Tableau Reviews

I knew this service from my academic field and was able to transfer it to the workplace. It is an excellent tool for data capture, processing, and visualization. The application of statistical models on the data displayed is very useful, and it is not complicated.

Tasks which may have involved days, even weeks, I was able to solve them in a very short period of time, thanks to Tableau. 

Information which was housed in a database, used for exploring, ordering and applying statistical models for analysis can be complex when involving different software. However, it was easy to do using Tableau exclusively.

What hooked me to this service is the combination of very pleasant, interactive graphical visualizations along with the application of advanced statistical models (in some cases).

The use of this service in the desktop version is annoying due to the constant updates which lead to reinstalling the application. If they could give support with updates on the same downloaded version, it would be great.

I like the payment model. For the people who need to create, they buy their licenses. Everyone else can use the free Tableau Viewer. This is much better than some of the competitor products, which require full licences for everything.

I have trialed a number of different tools similar to Tableau. There seems to be a whole group of them. However, I found that Tableau was by far the easiest to use. Within about 20 minutes of playing around I was able to quickly make fantastic looking, incredibly useful charts that I struggled to make in Excel or other data discovery tools.

I have only trialed it. I could not get this product signed off due to budget constraints, not related to Tableau (which is far from the most expensive out there). 

Recommendations to others considering the product: Trial it and play around with it. You will be amazed at how quickly you pick it up. 

I have been using Tableau to visualize data sets. The three features that are most valuable to me are:

• Ease of use. Most of the configurations are accessed by drag and drop, so very little actual programming is required.
• Interactivity, especially the ability to use tool tips to identify exactly which points are plotting in an unusual or unexpected position. This is the first step in distinguishing outliers from important data features, which is an important part of data exploration.
• The ability to easily annotate and export finished plots for presentation purposes.

I have previously used Excel or R to perform exploratory data analysis. Tableau is easier and quicker, which means results can be obtained more quickly.

Some of the command choices have to be memorized and are not intuitive. It could be even easier to learn.

I have used it for about three months.

No issues with deployment, except I wish a version was available for Linux (Ubuntu).

I haven't needed technical support yet.

I previously used R for data exploratory analysis. I'm choosing Tableau because it is quicker, and exploratory data analysis by its nature requires a large variety and volume of output.

Initial setup was very simple; standard Windows installation.

Just me... No problems. Just note that Tableau workbooks are stored in their own file structure by default, not in the file where the data originated or where the exported charts are stored.

Tableau has a free trial, free versions for academic scholars/faculty, and a free public version. The paid versions are a little pricey, but likely worth it.

There is a public version you can implement for free. Its main restriction is the variety of data source connections that it supports. You can still work with the typical text or Excel files, but live database connections are not supported.

I think it's great at what it tries to do.

I really like the design of the charts. The rapidness of the development is impressive. Its full set of options helps you reach the specific chart that you need and you can add any kind of additional data source (Excel, flat file, databases) at any time.

In comparison to others, this product gives you the power to make any chart that you can imagine with your data, getting insights with the results and leveraging the need of a “metadata” model behind it.

With the rapidness of the development, the business user only needs 1/5 or maybe 1/10 of the time required to perform analysis and achieve results; they can just use drag & drop.

The most important and valuable feature is the ability to merge any kind of data with your data set, even cloud data (web services). It gives the business user the power to analyze something new with his own datasources.

My company is a Tableau partner, and we are located in Lima, Peru. We used it to perform a geo-spatial analysis of prospects, and we created a distribution of them with a drill-down analysis for future clients, so we can segment the appointments and the demo presentations.

Tableau lacks a lot of ETL capabilities. Of course, it’s not the core of the product but it is the best tool for data discovery and really needs an ETL or data quality module inside of the suite. Enterprises have to use another tool (such as Alteryx, IBM DataStage or Talend Studio) in order to support some business needs. But this entails additional cost, maintenance, resources, etc.

Tableau will add a lot of capabilities for data blending, joins between different data source, etc., in its next version, Tableau 10.

