Tableau Reviews

The most valuable feature is the ease of use.

With Tableau, there is a gap in its ability to handle very large-scale data. I would like it to be similar to the rest of the solutions, which can handle terabytes of data.

We have used Tableau within the past year.

The stability is good.

Tableau is not as scalable from an enterprise perspective as some of the other tools out there.

I've had no problems so I have not been in contact with technical support.

In addition to Tableau, we're a licensed Cognos user and we also use Microsoft BI.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

I deployed it myself.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Its dashboarding is the most valuable. It is easy to create visualizations and dashboards and import Excel sheets and ESP files in Tableau as compared to other tools.

I am a BI consultant. I have worked on different reporting tools, such as Power BI and MicroStrategy. As compared to other tools, Tableau lags behind in handling huge enterprise-level data in terms of robust security and the single integrated metadata concept. When we connect to large or very big databases, then performance-wise, I sometimes found Tableau a little bit slow.

It can have the single metadata concept like other tools for the reusability of the objects in multiple reports.

I have around three years of experience in using Tableau.

Its scalability is fine. However, in my experience, I haven't seen large-scale projects in Tableau. For such projects, tools like Cognos and MicroStrategy were used. It may be because I didn't get a chance to work on very large projects. I have seen it being used only for small-scale to medium-scale projects, not for large-scale projects.

Their technical support is very good.

The initial setup is straightforward. We can configure the server and do all the setup in half a day.

It is reasonable and cheap as compared to other major tools. It has a good price, and people go for it because of its pricing.

For small-scale to medium-scale projects, I would recommend Tableau or Power BI. For large-scale projects, I would recommend MicroStrategy.

I would rate Tableau a seven out of ten. Most of the things are good in this solution.

Tableau is one of the most intelligent and dynamic visualization tools I have worked with. It provides dynamic adjustments of measures and dimensions. The reason this is useful is that it gives a business user multiple dimensions of data to look through. From these you can infer interesting business operation data characteristics.

Operational improvements have resulted from the efficient creation of ad hoc data visualizations in a timely manner.

The key feature of Tableau that has room for improvement is its performance with structured and unstructured data. I'm not sure I would suggest that Tableau go for a hardware oriented solution for this. Nevertheless, that would not be a bad approach to enhance the product and align with current marketing trends and its competitors.

Three years.

There were few issues with the stability of the product when there were features such as built-in data processing using TDE (Tableau Data Engine).

Not a lot here. Pretty scalable.

I would rate it as between very good and excellent.

Yes, we used MicroStrategy in the past. One of the reasons for the switch was to have more ad hoc data visualization and a more user-friendly tool for business; one which involved less coding and more GUI work.

The initial setup was not so straightforward. We had minor issues installing it across the enterprise, due to diverse technology in different business units. But none were actual showstoppers.

The pricing and licensing are generally high with Tableau. I thoroughly encourage their recent initiative of going to a “Tableau as a Service” business model, which aligns well with enterprises and also small and medium sized organizations. It even works for individuals who would like to learn Tableau and its core strengths.

We did evaluate QlikView. We actually have both in place, for various reasons.

The key point is if you would like to have faster, ad hoc and quick data visualizations, I would strongly recommend Tableau. But for enterprise-wide deployment and migration across different environments, I would say Tableau has room to improve further.

Ease of use (including frequently used calculations), drag and drop and interactive data visualization are the most valuable features of the product to me.

• Helped organization to identify the best time to roll out the campaign for summer cruise booking.
• Measured health plan product performance to identify health plan product(s) where organization is losing or making money.
• Source-to-destination mapping for health plan members to determine how far members travel to their primary care physician’s office from their residence to identify opportunities for service quality improvements.

We need a Tableau connector to connect to other BI tools like SAP BusinessObjects.

I have been using this product for over three years.

So far, I have never encountered any issues with deployment or stability. I do feel slowness rarely when I try to get data directly by connecting to Teradata database using SQL Query.

Technical support is excellent.

I did a POC with Tableau for my current organization and compared this tool with other BI tools.

