Tableau Reviews

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.

The primary use case is more visualization for user interactivity.

• Interactivity
• Fast data access
• The graphs
• Understanding our data better based on the sublevel of data provided. 

We would like a report model, because currently there is no schema that we can create in the tool.

It is a very stable product. It doesn't break.

I am not using the technical support. There is a great Tableau community.

I was not involved in the setup.

Tableau is an expensive solution, though it comes with its advantages.

We are researching for a new solution.

Most important criteria when selecting a product:

• Price and licensing
• Future landscape
• Support.

Extraordinary ease of use, easier to use than any competitor product I’ve used in 15 years or so I’ve worked on MI/BI.

Since I originally wrote this, I have found the mapping on Tableau has been extremely useful and easy to use, particularly that it includes very good geocoding for the UK. In terms of the UK, the support and community here is also exceptional and I know that I don't have to trawl through sites endlessly to find solutions, the community is one of the strongest I've seen thus far in BI

Speed of data discovery and accelerated our ability to remodel our data and improve our existing ETL processes.

Expansion of number of visualisations, as well as potential for straight to dashboard function, rather than design individual visualisation – these are, however, genuinely not priority to amend.

Having used another software for a reasonable period of time, I wonder about the chances of incorporating other languages, such as d3.js in future releases (NB I'm still using 8.3)

~3 years

This was a Proof of Concept rather than full roll-out.

No, but important to note it was PoC.

No, but important to note it was PoC.

Excellent.

Exceptional, probably the best user community I’ve ever seen in nearly 15 years of working in MI/BI/Analytical roles.

Currently use an alternative provider, looking to switch to a newer more empowering piece of software, an alternative to Tableau was selected at a Global CIO level.

Extremely simple. Download a package, enter a key post purchase and that’s it. Very easy.

Vendor team – they had (and indeed have) significant knowledge of the product and continue to share best practice tips and knowledge through their e-publications.

Standard software license cost to setup initially and an optional maintenance fee which include version upgrades. On balance, the costs of software balance nicely against the user experience because you probably wouldn’t need to spend a great deal on training as the product is straightforward to use. I continue to use Tableau in my free/personal time but have been using Tibco Spotfire much more frequently in my professional capacity, so will look to update my review of that software as well

Evaluated numerous different BI tools, including but not restricted to Cognos, Jaspersoft, Pentaho, Tibco Spotfire.

Assess the scalability using the Server set up, engage users of the tool independently through the Tableau Community for their ideas and advice on the pro’s and con’s of the tool. Even the biggest evangelists will be honest enough to tell you where it doesn’t meet their expectations.

Ease of use, polished visualizations, all data elements are treated as discrete, the story-telling feature, self-service, excellent for visually exploring data with unknown questions.

Tableau is used in our Platform-as-a-Service offering for data visualization/exploration, seeking to retire a larger BI platform using it, good customer adoption/feedback.

Metadata/reuse, performance/scalability at high data volumes + high user concurrency, disparity between desktop vs. web versions – need to address enterprise requirements in general.

I have used Tableau for two years.

No issues with deployments/stability.

It does not perform well when you cross into TBs+ of data and thousands of users.

Technical support is very good.

For our PaaS data discovery needs at the time, we reviewed MicroStrategy 9.4 Visual Insight, which was not up to the capabilities/ease of use that Tableau had at the time.

Initial setup was straightforward, it is not a complex system to install.

We implemented it in-house, limited to no need for external assistance.

The ROI is unknown.

Licensing costs continue to increase in Tableau and in QlikView, which we also use, forcing us at some point to consider consolidating to one and/or turning some existing/owned MicroStrategy licensing inward to replace, if the upward pricing trend continues.

Pick the right tool for the job/consumers of the products. There is not a single product that can cover all personas/use cases well or there would be only one product out there commanding the world – and there’s simply not just one. Tableau is great if the targeted users want highly polished visualizations of the data and from an exploration use case, the question(s) for the data are unknown.

The ability to make interactive graphs, tables, and maps that can be shared on social media, linked to, or embedded on a website are the most valuable features. The ability to allow readers to view and download the underlying data is another valuable feature.