I have been using Tableau Desktop for three years. I began with version 7.0.

Tableau is easy to deploy.

Stability is great.

Scalability lacks some features. For example: governance, better clustering, dual authentication, detailed options of security, events manager, etc. That is why I only see Tableau as a data discovery and dashboarding tool (for senior management).

Support and customer service is good, not excellent. 8/10

I was using SAP BusinessObjects for four years, then I met Tableau and I realized how discontinued the SAP product was. Of course, all the BI platforms think that way, they were discontinued with the monolithic vision of data warehousing.

Then, all of the data-discovery tools appeared and all of us were amused.
I chose Tableau because it can give you answers very fast without the intervention of IT (most of the cases).

As we can see in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms, Tableau is the leader among all the data-discovery tools, Tableau defined the BI trend, and now the rest of the BI platforms are incorporating these functionalities and improving them.

Initial setup was easy, the commercial department of my company adopted the tool right away and start creating its dashboards.

We implemented this with an in-house team. We used the product portal in order to learn about its development and we used some classrooms in the region for Sales, Tableau Desktop and Server.

Tableau offers a rapid ROI in comparison to other tools. It’s a very cheap tool, but it has some barriers in big enterprises.

They should read about compatibility. Before implementing Tableau, they should meet with the business users and ask:

• What are your needs in business intelligence?
• Do you have some information silos?
• Is the generation of information a manual process?

The BI area should perform a self-assessment of a business intelligence roadmap in order to plan the development of the product, the areas involved in the pilot, the information needed to achieve the business goals and define the final architecture for the BI deployment in the near future.

We use Tableau for the all kind of dashboards.

Tableau as a BI solution provides a platform to develop user-friendly, story telling dashboards, which provide insights to help management take decisions.

The solution has a lot of customization when comparing to Microsoft BI.

The customization requires a lot of effort and should be simplified. The performance could be better. When comparing the performance of Tableau to other solutions, such as Microsoft BI, they are not as good.

I have been using Tableau for approximately four years.

The stability is very good.

Tableau has good scaling capabilities.

We have approximately 30 to 40 users using this solution in my organization.

The support is good for Tableau. However, if we ask for a certain feature they will not entertain us, unless other customers are also asking for the same feature.

Positive

We previously were using Microsoft BI and we switched to Tableau because of the increased level of customization it provides. Microstrategy can also be a considerable alternative.

The installation is complicated and took us approximately four hours.

It would be best to use an integrator or other professional assistance for the implementation.

We have approximately two engineers that handle the maintenance of the solution.

Our management can take decisions based on insights provided by Tableau, which are smart and help us reduce costs and data issues.

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.

We performed a POC before going with Tableau, we tried Power BI because Power BI is competing against tableau. But to use Power BI at its full potential, you need the Power BI cloud edition, which our organization cannot go with. So the obvious choice was to go with Tableau.

Tableau is very good, but customers have to understand the requirements of hardware and software the way Tableau works. If they have some requirements that Tableau cannot meet, they will understand how to do it in an alternate way.

I rate Tableau an eight out of ten.

When we work with CXOs to create dashboards we use Tableau. C-level employees like a CXO, a CEO, a VP, prefer to work with Tableau. It's easier and better for them.

For Tableau, the most valuable feature is the user experience and the quality of the end product.

One thing I would want to change for Tableau is to have a lower-cost model. It's pretty high for enterprise deployment.

In the next release, I would like to have the capability to call machine learning models within Python while I'm building a dashboard. The value calculation should be a machine learning model, which is running somewhere else, on say, Amazon. These tools give good outputs, like calculated fields and all. But today the outputs are not straightforward. In simple terms, I need machine learning on the fly. That is not there.

I have been using the solution for four or five years.

I would say the solution is very stable. We have not had any issues in using the product at all.

The solution does have scalability issues. When the data size increases, the product slows down and doesn't work right. In addition, it's very expensive to scale.

