Tableau Reviews

For visual data analysis, discovery analysis and usability, it is the best product on the market.

For data cleaning, it can be very helpful in showing you where there are holes or mistakes in your data.

In our Project Management office, it has provided us better insight into the breadth of our work and made it much easier to see which projects are at risk. Once we retire our old reporting system (Word docs/PowerPoint), we will be saving about 20 people four hours per week. You can do the math on the annual impact.

Getting buy-in from all of the department leaders has been the toughest part. They are tentative about letting go of the old systems, we have to really prove that our Tableau dashboards fully meet their needs.

This is tough to answer. The company puts more $$ into R&D than any other in the industry and I don't even use all of its current abilities. They put out releases regularly, so at this point this is more about keeping up with the changes and understanding how they are useful to us.

The tool was not created for data structuring, but does provide some functionality.

I have been using it for about 15 months, off and on, at times more than others. I use it on any piece of analysis I can.

We were unable to use LDAP or Active Directory, so all server users have to be created locally. Stability and scalability are not issues; we are just trying to grow adoption. Of course, we have experienced some growing pains but that is normal with any new technology.

Customer support always gets back to me within 24 hours. However, they are not always able to help me resolve my issue.

We have the EBI tool, Oracle OBIEE. Although I never used it personally, our department has experience with several of the top competitors of this product. Despite owning licenses to those tools and using them, the decision was made that Tableau offers self-serve BI better than any of the others. (I was not a part of this decision process, but was moved over from another team to manage the product once the decision was made.)

Initial setup was straightforward. One thing Tableau excels at is documentation that is user friendly. We did bring in a consultant to help this go smoothly but honestly I think he did more harm than good. Could have just followed the playbook.

Implementation was done by a vendor team and in-house. Our middleware team did the heavy lifting and we brought in a vendor team with experience to help us.

ROI has yet to be determined as the implementation is less than a year old. Adoption has been slower than expected but gaining momentum lately. I attribute the slower adoption to the fact that using Tableau is a shift in thinking for those wanting to use it and therefore involves some growing pains that some are hesitant to embrace. However, those that have embraced it are beginning to reap the benefits.

The pricing is a little steep. However, if used correctly, the improvements in productivity will more than outweigh the cost.

It does require you to think about your data in a slightly different way as this is totally different than Excel, so take a little extra time when starting out.

Tableau helps people see and understand their data, answering valuable business questions and giving insight into mountains of information collected over time.

I'm collecting some information and some reports from SAP and sending them to users as a graphical report. That's basically how I use the product.

The new pre-built application of Tableau is amazing.

The initial setup is simple.

It's a very stable, reliable solution.

You can scale the solution.

The dashboard has a lot of great options. 

I'd like it to work without the workflow or pushing options from the build, every time you need to do a refresh. We need a workflow for pushing the data to the cloud or to the server when you are using the pre-built application, the new application.

In the cloud sometimes the performance is a little bit slow.

I've been using the solution for two and a half years.

The stability has been good. It's reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

I have found the solution to be scalable.

At my organization, we have about ten to 15 regular users. 

We use it pretty extensively - at least once a week.

I'm not sure if we actually have plans to increase usage at this time. 

So far, I haven't needed any help from them. It's a good application in and of itself. I haven't needed technical support.

I used a little bit of Power BI. I know Tableau better, so I moved to Tableau Arabic.

The initial implementation process was straightforward. We did it without any problems.

Since the solution is on the cloud, you don't need a lot of staff for maintenance tasks.

You do not need an integrator or consultant to assist you in the implementation process. We were able to do it ourselves. 

We have a standard license that we renew yearly.

I'm an end-user.

I'm using the latest version of the solution.

I'd recommend Tableau to others. It offers good performance and the dashboard options are solid. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

I use it for management control and for balance sheet analysis. As corporale finance consultant, the core of my job is financial analysis/modeling. I added Tableau to my workflow to improve the decision making process of my clients make decisions but I found it very useful also to produce reporting for Financial Istitutions, Investment Fund, etc.

Tableau has improved the way our clients “read” what’s happening in their company, 

I think one of the best feature is usability: understanding  dragging & dropping Measures & Dimension is so simple that you can easily learn the software.

Tableau is very intuitive, it has not a deep learning curve so you can build your dashboards in short time.

The forecast instrument. I still use my primary software (that is Quantrix Modeler) to build my financial models. 

I’m not saying that is a “static” platform at the moment, it’s dynamic due to the fact that you can build parameters, however it's not the same as a spreadsheet in which you can write formulas and algotythms that are more and more complex. 

