargill Value Investment, Chloride Power, Auchan, Erste, UEFA, Novartis, Porsche Informatik, Raiffeisen Bank International

Buyer's Guide

Tableau vs. XLCubed

March 2025

Free Report: Tableau vs. XLCubed

Find out what your peers are saying about Tableau vs. XLCubed and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.

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