Tableau Reviews

Operations Perspective:

The most valuable aspect of this product is the ease of deployment from the Tableau Desktop to the server, providing the ability to either connect live to a data source or create a cached dataset that can be published and updated separately. The deployment of a Tableau Workbook can even be packaged up and sent to someone with a Tableau Reader installed. This makes the solution very agile and scalable.

The ability to deploy is the added ability to centralise the Tableau repository for all Tableau Developers. We have initiated a central shared directory for each Tableau platform, Dev, UAT, and PROD with each containing subdirectories for each Tableau Site and Project. Being a financial institution we must provide data segregation to comply with legislation and Data Governance policies enforced by brand segregation.

Development Perspective:

Ease of use is the most common call out from the developers. There is a thriving user group online that provides any number of ways to build reports quickly and easily, but the most important ability is to allow the Developer to storyboard the information in a dashboard. Tableau provides the developer a means to provide captions and business information on the dashboard to tell the story of each Workbook. This ability to break down a complex Workbook into an easy to digest narrative provides the business stakeholder a way to really understand and discover the story behind the data giving them the necessary insights and metrics.

Tableau has provided the organisation a means to allow business people to explore their data at their pace. They can either review the reports online, or on their Tableau Reader or they can download it into other formats for use in data analysis. The key insights and graphic representations through the dashboards has also provided them a quick and painless overview of their current status, whatever that may be.

At this stage, we haven’t had any suggestions since moving to Tableau 10.3, so there may be improvements requested further down the line.

Six years.

We did have issues with Tableau 10.1 server with the brokers failing on heavy load but since moving to 10.2, then to 10.3, this issue seems to have been resolved and the environment is now quite stable.

This is no longer an issue in Tableau 10.3.

A nine out of 10. With all first line support, sometimes these support people need to read the question a couple of times before responding, but this is typical of any first line support for any vendor.

We are still using another solution. However, this will be shutdown next year due to the decline in development on this platform. The development cycle on this legacy platform has been too slow for any type of turnkey solution and the end result did not provide a proficient self-service capability that satisfied the customer. Performance has been another factor in this platforms decline.

The initial setup of Tableau had been developed with a DevOps lens. I wanted to build a platform that had rigor and a platform with a level of governance of aspects which could guarantee report certification and certainty for the business stakeholder. These processes were carefully thought out even before the product was installed.

Once the process was developed and tested, we rolled out the solution to the business with a migration form for developers to fill out as we needed to meet audit policy guidelines and brand segment legal requirements. We allocated several business people to be software advocates whom were familiar with the migration requirements and liaised with the business to guide them in their approach to using the Tableau solution.

After six years, we can confidently say that any report in production is guaranteed to be correct (within limits) and the data source has been certified for provisioning.

At the time, this did have pushback from the vendor, but we’ve seen the chaos caused in other organisations that we mitigated right at the start.

Buy 50 at a time. Project your use base every three months, and project your requirements forward, so you can meet demand for licenses by having them available.

We have also added the vendor into our internal order system for ad hoc requests that we meet the needs of those that want a license on their own terms.

Actually no. This was a spontaneous purchase by an executive and we basically ran with it.

I’d strongly advise going to the forums, attending the Tableau conferences, and ask questions about governance, report certification, and capacity. These questions and the corresponding answers should guide you on how you would best implement your own solution. We did not want to be dictated to by Tableau to install it as a free for all. We wanted to future proof the product and provide certainty around the reports being developed and deployed to the business.

My team is working with Tableau to give presentations, create dashboards, and fetch reports from the system.

Tableau is a fantastic tool that provides impressive dashboards and customized reports.

The solution’s pricing could be improved.

My team has been using Tableau for the last eight to nine months.

Earlier, we were using only Power BI, which had certain limitations. We could not go beyond the maximum output we had expected. We observed multiple facilities or benefits after buying Tableau. The dashboards are getting more presentable, and we are getting customized reports. Things are in place after getting Tableau into our systems. We are getting appropriate dashboards and reporting with the solution.

Tools like Tableau are not cloud-native services of the cloud and the cloud environment. So, it is very difficult to secure things, move to the cloud, and deploy things onto the cloud. Setting up Tableau on the cloud requires a different skill set because the cloud is a different environment altogether, and data center technologies are something else. Although it's more or less the same, people are unfamiliar with the cloud these days.

Once the environment was set up, it hardly took a week to configure everything in the cloud environment. The team concerned worked with system integrators, who successfully set up everything. We are working seamlessly, and there are no problems as of now.

Tableau is an expensive solution compared to Power BI. We have paid the upfront cost for Tableau, which is 40% more expensive than Power BI.

We realized the benefits of Tableau within a month or so. We got the appropriate skill set to work on the solution directly and got fantastic outputs after deploying it in our systems.

We are working with the government directly. The government has observed that the tool is fantastic. The tool has multiple features, and they are getting the desired output. We are still exploring how many other features and functionalities of Tableau we can use.

We are still trying to integrate Tableau with other platforms to exploit the maximum potential of the portals, services, or software. We are still exploring those opportunities. We have integrated the solution with different schemes and applications, and it works seamlessly.

We are still discovering how many other platforms can be integrated with Tableau. As of now, we haven't faced any issues. We may face some challenges because we are currently trying to integrate it with the SAP environment.

I strongly recommend Tableau to other users because it is a fantastic tool that provides impressive dashboards and customized reports.

Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.

We have been using Tableau for all sorts of analytical tasks. When I was having an ERP SAP practice, we used SAP analytical tools and IBM Cognos plus Tableau for dynamic display session purposes. Tableau ended up being the best solution. That is why we moved over to Tableau. We predominantly implement and use Tableau. 

It's a pure data platform. Everyone relies on Tableau. Our departmental meetings and reports for monthly meetings and reviews happen live on Tableau. We can prepare all of our KPIs on it. In fact, all of our KPIs can be placed onto one single screen and divided into nine tiles that can be further divided.

We can easily review and define all of our KPIs. The data is perfectly validated. It allows us to run corporate and board presentations purely on Tableau's visualization center.

It's an extremely good product with respect to performance and analytics. 

All the transactions that are happening are happening in SAP and some of the solutions are in Oracle as well. The combination, the data extraction which is filtered into authenticated, validated financial data, sales data, material data, etc, into Tableau platform is very useful for us.   

The solution makes for very productive and really informative decision making. It can lead the whole business and build a strategy across whole working departments.

The licensing costs of Tableau are on the higher side and probably if you wanted more adaptability in usage across business divisions you need to have more reasonable pricing of licenses of Tableau. Tableau is a standalone product. That is a disadvantage.

Due to the fact that it is a standalone product, it has to extract the data from other ERP systems or other bespoke systems and other data systems, etc. If you have big data systems and you have got other informed decision-making tools and the data is being extracted into Tableau it is dependent on many other platforms.

In contrast, if you use SAP vertical data systems and you have SAP's Data Hub, etc., then everything is vertically integrated. The whole data pipeline is vertically integrated and there is a visualization screen right there as well. Therefore, you don't normally have to go for a separate integration process altogether or need a data extraction solution.

In the end, Tableau has got two or three disadvantages in the sense that it is not a seamlessly integrated platform, end-to-end platform. It's purely a standalone reporting tool. On top of that, the licensing cost is extremely on the higher side. Thirdly, IT divisions probably are a little bit hesitant to use Tableau due to the fact that separate training is required, and separate skill sets are needed to develop everything. 

The cost of owning the solutions from Tableau is much higher compared to any other analytical solutions.

We've used Tableau for the past two and a half years or so.

Technical support is okay. It depends on the countries. I was in Australia for some time and there the support is much better than in India. This is probably due to the fact that a number of users are struggling with it and you get delayed support here. It's better to use Tableau proactively and develop a center of excellence in our organization. That is what I did and it helped us out a lot. I don't have any complaints about technical support per se.

Tableau is undisputedly the number one analytical product in the world. I have given a long presentation to management and the CEO about what differentiates Tableau over other products such as Cognos and Hyperion, SAP, etc. Lumira also is a strong contender, however, Tableau is way ahead because of the dynamic reporting that is possible and the whole virtualization that is very easy to produce, or reproduce. The business users themselves enjoy working on Tableau much better than other solutions like SAP, Cognos, Hyperion, etc.

The pricing of the solution is a bit high.

We're only customers. We don't have a business relationship with the company.

We have not moved to the cloud so far with this product. Only SAP Ariba is on the cloud. The rest of our solutions, all analytical solutions, are on-premise solutions only.

Businesses should know what exactly they can do with Tableau. It's not just a visualization center or dashboard. You can contact a lot of assets that are in use - such as institutional analytics, predictive analytics, and prescriptive analytics. It can integrate with any artificial intelligence learning solutions and analytic solutions. That is where big data analytics play an important role. Modern business is more focused on all sorts of big database analytical solutions, especially for retail and other larger CRM business.

A company needs to decide answers to questions such as "how do you extract data?" or "Which department wants what data?". They would definitely need to have an initial, extremely focused approach of implementing it, with the full participation of the business teams. That is how a successful Tableau implementation needs to happen. However, it doesn't end there. You also need to educate business users or corporates on the solution as well.

Tableau is an extremely good product. I'd advise other users to use all aspects of and take advantage of its capabilities. Tableau has many licensing products available and a whole analytical model should be under one platform rather than going for bits and pieces from Oracle, IBM, SAP, Microsoft, etc.  Tableau is undisputedly the leader of the whole analytical solution and it should remain so only because it should have a larger use phase.

The training of Tableau is good, however, users should be aware that the consultants' availability across various countries is limited. I'm from Bangalore and if I need a Tableau consultant it's very difficult to locate one. You can, however, often find freelancing consultants. They can also get the job done.

Overall, I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

There are so many solutions on the market. Primavera solution is a project management software. There is no product that can beat Primavera in the project management functions so you have many such project management products, SAP Project Manager, Product and Portfolio management is there, Microsoft Project is there. There are other Oracle project management solutions out there and then Primavera is there. 

When Oracle purchased this solution, the popularity of Primavera died out. I've personally stopped recommending that particular product. There are others that cost less, so why use that one?

Tableau should learn from Primavera, and ensure it builds its user base and market its abilities so that corporates understand the depth and breadth of its usage. Many only use 10-20% of its capabilities. It's the duty of Tableau to ensure potential use cases are advertised and more information is disseminated to corporates to help them understand how it can benefit them and why that should adopt it.

In my consulting firm, I use Tableau for data visualization and data analysis. Alongside Tableau, I also use Python and, on occasion, SPSS.

The EU had recommended Tableau for use in some of the statistics offices in Africa, including government institutes in Ghana, and just last week I was using it to do a program for the Ministry of Monitoring and Evaluation. There, I used Tableau to convey selling points to buy Tableau, which is one example of the consulting work I do for clients. 

I also train others in visual analysis with the use of Tableau. This September, I trained 265 medical statisticians. Last week, I trained 13 staff from the Ministry of Monitoring and Evaluation. And soon, I'll be training another group of 20 people on Tableau.

Tableau is a good product for people like me who provide data analysis training because it makes my job far easier. It's a good product and very easy to use, making the introduction of key technologies extremely simple.

For instance, when you get data, and go in to analyze it, people ask, "This is numeric?" People start thinking about, "How do I get all these tools?" Tableau takes the data and automatically breaks it down into two dimensions and measures. That makes it easy for me when I'm doing training.

So what I would say to trainees is, "Don't worry about all these data types, when you are designing your questionnaire, because in Tableau it breaks them into two. And the measures are the ones that you are going to actually work on. You normally break them down by the dimensions." And that makes it simple for people to understand. Otherwise people don't know where to start when it comes to data analytics.

Tableau makes life very easy for not only myself but also for others, because you can quickly get into data analytics and visualization with it.

Tableau is easy to use. That's the first and most important thing. I not only provide consulting but I also train people to use it, so with its ease-of-use it's not as difficult for me to train executives and management staff, because they don't have the IT background, unlike when I'm using Python. They don't know anything about programming, so Python is more difficult.

Tableau is also, right from the outset, a self-service product. It's easy for anyone to understand and use. Some of the organizations that I introduce to Tableau are using the full-blown version, i.e. the commercial version, and they can very quickly start analyzing data with the use of the Ask Data feature, where you can simply drag and drop while querying for data with natural language processing. You type in English and it will pick the data and analyze it for you.

Those features are built into Tableau which makes getting started with data analysis very easy. And it's also got some pretty good built-in visualization tools. I would say Tableau is one of the best when it comes to self-service functionality.

I attended a Tableau conference recently, and a quick improvement came to mind. When I am training people how to use it, I've come across situations where I've found it difficult to explain relationships. For example, when you want to blend data or when you want to show relationships, like when linking multiple tables; well, if you're an IT guy, that's easy. But if you are not an IT guy, you don't know anything about entity relationships, and it becomes a bit difficult for others to follow along.

It takes me a long time to get people to understand, even up to the point where I feel that this is the lowest level that I can go in terms of explaining it. I realized that many people don't really have any experience or knowledge about relationships between objects, and it makes it hard for me to get my teaching across. 

So I was suspecting, and I think I made this recommendation, that Tableau could find an easier way to introduce relationships. For now, if you want to build relationships in Tableau, or even in Excel, you have things like Access modules and Sheets. But how do I know that I need to use one object with another for the relationship. And if you then put in a table, what do you do after that? You have to double click, but people don't know that you have to double click.

I was hoping that there's a way that they can make that process a bit easier, though I don't know how they will do it. Perhaps when you load Tableau and connect to a data source, there would be a prompt that asks you if you want to link two tables together. So if you want to link two tables together, maybe you do A, B, C, D.

That might help with the self-service idea. If you're talking about self-service, then it should be easy for people who do not have the time, or who do not have that IT background, to pick the data and use it correctly.

In addition, and more generally, what I would like to see more support for is predictive analytics. When you're doing descriptive analysis, Tableau is excellent, and it's easy to do. But when you are trying to predict something, like in Tableau's forecasting feature, it seems to require date fields, or it won't work.

But I can forecast something without relying on date fields; maybe I want to predict that a branch has to close if it doesn't want to make something soon. I don't need dates to do that. For this reason, I'm using Alteryx for predictive modeling instead of Tableau.

Overall, the only major frustration that I have had so far is with Tableau Public. I first used Tableau Public when I was building capacity, and when there was a later release to download and you wanted to upgrade, all your work would have to be manually re-entered. I don't know how they can solve that. I was expecting that they might make a release on this upgrade, and then I can hit upgrade and it will install over what ever I have already.

Otherwise, for now I think they are doing well and I know they're still adding a lot of features. But it does sometimes make our work difficult, for those of us who are building capacity, and who are regularly changing people around. It means you have to keep learning all the time.

Another small detail for improvement is that when you draw bar charts, the default color could be something more neutral like gray. Instead, the default is blue, and I don't exactly get why this is the case.

I've been using Tableau for the past three years now.

I contacted support when I had a problem with data entry in 2018 or 2019. I spoke to a man based in Ireland and he was super.

I had originally put the problem I had on the Tableau community support forum, but I didn't get the right answer. I've forgotten the exact problem but it involved connecting to a data set from an Excel file. Instead of the data field displaying the data for you, what I got instead was an error or no response.

It kept happening like that so I sent a message to support, who gave me some steps to follow. I followed them but it still did not work. However, I realized that any time I do it and it shows up and I click data,  it then suddenly goes off. I'm still wondering why that happened. I think it depends on the size of the file or some other reason. I have not tried it again because I'm a bit busy now but it's something that I want to go back to because support didn't give me a satisfactory answer.

They told me, "Do this." I said, "I tried it. It did not work." They asked me again to do something and I tried it, and it still did not work. But then I tried on my own, and this time when the problem came up I clicked the data interface twice to reload it. On the second time I clicked, it worked, but I don't think that is the right way to handle it. 

I used Power BI before discovering Tableau in 2016/2017.

At first I did not like Tableau, because Tableau initially put me off considering that I have a problem with how Françafrique countries, like in West Africa, are controlled by France to not buy anything from Anglophone countries. I've worked in 15 African countries. And for instance, in Ghana, we are bordered by Françafrique countries but they haven't bought things from here because France tells them, "Don't buy." Which to me is wrong. Why should you sit in Paris and dictate to Africans?

I also decided that, "Okay. I'm not going to go into any French country and work." So, for my consultancy, apart from mainly Côte d'Ivoire, I also said, "Look. It is the attitude towards Anglophone and West African countries, I'm not going to help anybody." Because my contract with the World Bank was to build capacity. So I decided I'm not going to go there.

So, when I saw Tableau first, the word itself made me think that this might be the same kind of product, and I would not even look at it, because I was against it.