I have used Tableau since 2018. It's been about three years.

The stability has been good. there are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The solution can scale well. There shouldn't be any issues if a company needs to expand. 

I've dealt with technical support in the past. Two years ago I had a problem, a technical problem. It was a very serious issue with the software in my first installation and I came in contact with the engineer in London. They solved my problem very, very quickly. I've been quite satisfied with them overall.

The initial setup is very simple. It's not overly complex or difficult. A company shouldn't have any issues. 

While I handled the implementation myself, I chose to do a period of learning with the Information Lab a Tableau Partner company.  I took two courses to have a better understanding and to more quickly understand the possibilities I had to work with.

I have a Tableau license. It's very, very cheap. For the use and the capability of the software, it's $70 per month, it’ an awesome price.

Yes I did: MicroStrategy because , it was the first competitor of Tableau. However, there is no comparison. Tableau's the best platform for me and offers the best software.

We are only customers at this time. 

We are focused on producing and using Tableau only for our clients. We bought a number of view licenses and we give them to our client so they can use Tableau via the online version.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten. I've been very pleased with its capabilities. 

I am using it for personal and organizational purposes. Most recently, we used it to collect and analyze the personal and geographic data input by people over the web.

Makes analysis fast and easy, providing insights that could be missed otherwise.

It is easy to use with very powerful data visualizations.

I am not a frequent user of this solution, so I am not sure what they've been doing recently. The last time when I used it, I had to use other tools with it for data extraction and cleansing.

Its price should also be improved. It is more expensive than Power BI. In terms of training, there is generally better online training for Power BI, but I am not sure of that. It would be helpful to know from where to access its training.

I have been using this solution off and on for four years.

It is stable.

It is scalable if you use it with other tools. I have used it with other tools.

I am a freelance consultant. I use it myself. My clients have hundreds or thousands of users.

I don't have any experience with their support.

I also use Power BI. Tableau is very comparable to Power BI.

If I remember it correctly, it was easy.

I can do it on my own.

My clients don't measure an ROI, they are interested in getting insights faster and when the get past the basics right then modelling scenarios. If you invest in BI tools it is part of a journey requiring investment. Analysis often helps to increase revenues and reduce costs. 

It is expensive when you compare it with Power BI. It should be cheaper.

I have looking at SAP SAC and Oracle / Essbase for a client.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate Tableau a nine out of ten.

Business Intelligence for operational and executive dashboards. It is used to create real-time operational insights which start at the line-level staff person who manages their own productivity and performance indicators. This gets rolled up to middle and upper management and provides a full sense of operations and targeted goal achievement.

Excellent product: Great visualizers and it is easy to use. 

Allows insights into business performance issues, providing supporting data for critical policy and operational changes.

It is easy to adapt visualizers to have interactive conversations among decision-makers. Powerful aggregating and drill-downs are critical for effective insight discovery.

Deployment of dashboards to viewers and unit supervisors can be prohibitively expensive.

The cost is high.

The drag and drop in development, design and usage; the Show Wizard feature.

As a BI and data visualization enthusiast and provider, I have compared Tableau against other BI and data visualization tools. It provides tremendous ease of use and a shorter learning curve when compared to the rest. Provides astonishing visualizations as well.

The user interface and ease of use requires a bit of a learning curve to pick up. No drag and drop functionality at the development stage, unlike its competitors.

The data preparation is quite good but not as powerful as the one I use or would recommend for data manipulation and cleansing as well. Tableau seems to focus on the data visualization end and provides, or has partnered with, some other software for data preparation.

Three years.

None at the moment.

Tableau, as noted above, does not provide much in terms of data preparation. Handling of large volumes of data sometimes does not work well with this all-in-one purpose tool making it less ideal for business users.

The Tableau online community is rich and vibrant and provides quick guidance on getting started with the basic use of Tableau.

None.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward for personal use, except when looking at deploying on local premises. Doing so entails some configuration during the installation process.

Tableau pricing and licensing is on the high side for a small company, but it’s competitive among its peers. They offer a monthly subscription for their cloud service.

As a consultant in the area of Business Intelligence and data analytics, I have personally evaluated BI tools such as QlikView, Qlik Sense, Power BI and MicroStrategy.

Invest in the memory and RAM of the PC or server you intend to use with Tableau. Though most database sources are available for connection, you should still ensure you have all the necessary resources and connectors installed for proprietary databases.