I recommended Tableau for the following reasons: truly mature product, price-performance balance, ease of use, lot of flexibilities in regrouping the data on the fly, most of the frequently used calculations are built-in and very easy to use - unlike some other BI tools, which are quite clumsy - and for best interactive data visualization capabilities. Most importantly, a non-IT person can develop a simple dashboard without any IT help.

Initial setup was very straightforward.

I installed the Tableau desktop on my computer. Tableau servers are installed by our internal admins. It’s an easy installation and doesn’t need the vendor’s help.

Sometimes admin gets overwhelmed after Tableau is rolled out in the organization as users get up to the speed in a very short period of time, because of how easy it is to use the tool. Therefore, system access and resource planning should be done and properly planned ahead of time.

People should be aware of the fact that Tableau doesn’t have a semantic layer. It takes a good amount of time to prepare the dataset / data structure. Once the dataset is ready, the data visualization part doesn’t take much time, even for a fairly complex dashboard, because the tool is very intuitive and easy to use.

• Ability to read multiple data sources
• Beautiful visualizations#
• Easy to learn and use

Tableau does an excellent job upgrading the software with each release. One thing we have been waiting for is the ability to import an ArcGIS Shapefile into a custom map. There is a workaround using a third-party utility but it is unstable.

I have used it for more than three years.

I have not encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues.

Installation was a cakewalk. Over the last three years, there have been at least eight upgrades and three major releases; all upgraded without incident. Our Tableau Server has been running continuously for over three years. We have had two separate up scales; both were successful.

I rate the level of customer service and technical support 10/10. I’ve been working with vendors for over 25 years. No one else comes close.

While we use several BI tools, this was the first visualizations platform we purchased.

Initial setup was very straightforward.

We implemented it ourselves. It was very easy.

Pricing/licensing comes in two methods; named users and core licensing. We started with named user accounts, buying only what we needed when we needed it. As demand for the platform grew, we upscaled to core licensing. That approach was practical for us.

Prior to purchase, we did evaluate several other vendors. We choose Tableau based on Gartner research, deployments at peer institutions and finally, price.

Start now, start small and grow. This isn’t like your traditional BI platform, where you have to spend years designing the infrastructure before the first report comes out.

Data Visualization & Analytics: In my last project, we used ESRI maps super-imposed with brand sales and sales history. By adding more dimensions to the data, we were able to drill from sales territories to analyze product sales at individual retail outlets. The next phase will be to add age-group demographics to the analytics.

That also describes our Agile approach. Incrementally add dimensions to the underlying data, and add richness to the analytics capability, and it’s a business-driven approach.

The client is in transition from traditional BI reports to real-time, mobile sales reporting, with a goal of eventually providing predictive analytics. The transition included a move away from IBM Cognos to Tableau, and using IBM Watson for predictive analytics. In this case, Tableau was able to do all the predictive analytics with less development effort and more visual results than Watson Analytics.

The trend I see from clients is towards more mobile solutions, more real-time analytics, and the integration of analytics and order entry. E.g. A sales consultant can seamlessly transition from sales analysis to entering an order while on-site. This implies a BPM integration with SAP, Oracle eBusiness Suite, SFDC and others.

The architecture this client was prototyping was an SFDC application with imbedded analytics provided by Tableau delivered to a tablet device. There are several ways to go about this, but the architecture was selected because SFDC was the system of record for all customer information.

I have used this solution on and off for about three years, more as Solutions Architect and Project Manager than a full-time developer.

I did not encounter any deployment issues, but a production deployment was outside of the scope of my role.

I know the client ran into several ODBC issues with the interface to Denodo, a data virtualization environment, but I can’t comment because Tableau support was outside of the scope of my role.

The client has a large Cognos footprint and they were looking to Tableau as a more agile reporting & analytics tool. For this project, we used Cognos 11 and were experimenting with IBM Watson Analytics. We were able to perform all the analytics they were doing in Watson Analytics, using Tableau.

In prior projects, I have experience with SAP BusinessObjects, SAS and QlikView.

Tableau was installed and configured by an in-house team and it was complete before I arrived on-site.