I just did an analysis of real estate sales in my county (Bay County, FL) and it allowed me to share the results with the public in a way they can make their own discoveries beyond what I have presented. 

Tableau Public is free, which is incredible. However, the paid version is too expensive per user. They need to reduce the cost of the user that is not making the analysis, but only reading / drilling down on the results. It is hard to get a client to pay that kind of money to view reports.

From my conversations with Tableau, their product Tableau Online is what allows others to view and interact with data online privately. The cost per online user is $500 per year. There is a free Tableau Reader, but it is limited. So, if I wanted to make data visualizations for a client or within my own company, I would have to pay for the desktop software to make the visuals plus pay an additional fee for everyone who wants to use the full functions online. Tableau Public is free and an awesome tool, but it is all publicly available.

I've had no issues with deployment.

I've had no issues with stability.

I've had no issues with scalability.

Without a doubt the best aspect of Tableau is the data flexibility. I work with Tableau within the confines of a healthcare organization- which is constantly expanding the metrics, datasets and sources we have to draw from in order to meet the needs of the US government, our physicians and most importantly our patients. With Tableau we have the ability to create a dashboard that displays all of the aforementioned data sources in a way that appears uniform.

Before we built a data platform using Tableau we were unable to align our employees around their data. We had a few dozen data sources representing important areas of focus for our operations teams. It was unreasonable to expect our operational leaders to consistently monitor the results of these different reports. Our hope was to build a platform everyone could access, that would be a one stop shop for reliable answers to important business questions; Tableau gave us that ability and made it affordable.

While Tableau is flexible it doesn't deal well with data that comes in a predetermined organization- i.e. data cubes. Our team has repeatedly had trouble trying to import raw data if it had any predetermined structure.

Two years.

No, it was pretty seamless.

The issues we have encountered have been largely due to our own server structure, not Tableau itself.

On the contrary, Tableau gave us the ability to manage larger volumes of data.

7/10.

7/10.

No, not for this purpose.

Very straightforward- we were live with access in a few days, though it took a few months to build our more polished dashboards.

Our decision support team handed deployment, in house.

You will need a team comprised of programmers, developers, user experience specialists and customer service representatives.

I am using it for my personal use. I'm using Tableau Public. It is a downloadable version. I downloaded it to my system and installed it.

The feature that is currently most valuable is the import feature where I can link to an Excel data source. I'm not using it with any other data source, such as SQL Server. I directly link it to an Excel sheet, and if I change anything in that Excel sheet, the changed data immediately gets reflected in the virtualization. This is something that is very convenient for me as of now.

Its documentation can be improved so that a user can get a good hands-on experience. Tableau is well documented, and on their website, there are a lot of tutorials that are available for free. I started my learning process through those tutorials, but there are certain loopholes in those tutorials, which only got filled through a couple of good YouTube channels that talk about Tableau. YouTube helped me a lot. So, the documentation could be better, I understand that it is evolving day by day, and with more usage, there would be more such documentation.

There are a couple of features that are only available in the cloud version, and I would like to see them in the hosted version. We can only use them in a demo or temporary account for 10 or 15 days, but I would love to see those features in the hosted version that I am using, which is Tableau Public.

I have been using Tableau for almost one and a half years. 

It is stable, but at times, I have seen that it doesn't work for certain datasets. If the data is not correctly sanitized, there are chances that you would end up having no visualization at all, even after spending a lot of time. So, sanitization is a must in Tableau as of now. Other than that, I've not seen anything else. There are no bugs, but if the data is not sanitized, you will not get any visualization. That is a problem. 

It is pretty scalable. There is no doubt about it. In the cloud version, a live data source can also be integrated. So, it seems pretty scalable, but I've not tested how scalable that version is.

I don't have any experience with their technical support. Whatever I've learned to date is from online resources such as YouTube and my personal sources. I've not contacted Tableau support.

Its initial setup is quite straightforward. It took me a while to understand that this version is also available for free for users like me who want to understand the data visualization part, but its installation is pretty easy.

I'm using Tableau Public, which is free.

I compared it with QlikView, which is a leading data visualization tool, but because I had heard a lot about Tableau and I had seen that there is a lot of scope in the market to get hired, I decided to go ahead with Tableau. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten.