Tableau vs Yellowfin comparison

Salesforce and Yellowfin are both solutions in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category. Salesforce is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.6, while Yellowfin is ranked #42. Salesforce holds a 18.3% mindshare in BIT, compared to Yellowfin’s 0.2% mindshare. Additionally, 89% of Salesforce users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Yellowfin users who would recommend it.

Tableau

Read 295 Tableau reviews

18,562 Views
15,629 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Yellowfin

Read 2 Yellowfin reviews

203 Views
159 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Tableau

Yellowfin

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Tableau and Yellowfin are competing products in the business intelligence and analytics space, with each showcasing distinct advantages. Yellowfin appears to have the upper hand due to its emphasis on features like collaboration and mobile functionality.

Features: Tableau is known for capabilities like robust data visualization, dynamic dashboards, and extensive integration options. Yellowfin offers automated insights, collaborative storytelling, and advanced mobile functionalities, providing a narrative-driven analytic experience that emphasizes collaboration and accessibility.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Tableau provides a straightforward installation process with comprehensive documentation and a strong support network. Yellowfin offers a flexible deployment model with cloud and on-premises options, combined with a customer service focus, providing advantageous operational conditions.

Pricing and ROI: Tableau generally involves a higher upfront cost but delivers swift time-to-value due to its intuitive features and powerful analytics. Yellowfin provides a competitive pricing structure and substantial ROI through its emphasis on collaboration and mobile analytics, making it a cost-effective solution.

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

Buyer's Guide

Tableau vs. Yellowfin

March 2025

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Helped 842,161 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 BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

2nd

Ranking in Reporting

2nd

Ranking in Data Visualization

1st

Ranking in Embedded BI

1st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.4

Number of Reviews

295

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Yellowfin

Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

42nd

Ranking in Reporting

30th

Ranking in Data Visualization

27th

Ranking in Embedded BI

13th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of Tableau is 18.3%, down from 19.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Yellowfin is 0.2%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

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_user86469

Director with 51-200 employees

Very scalable design and easy to implement. It can reside alongside more complex enterprise systems.

I have been involved with the implementation of many BI products; many products are expensive, require complex and difficult implementations, and once installed it is only the start of a lengthy consulting engagement to get the installation to where the customer wants it to be. Yellowfin is the antithesis of this; it installs easily, the configuration is done quickly, and the user can come up to speed quickly (especially if they have used other BI products). As an implementer, this changes how we operate, because we can focus on providing the customer what they want, not just on technical wizardry to get the product operational.

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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

"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."

"Tableau is very flexible and easy to learn. It has drag-and-drop function analytics, and its design is very good. It is a very good tool, and it basically brings life into data with good design. We have been creating a lot of interactive visualizations and dashboards. It has a public version. There are public communities from where you can get a lot of examples for practice."

"The product has the best features for analytical views and filters."

"The geospatial maps representation and the visualizations are nice."

"The ease of presenting findings is very helpful."

"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."

"It’s good for quick visualization and being able to quickly consume unstructured data to play around with."

"The product offers an intuitive user interface, detailed screens and widgets, and the absence of data limitations"

More Tableau pros

"It is a central source of up-to-date data and information."

"It reduces time to reproduce reports, provides easy access to organisational data, and has the ability to generate a wide range of reports and analysis."

"It is able to create information dashboards for various users' throughout."

Cons

"With performance tuning, it generates a pretty complex query when it is not required."

"It will be good if the server, could be more stable, and I would like to have the technical service to be more reliable."

"Small multiples (a.k.a. Trellis charts) are possible only through very hacky means. Update: Still remains a challenge."

"It needs a little bit more advanced modeling. I would like to see functionality like Cognos has in the Framework Manager."

"I also work as an SME on the platform side. Tableau is very nice and jazzy for the end-users, but there are pain points for the admins. Performance is something about which we hear a lot of complaints, such as the dashboard doesn't open in time. It performs well on the desktop but not on the server. I know that there is always a limitation when it comes to a huge amount of data or the complexity of the calculations, but we often hear from end-users about the performance on the server side. It is easy to drag and drop all the columns and do what we want, but if it is not going to load better on the server, users are not going to like it."