In my experience most (all) enterprise-scale clients have multiple, entrenched BI reporting tools that Tableau will have a tough time to displace. Tableau is most successful when it is introduced at a departmental or subsidiary level in an organization. That’s the starting point, and grow the ‘footprint’ from there. With that background in mind, make the initial pricing & licensing simple for a department to budget for & approve.

IMO, I don’t think any client can isolate an analytics tool and derive an ROI that stands up to scrutiny. I usually start by looking at a company’s annual report and I look for the transformational initiatives. E.g. They want more mobile capabilities, more real-time decision making, etc. I use that as the entry-point for discussion around capabilities, not a discussion of technical features and I look for real-world use cases to develop a solution architecture.

My advice to clients is always: Start with a clear goal in mind, generate some quick wins, and grow the environment from there. The enterprise-scale initiatives are big on vision, but I’ve seen more failures than successes.

The product is definitely a leader in the analytics-lite & data visualization space. Unless a client has a well-defined use case for one of the statistical or predictive analysis tools, Tableau can meet the needs. If the use case for Tableau becomes too complex, then clients can use the ‘R’ extension. I don’t have hands-on experience with that feature.

The properties of each chart: It is helpful because in the world of analytics, not everyone is a developer; there are business analysts and directors as well, who want to play around and find quick solutions. If that requires coding or other settings, it would be more difficult or they don't even think of playing around. For developers, also, it’s easy to build reports as compared to coding.

Tableau gave us better visuals with more settings that help us find a better solution in the analysis world.

Performance improvement: Handling a huge amount of data and loading reports in a minimal time frame.

I used it for about two years, but very little in the past 12 months.

We moved to Tibco Spotfire because of performance issues in Tableau.

Technical support was 7/10.

We previously used SSRS and other analytics tools. We moved to Tableau because of its visual effects and because it was easy to develop with it.

My admin team handled the configuration.

We implemented it in-house, with a little help from vendor support.

Tableau is a good and growing tool in the business analytics world. It’s good to have it, but always compare and find out whether this tool meets your requirements.

The best features of Tableau include:

• Freedom of connection: Its ability to connect to practically any database. There is no need to go through cryptic ODBC or other driver setup procedures.
• Freedom of exploration: The ease one can explore a data table. With simple drag and drop, you can produce easily readable cross tabs and paretos on-the-fly to learn everything you need to know about an unfamiliar table.
• Freedom of expression: You can pretty much build any type of analytic structure you need to analyze your data.
• Built-in visual best practices: Interfaces are clean and simple. You have to work hard to produce an ugly chart in Tableau.

With the ease of using Tableau, I am able to set up basic analytic structures in the meta data (dims and measures) with some starter chart types, then turn over to analysts who can then ask all the detailed questions of the data on their own without having to come back to me for every minor change.

• They still need to improve advanced query functions. Level of detail and table calcs have improved but still are difficult to use, especially when working with large data sets.
• The custom query editor has lots of room for improvement. If Tableau can add features and functionality here, it would be easier to work with the database in one environment, instead of having to open another query editor to develop custom queries for advanced analytics.
• The formatting interface is the one area that has lots of room for improvement, as well as the ability to be more precise in formatting. At the moment, it is much more of an all-or-none proposition.
• More integrated statistical functions.

I have used it since 2009, Tableau 5.

I have not encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues. Although I do run into performance issues with Tableau server from time to time, it is not always easy to identify the root cause.

I have had so little need to use customer support, I can’t really rate them. Nonetheless, the few times when I have called, the level of understanding of complex data issues at the first few levels of support seems to be on the light side.

For the desktop edition, initial setup couldn’t be simpler. For the server edition, it is a bit more involved but that is to be expected.

It was implemented in house. For the server edition, an experienced server admin would definitely make the final install better.

My clients find the price tag for the desktop edition high, so they typically try to use the server/interactor edition, which for an analyst just doesn’t provide enough functionality to get the job done. Hopefully, as Tableau builds scale, they will be able to bring the price of the desktop edition down and get on more desktops, like Excel.

I have evaluated other competitive tools but in the end, my clients have always gone with Tableau.

The Tableau on-demand learning resources are fantastic to help a new user get going. There is a robust user community that is very generous with their time and knowledge to help you get through the learning curve.