I kept on using my Power BI until a colleague, another consultant who we met from South
Africa, said to me while I was demonstrating Power BI, "I think you can use Tableau." I said, "What is Tableau? I don't want it." He said, "Oh I don't know much about Tableau, but somebody told me it's easier to use than Power BI." He said, "Why don't you look at that?"

We were working on the same project and I told him, "No, I'm not interested, I will not
look at it. It's a strange product, I don't want to look at a different product." And the guy insisted, "Oh please, you must take a look at it." Because we were looking at the project like we're a team, I said, "Okay, I'll look at it."

So that evening I downloaded it and I realized that all the things that I'm doing in Power
BI, that requires some level of IT background, well, I don't need that in Tableau. So then I decided, okay, let me really look at it. Who is behind Tableau? I asked where is the name Tableau from? Where did you get that name from? Okay.

So that was the time I changed my mind towards Tableau, and to be honest with you I've not regretted anything for doing it. I'm quite happy about it.

Setup is not that difficult for me. However, I remember in Gambia, there was some initial difficulty when I was teaching how to set up the organigram for the National Social Staff System.

In the National Social Staff System, you have about 11 ministries involved and the coordinator, and it's the coordinating agencies in Bureau of Statistics. So I needed to set up the system so that all the other ministries can enter their data. And when you enter the data, the other ministry, let's say, Ministry A can also enter data. And Ministry B cannot see what Ministry A is doing.

Now, when I was doing it, it was not difficult at all, but because I had to handle other systems and leave, I tried to explain it to them but they found it a bit hard to grasp.

So where you have multiple alliances and you set them up like organizations, it can get a bit complex. Because there's differences within the same organization under different departments. It's not a big problem when you buy Tableau for one single organization, but when you set things up for multiple organizations like the National Social Staff System, it can get problematic.

The national system is made up of different entities: Ministry of Health, Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Finance, etc. They are different ministries and they don't necessarily need access to all of each other's data. But if you buy Tableau for each of them then that is fine but if it comes to a situation where they all come under one number and you're setting up, you don't want one ministry to see what the other is entering.

So there was definitely a bit of a problem there. But I can't blame Tableau because no matter what it is, sometimes you need a certain level of IT skills to get certain things done. 

At $70 per month, I think the price is a bit scary. I have a small consulting firm in Ghana, working in about 15 different African countries, and when it comes to our part of the world, $70 a month is a lot of money for software.

In fact, where Tableau was approved for use in Gambia, I had the EU pay for three years. But I know it's expiring soon, and I don't think they will have the money to renew. I don't know how they're going to do it. When you come to Africa, especially when you're on the net, we don't use it so much, so I don't know if there is something that they can do about pricing for people in the African continent.

Yet recently, I trained 265 medical statisticians on how to visualize their data, using Tableau Public. They were so happy. And they thought, "Oh, this is very easy for us to do." But when they asked me about the price and I told them, they said, "$70? But we can't pay."

So that for me is a problem here. And, mostly, it's a problem for everybody. There are some companies that can easily afford it, but the majority of companies cannot.

I have occasionally used IBM SPSS for similar work that I perform in Tableau, but I only use it when the client absolutely requires it.

I wouldn't tell people to go with Tableau just because it's the tool that I use. I would instead emphasize its remarkable ease-of-use and the way Tableau really listens to their users and comes up with frequent upgrades. 

I would rate Tableau a nine out of ten. 

We use the solution for the client's management of KPIs; it involves monitoring various aspects. If they are a manufacturing company, key performance indicators revolve around production and other relevant factors.

The solution helps users create dashboards and analyze data without relying on IT or product teams. 

The tool's OpenAI integration was announced last year. However, it is late. Tableau is a good solution for end customers. However, there are some concerns regarding the stability and performance of its server architecture, including SaaS services. The server side appears unstable, and performance issues are noticeable, often accompanied by unclear error messages.

I have been working with the product for seven years. 

I rate Tableau's stability a nine out of ten. 

Our experience spans around 70 customers, covering manufacturing, pharmacy, trading, construction, universities, and the public sector. I rate the product's scalability a seven out of ten. 

The tech support takes too much time to respond.

Neutral

I rate the tool's setup a ten out of ten. While setting Tableau servers for customers, we often encounter challenges that vary based on their network configuration and operating systems, such as Windows or Linux.

In Korea, the tool's pricing depends on the scale of usage. For instance, it's reasonable for a department with fewer than 50 users to adopt Tableau, like sales. However, the pricing becomes an issue when considering an enterprise solution for a larger user base, say 10,000 people.

Tableau is integrating OpenAI's GPT feature. It will help to create automatic dashboards with natural language. Only ten percent of our customers use Tableau in the cloud since they prioritize their data. They don't want to import their data to the cloud. It is as per their policies and security advice. Traditional companies don't like exporting customer data outside the organizational network. 

Japanese data centers often support Korea. However, the challenge arises from the absence of a federal cloud data center in Korea. Consequently, utilizing Tableau Cloud may result in data being exported outside the country. This is not allowed legally for financial entities such as banks. 

However, the government does not regulate smaller companies like startups. Hence, they are more open to the cloud. This is not the case for public entities. They should install the software in the government's cloud. 

Our clients for Tableau are mainly enterprise businesses. I rate it a nine out of ten. 

I primarily use Tableau for fair-market reporting.

I've been using it a lot for our dashboarding needs, circulating data to the business, generating PDFs, and publishing on the portal.

Over the time that I have used this solution, I've found the interface to be extremely user-friendly.

I especially like the flexibility that Tableau provides. You can quickly make web edits from version 9.0 onwards. My understanding is that Tableau 2020 has many more features for this, as well.

I customize the reports to my needs and preferences.

There is a lot of APIs available, which means that Tableau can be customized to a large extent.

Tableau had some issues with parameters. In particular, prior to version 2020, they did not have dynamic parameters.

Tableau cannot work with cubes or MDX (multidimensional expressions).

For enterprise-level users that are computing millions of records, they need to improve the features.

I have been using Tableau for close to five years.

In all aspects, Tableau has been very stable.

When there are millions of records, scaling up is quite difficult. There are, however, workarounds.

For example, you have to create summary tables or aggregate tables so that Tableau can be faster. There are third-party solutions like Kyvos available but if Tableau can integrate that and address the scalability, then it'll be an undisputed champion in the space.

Technical support is extremely good. Since we have been a customer of Tableau, they have always responded really well to our queries. This is true regarding price, as well as in the technical aspect.

They have a good knowledge forum.

I have worked with SAP BusinessObjects, Domo, SAP, and Birst.

One of the reasons that I prefer Tableau is that it's very user-friendly. Anyone who is familiar with Excel can easily adapt to Tableau.

We have been using Tableau for a long time, and we have seen a return on investment. The reason is that we have been able to scale it up to an enterprise level.

In the long run, there is definitely a return on investment.

Licensing is slightly on the higher side compared to other products, such as Birst. There are different licensing options so you really have to be careful when choosing them. I recommend that you discuss your needs with the salesperson and try to negotiate the price.

In general, the price is slightly higher than products such as Power BI and Birst.

Tableau is a solution that is near-perfect.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use it in our parent company as well as in client companies. A few of our environments are on-premises, and a few are on Tableau Online. We have a mix of both.

The UI part is the best. The end-users can easily get started with Tableau Desktop or Tableau Online because of its user-friendliness.

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.

Their standard support is not good. They should improve it. I don't know if it has anything to do with the acquisition, but lately, their support has not been great.

Their upgrades have always been an issue. They never work. 

Tableau is a little bit costlier than other tools such as Power BI.

They should make it easy to integrate with tools like SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, etc. Its integration with Office 365 should be improved because most of the users already have tools like Outlook, Teams, and SharePoint, and they want to integrate a reporting tool or a visualization tool with their existing tools. 

It is very easy to integrate scripting in Spotfire. We can do a lot of changes in the UI by writing some scripts. That could be something that Tableau can look into. They can also consider providing APIs, but most of the people who work with Tableau do not really work much on the scripting side. So, I am not sure if it is feasible or required technically.

I have been using this solution for almost eight years.

It is scalable for online and on-premises versions. With the online version, they take care of the load, and we don't have to worry about that. For on-premises, initially, we used to have core-based licensing in which we had a cap on the number of cores we could expand to. We then moved to user-based licensing, which makes it easy to scale.

In our parent company, we have close to 200 users. We also have two clients on this platform. One of the clients has about 400 users. For another client, overall, we support close to 20K customers on this platform. That's one of the biggest environments.

Their premium support is really good, but their standard support is failing. Their standard support is the worst. We recently had an experience where we waited for more than seven days for a ticket to be picked up. It was vacation time, and there were a lot of factors, but their standard support is not good. For a few of our clients, we do have premium support, and they respond to any issue because we include the technical account managers in the communication.

Comparing it with Power BI, the main differences are the cost and the integration with Office 365. It is very easy to integrate Power BI with Teams or SharePoint because they all belong to the same company, whereas with Tableau, I have to integrate it with a third-party vendor. It is a little tough to integrate Tableau with SharePoint or Teams. Nowadays, everyone wants everything in one place; it could either be in SharePoint or in Teams. 

I have been working with Spotfire lately, and it is very easy to integrate scripting in Spotfire.

The Tableau server-side used to be very good initially, but for the last year, we are having issues with the upgrades. Their upgrades never work. We always get stuck while doing the upgrades, and we end up taking a different approach. We take the data and keep it somewhere. After that, we wipe out the entire server and install it again. We then restore the data into that environment. 

In terms of maintaining this solution, I used to belong to level three (L3) support till last month. We were only handling the performance issues and any issues that need RCA. The L3 support used to have close to five people. L2 support, which usually included adding a user, removing a user, adding a new group, and providing usual production support, was taken care of by the Ops team. They used to have more than five people on the team.

Cost is where tools like MicroStrategy, Power BI, or Spotfire come into play. Cost-wise, Tableau is a little bit costlier than other tools such as Power BI.

I have been using Tableau all these years, but about four years ago, Power BI came out at a very low cost. Their desktop version was free from the beginning. Power BI Desktop has always been free, whereas Tableau Desktop is costly. When it comes to cost, people prefer Power BI because it integrates very well with Office 365. You don't have to worry about integration with Teams or SharePoint.

It is easy to use for most business users, but before using it, you should understand the basics of dimensions or measurements. If you directly come to this tool without understanding the concepts of warehousing, dimensions, and fact tables, you would not get what you want. This applies to any reporting tool. You should have a basic understanding of what data warehousing is all about and then get started with the tool.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. Tableau has always been at the top of my list. Because of the technical hold that I have on the tool, I always prefer Tableau. It would always be on top as compared to any other tool.

We use Tableau for data analysis. We integrate 15 sources of data and then that data is brought into AWS. From the AWS, the data is uploaded onto a dedicated Tableau server where we have all our dashboards running. We then run code on the data to return results, such as the regression and causation.

The solution has great features which nobody can beat, you can do a lot of customizations, such as use different dimensions and colorize them. Additionally, you can use the numeric values for the customization, which is an exceptional feature.

There is a lack of visualization in Tableau which could be improved. For example, if you want to do a Sankey in Tableau, you have to do a lot of work to do it. Sankeys are available, they are for sale for a minimum of $400, which is out of the question. Whereas if I wanted to do a Sankey, it is simple for me to use a free visualization and put in the data, and from what I already have, receive a fancy Sankey.

Whenever it comes to specialized visualization, Tableau is an absolute failure.

The integration between Tableau and our statistics software or other software, such as Python is very loose and undefined. If they improve that it would be a benefit.

I have been using Tableau for approximately two years.

The solution is stable.

If I have web analytic data on session IDs, Tableau or Power BI both fail miserably in scalability because you are not able to go on a session-level and have 18 million rows fire up visually.

We have approximately 100 users using the solution.

The initial setup is simple.

We had a local team of two technicians that do the implementation and maintenance of the solution.

We are on an annual license which costs us $1,400 which is very expensive. Microsft BI is less expensive.

I have evaluated Microsoft BI.

The reason why we are not getting rid of Tableau is because of legacy reasons. Legacy, meaning it is being carried over and our organization does not have time and energy to transfer everything to Microsoft BI.

I will not give any credit to Tableau or Power BI for the very simple reason that everything is in the hands of the developer of how you visualize the data. There is not any magic in what Tableau is doing, the magic is from the developers who are creating the visualization. Any visualization tool which gives that capability sets you apart.

I would not use Tableau if I am working out of a financial organization because it is lacking fancy visualization. However, if I was a bank or a government organization where I am only looking at trend charts and bar charts I think Tableau comes out ahead of other solutions, such as Microsoft BI.

I rate Tableau a five out of ten.