The only other solution we use and have explored is Power BI from Microsoft.

The solution deployment was pretty simple and straightforward.

We deployed the solution with our in-house team.

It's an enterprise solution, and we have all licenses. Tableau has multiple licenses; there is a reader, a developer, and an administrator.

If there are 50 or 100 users wanting to use Tableau, it's pretty expensive. The license is very expensive. We have 20 to 30 users in our company.

Because the solution is a drag and drop tool and what unique features we need or what we want to build, we cannot build using the tool. So we use JavaScript for that. We write our own code and build our own solutions.

My advice would be that all solutions are good, but it depends on your use case. If you are building something for C-level employees, use Tableau or another solution.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are into the distribution of licenses, and we also have a services arm that takes care of the implementation.

Our customers use it for different use cases, such as fleet management, HR analytics, and retail analytics. They also use it for forecasting and predictive modeling. In the EMEA region, the analytics market isn't very mature. Therefore, many customers just restrict themselves to basic statistics in Tableau. At the most, they go for the predictive functionality, which is inbuilt in Tableau.

Its deployment depends on the use case. Some customers use it on the cloud, which is Tableau Online, and some of them go for Tableau Server, which is on-premises.

Our customers love the visual capabilities on top of it and the ability to explain and get the required data. There is no other product like Tableau in the business intelligence and analytics space.

Tableau is an end-to-end analytics platform, and it is doing a pretty good job in terms of connecting to the data and analyzing it. It can, however, do better in terms of data management and the ETL features, which are not on the advanced analytics or machine learning side. Tableau Prep is where users would want to see more advancements. They can improve Tableau Prep, which is an analytic platform tool for data cleansing. People who work with data spend most of their time curating the data. Cleaning up the data and getting it ready for analysis is what takes the most time. If Tableau can invest more time in improving the Tableau Prep platform, it would be great. 

Previously, Tableau didn't have the functionality for writing to a database. So, you couldn't really alter the database tables and write to your database, but they fixed that in one of the very recent releases. However, it isn't really advanced and should be improved.

I have been using Tableau for three years.

With respect to stability as a performance-driven metric, it is wonderful. Tableau is being used by one of the biggest gaming companies. Stability has mostly got to do with:

• Connectivity to your different data and database platforms
• The amount of data that you're dealing with

The Tableau platform can handle both of these because there is no limit per se in terms of the data size. However, a big fee is a challenge for everybody, and there is no escape from it. 

Tableau has recently acquired Hyper, which speeds up the performance. Hyper is also something that Facebook uses. Therefore, when it comes to stability, it is one of the best solutions in the market. You don't need to worry about it. 

If there are some glitches because a huge amount of data is coming in, there is an inbuilt performance monitoring option in Tableau where it actively monitors every user click on the platform. It will show you the results on the fly and tell you the part of your dashboarding or activity that is consuming the most memory. This way, you can optimize its performance.

It is scalable. The beauty of this product is that it is for everyone. Tableau is a good fit for small enterprises to large enterprises. It can also be used in small departments of a company. The mission of Tableau is to help people see and understand data. So, it is not only for the IT people who understand the technicality of it. It is end-user-centric, and therefore, everybody can use it. It can be used by the marketing, finance, credit, and sales departments. The developers, data scientists, statisticians, and other people can also use it. It is for everyone. 

You can scale it vertically or horizontally, or you can go both ways. You can have a single node configuration and add more RAM or more memory to the same node, or you can have a multi-node configuration. Both are supported. You can add nodes depending on the number of users who want to consume the analytics.

I am not completely aware of it because I mostly handle pre-sales, but I do know that you can raise a support ticket with Tableau very easily. They have 24/7 support, and the priority of your use case depends on the agreement or the contract that you have with Tableau. There is Tier 1, 2, and 3 support.

I have used SQL on different platforms. I have also worked on Python and R to generate plots. I can't stress enough on the fact that as compared to other solutions, Tableau is much easier, clearer, and more intuitive while using your data. You can actually see every bit of your data. They are able to achieve their mission and help people see and understand data. 