The data blending capabilities is a huge factor for our team. The ease of blending data from multiple sources has allowed us to generate new insight and bring a different level of questions to the meeting table. The type of dashboards we have been able to create have made it easier for individuals who are not use to looking at data to navigate and drill into their own material to find answers or ask questions they never thought to ask in the first place.

We’ve been able to replace several manual spreadsheet reports that took hours for individuals to complete. With Tableau Server and some automation processes put in place, those reports are now automatically delivered to the end users, saving time and money. We can also develop reports much faster than in the past plus provide an interface to a database which in the past might not of been used as much due to the lack of technical skills to write the queries.

Formatting controls could use some improvement. We’ve found that to be the most confusing part of developing reports, at least until you get use to where all the controls are at and how to use them. Ideally, making a user-friendly interface for formatting the worksheets and dashboards would be a big improvement and time saver. Recent version upgrades have added some new features such as being able to change the format for your entire workbook all at once. Still a work in progress though.

I have used it for eight years and sever administrator for 2 years.

Deployment and stability have been flawless so far. We’ve not encountered a data set that has slowed the software down and we use records with millions of rows. There is no clear-cut line of determining when best to consider switching over to an enterprise-wide model vs. per license, so there could be a better way of informing their customers on when to flip that switch.

We have never experienced an issue with the server software or any technical problems with the desktop or interactor licenses.

Once others in the company start seeing what it can do they immediately ask what needs to happen so they can get a license. We started down the path of looking at core enterprise licensing but were told the company is moving away from that model and sticking with a per user/license structure. Depending on how many in the company want to start using the software plus needing the additional interactor license to access the server the purchases can add up quickly.

Very little need to contact their customer service but when I did they were professional and quick to respond.

Both customer service and technical support have been excellent. Sales reps have been very nice to work with and you don’t end up with that used car salesmen feel. In fact, we typically meet with our reps about 3-4 times a year and have been extremely supportive.

No - most of our reporting was done between MS Excel and MS Access.

Setup was extremely easy. Essentially a plug-and-play right out of the box.

We implemented it in-house. Implementation was easy in comparison to other systems we’ve worked on in the past. QA testing was seamless and found no integration issues.

We’ve found quite a bit of savings using Tableau, based on the time it takes to develop ad-hoc reports, changes in process due to new insights and report automation.

Best advice on pricing is to anticipate the desire for more licenses once the results of this product are acknowledged in other parts of your company. Note that for others to interface with a published report on your server, they need what’s called an interactor license. We acquired several guest interactor licenses in order to lend out to departments so they can see the benefit of accessing their reports on the server vs. static reports. This encourages them to purchase their own interactor licenses or at least plan to purchase when preparing their budgets for the following year.

We evaluated several potential software systems such as Visier, Lumira, and Qlik, but found Tableau the easiest to use for individuals who did not need to have a programming background. Plus, the freedom to develop from a blank canvas with data that could be from any corner of the company appealed more to our team than working with a set of canned metrics to one specific department.

The annual Tableau customer conference is a huge learning opportunity for new and seasoned users alike. The week-long conference provides a large number of workshops to help increase your skills and many of these sessions are hands-on training. Also a great way to network with other users and see how they are using Tableau.

• Ease of use
• Efficiency
• Integration with sources
• Amazing way to view your data

Data visualization and analysis used to take much longer; we were able to shorten the delivery of the projects by 60%.

I would like to see improvement in licensing. It is expensive to provide licenses beyond the 10 we already have.

I have been using it for four years.

Our deployment issues are related to cost.

No, very stable product

Yes. licensing costs are an issue

Technical support is 9/10.

We didn’t have a data vis solution beyond Excel and MSRS before. I used Spotfire in my business school work.

Initial setup was straightforward. I created a data mart, plugged in Tableau and started creating dashboards.

A vendor team implemented it. Implementation was pretty straightforward – but our data was cleaned and well thought through. I would say, 80% of time should be spent on designing your data mart (if that’s the route you are taking) with clean data and valid data sources.

We haven’t calculated ROI, but we know that we shortened the delivery timeline by 60%.

Make sure you plan it into the 5 year plan - how many licenses you will need, etc.

When time came to select a tool for my work, I did thorough research. I downloaded trial versions of both products and selected Tableau based on my user experience and the ratings (Gartner quadrant).

Beware of licensing costs, but it shouldn’t deter anyone from using this product. Even if you just use Tableau desktop to provide static data vis’s, it’s worth it.