"SAP BusinessObjects has some semantic layer designs that give the flexibility to do ad hoc reporting or dashboard designing. If that can be brought into Tableau, it would be great. We have the data in the database, but we should also be able to bring something between the database and the dashboard and do some semantic layer modeling for ad hoc reporting requirements."

"With Tableau, there is a gap in its ability to handle very large-scale data."

"I have used Power BI as well as Tableau. There are a couple of interesting features that I like in Power BI, but they are not present in Tableau. For example, in Power BI, if I am looking at country-wise population, I can type and ask for the country that has the maximum population, and it will automatically give an answer and address that query. This kind of feature is not there in Tableau. Similarly, in Power BI, for integrating with the latest ML algorithms, we have decision trees and primarily multiple machine learning algorithms. The decision tree essentially visualizes the patterns in the data. We don't have such a feature in Tableau. If Tableau can integrate with the machine learning algorithms and help us to do visualizations, it would be a wonderful combination. Most of the people are going for Tableau primarily for visualization purposes. However, in the data science industry, users want to do model building as well as tell a story. As of now, Tableau is fulfilling the requirements for visualization purposes. If they can bring it up to a level where I can use it for machine learning purposes as well as for visualization, it would be very helpful. Many people who want to do data science don't want to write a code. Tableau is anyway a drag and drop tool, and if they can provide those options as well, it will be a powerful combination."

More Tableau cons

"It needs more presentation/charting capabilities and integration with GIS."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"ROI is very high, but it requires a data preparation/blending tool."

"The pricing is $70 per month. You have to pay about $800 or something in that ballpark annually for one license."

"The initial cost that is set according to CPU cores is expensive."

"There is a license for the use of this solution and it is on a per-user basis. The server is free but the users you have to pay for."

"In general, if someone is new and wants to learn Tableau, it's around $70 per month."

"Its licensing cost should be improved."

"Tableau's prices are relatively high for our market. I am from Serbia, so many companies in this market don't have the ability to pay for expensive software. My clients are quite satisfied with a lot of Tableau's qualities except for the prices."

"The professional version of Tableau is quite expensive."

More Tableau pricing and cost advice

Information not available

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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

Computer Software Company

27%

Educational Organization

13%

Government

10%

Insurance 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...

See all answers

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

Apache Superset vs Yellowfin

Compared 55% of the time

More Yellowfin Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Tableau

March 2025

Download Tableau product report

Buyer's Guide

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

February 2025

Download Yellowfin 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

Yellowfin offers a business intelligence (BI) platform that allows users to interact with big data in a variety of ways. Yellowfin works to provide big data access to companies of all sizes, from small business to billion-dollar enterprises. It is designed for providing data quickly and allowing users to filter for specific results, maximizing gain from big data. Yellowfin has a variety of dashboards so the user can filter, drill to detail, and have data analysis in the same browser. The data can also be easily shared with others via email, wiki embed, and reports. There is a mobile app as well, which works automatically with the desktop dashboards to allow users to access their data on the go, and alerts can be set up to notify a user via email or push to a mobile device if the data is indicating a critical event taking place. Yellowfin also can map data to locations, providing not only the what of data, but also the where. Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust provides its community in England with mental health and community care services. Using Yellowfin's mobile business intelligence capabilities to deliver reporting and analytics to approximately 6000 clinicians, Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust was able to greatly improve the quality of its patient care. Yellowfin allowed the Trust to access and share independent data from mobile devices as well as create a Balanced Scoreboard to quickly gather and report information on the company's performance to its executives, management, and directors.

Yellowfin

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.

NCS, Universitat Konstanz, AT&T, PG&E, SingTel, InternetStores

Buyer's Guide

Tableau vs. Yellowfin

March 2025

Free Report: Tableau vs. Yellowfin

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

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