Its initial setup is very easy because Tableau has a new graphical user interface, and there is no need for you to script or code your installation process. It only takes a day to set up everything, and it does most of the configuration on its own. It is a very easy process.

In terms of maintenance, there are product upgrades that get released every quarter. It has quarterly upgrades and updates because it is enhanced so rapidly. They spend 25% of their annual revenue on R&D. They have constant interaction with its broad community, and they constantly take in user feedback. If there is a maintenance requirement or some issue with the product, most of the time, it automatically gets resolved in the next upgrade.

Tableau has core-based and user-based licensing, and it is tied to scalability. The core-based licensing is about you buying a certain number of cores, and there is no restriction on the number of users who can use Tableau. The restriction is only on the number of cores. In user-based subscription licensing, there is a restriction on the number of users. Big companies and government organizations with a lot of users typically go for core-based licensing.

User-based subscription licensing is a more common model. It has user roles such as creator, explorer, and viewer. A creator is someone who does the groundwork or development work. An explorer is someone who is into middle management but is not technically savvy, such as a category head. A viewer is like a typical decision-maker in senior management. For each role, Tableau is priced differently. The viewer role has the minimum price, and the creator role has the highest price. This pricing is available on their website. Everybody can see it.

I would advise checking your minimum configuration. There is a specific hardware configuration that you need before installing the software, which varies based on your development, test, and production. You should also decide on whether you need Tableau Online or Tableau Server. Tableau Online supports most of Tableau Server functionalities, but there are some limitations for certain data connections and refreshes. This is something that you need to be aware of while choosing between Tableau Online and Tableau Server.

Sometimes, organizations that can spend or have a good budget just go for Tableau Online because they don't have to worry about maintenance and upgrades. You're already on the latest version, and everything is taken care of by Tableau. The trade-off is that sometimes you may not have your refreshes and connectivity in the widest section possible, which is something that you can do with Tableau Server, but it happens only in rare cases.

It is the best product at the moment. If you look at Gartner's report for BI and analytics, Tableau has been the leader for nine years in a row, which is a very big achievement. There is nothing else like it. You will see Microsoft above Tableau, but Microsoft provides a product suite, whereas Tableau is just BI and analytics. It is not an apple to apple comparison. 

I would rate Tableau a nine out of ten.

Tableau is very good in the front-end visualization compared to Power BI.

The look and feel of Tableau are the best when compared with Power BI.

Power BI meets with my expectations but the wow factor is in Tableau.

An issue that is common to both Tableau and Power BI is with large data sets. When it comes to large datasets, the data should be extracted faster.

Tableau should offer the end-user a desktop version that is free where they can go in and practice. There are other solutions that offer it for free such as Huawei, and the desktop version of Power BI is also free.

People tend to know if they want to learn visualization. They don't have a proper tool in place, they don't know how to or where to go to learn. If you give them the tool to learn and let them explore when they want to go into production, people are able to purchase the license. A 14-day trial version would not be enough time.

If they want to be competitive in the market, the price must be improved.

They should allow more than a 14-day trial version. It should be a longer duration otherwise no one will want to learn it.

Tableau is $35, whereas Power BI is only $9.90. Tableau is not competitive and should reduce its price.

SQL is the most important. Writing SQL queries is very important and that's the first foundation I would recommend for any juniors to start.

If they're not very strong in SQL then they will not be able to write the functions for both Power BI and Tableau. SQL is the foundation for anything.

I would rate Tableau a seven out of ten.

• Creating dashboards to generate value out of data
• Great features and functionalities with customized dashboards
• Very intuitive and massive user support base.

It has helped to save millions by making informed decisions which are data driven. Visualization of data with great efficiency has helped to integrate dashboards across the organization.

• Platform to automate and make user-defined customized dashboards. 
• Very well integrated with other applications which helps to move data from one application to another with much ease.

Sometimes it crashes because of the huge database. This could be fixed so that it works smoothly with large databases.