Tableau Reviews

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. 

As an administrator, I use the solution in my company to deal with customers' current deployments and help with the troubleshooting process in case of issues while keeping a check on the performance, like the coverage provided by the solution.

Tableau is a good product for some of the projects my company has handled, and we have also used it as a visualization tool. Considering how certain products work for customers and how their businesses function, it is easy for my company to use Tableau in such environments as it is a user-friendly tool.

The most valuable features of the solution are the permission management and the user management.

With Tableau, the only downside stems from its prices, especially in the country where I reside, which is Sri Lanka. When my company reaches out to new customers with Tableau's new costs, we find ourselves at a disadvantage. The price is an area where improvements are required.

I think Tableau plans to release some AI-integrated features in 2024 for one of our company's clients we had initially. My company plans to use the AI-integrated version of the solution when it is released. AI is one of the best things that I was hoping to have on Tableau.

The only issue with the solution is with its prices at a regional level. Integration-wise, it is a good product. Tableau always provides support to users. Tableau should introduce some special pricing for its existing customers, and it should be possible for the partners and resellers to provide such special prices to customers.

I have been using Tableau as an administrator in my company for four years. My company, which is in Sri Lanka, has a partnership with Tableau.

It is a stable solution. If the people who are working on the tool know about the product, then it's a stable solution. New people who have an understanding of the product can use its stable nature. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten. There is a possibility that the product crashes at times.

The product offers scalability or scaling out options, but at the moment, there is no demand for the product from the customers, and nobody is getting it deployed. In general, though it is a scalable solution, no one prefers using the product presently. Recently, I have only done two deployments of the product for our company's customers. The people who use the product are not satisfied with it.

The product's clients are major banks and some other businesses operating in the financial sector, meaning all of the tool's customers run enterprise-sized companies.

The solution's technical support was good. I rate the technical support an eight to nine out of ten.

Positive

The product's initial setup phase was not very easy as it was a little bit of a technical process about which I didn't have any experience. I rate the product's initial setup phase a six to seven on a scale of one to ten, where one is a difficult setup process, and ten is an easy setup process.

Most of the solutions I have deployed have been done on an on-premises model. For some new customers, my company has deployed the product on the cloud. If customers are okay with their budgeting part, I suggest they deploy the tool on the cloud.

For new users, our company can set up an environment. If the customer can provide an on-premises environment, we can set up Tableau in four to five hours. A single-node deployment takes around four to five hours, but if it is a marginal level of deployment, it might take a day or a day and a half.

When involved in the deployment, if there is some support from the customer's IT team, then only one person is required to take care of the deployment process.

I rate the product price in the Indian region a seven to eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price, and ten is a high price. For the other regions in the world, the price of the product might be average. The additional cost attached to the product crops up when users plan to use the product on an on-premises model.

I recommend the product to those who plan to use it. Tableau is a good visualization tool for everyone, and it is also easy to learn, especially when compared with its competitors.

I rate the overall tool an eight to 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. 

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.

Our primary use case of Tableau is to elaborate and demonstrate output from our big data solution. For example, we use it for finding out the best location for cases, such as fraud cases. Presently, we are using Tableau to find out the original fraud case, the initiator of the fraud process, and the network. Tableau is used with our big data solution, so it's embedded there, before Oracle even. 

Tableau is deployed on-premise. In my organization, we have a very strict environment, so we don't have a policy for having anything on cloud. 

A valuable feature of Tableau is that it is a useful tool for small setups. I shuffle between Tableau and MicroStrategy, so I use Tableau for personal purposes more than enterprise. I like the light version of Tableau for personal usage and doing some use cases on my own. When it comes to something small, I use Tableau for setups, rather than any other tool. 

I think Tableau could be improved with cheaper or more flexible licensing, though this is a generic improvement and applies for any product. It would be better if they had more flexible payment and licensing plans so that they could suit small- and mid-sized organizations. 

I have been using Tableau since 2016. 

I haven't had any issues with stability. 

Theoretically, Tableau is scalable, but I haven't tried to scale it yet. 

I have never contacted technical support. 

I shuffle between available tools—I also use MicroStrategy, Microsoft Power BI, and Qlik. 

Before using Tableau, I used Oracle BI, Oracle ODI, and Teradata. 

The installation was an easy process, and I've done it myself twice. I'm a technical guy, so I didn't need a technical team to help with deployment, I did it on my own. 

I implemented this solution myself. 

We pay for the enterprise license for Tableau. The licensing could be cheaper and more flexible. 

I rate Tableau an eight out of ten. I recommend Tableau, and I even recommend it here in my organization. Their plan was to replace it with Qlik, but I did an assessment and advised them not to pay extra costs for other tools when Tableau was already in place in our organization. 

We have Tableau installed in a massive environment. The Tableau sector is on a seven-cluster node, including one with two nodes for high availability. In our initial setup, Tableau was deployed across the entire infrastructure, so that's more than a hundred sites and around 30,000 active users, and each site has several projects, too. We have around 11,000 workbooks in total.

The maintenance of the entire infrastructure is done on-premises, including user management, authentication, authorization, permissions, and publication. We are constantly doing these tasks, including the SSL certificate renewals. 

Tableau is an advanced specialized tool. One of the best features I've seen is the lack of an intermediate semantic layer. I think that's an advantage compared to any other tool like BusinessObjects or Power BI, which are Tableau's biggest competitors. All of these have semantic layering, so the learning curve is high. Users have to understand the data model and the relationships, but Tableau has no data model, so you only need to know the relationships of the direct inquiry to build a report. 

I've been using Tableau for about six or seven years.

Tableau is stable, and I believe stability is essential. Our infrastructure has been set up right. The last two updates have had very few bugs, so stability-wise, it is excellent. However, performance is something we need to investigate further. It's hard to say whether performance problems are on the Tableau side or an issue with the infrastructure or the data sources. If there is a performance issue, we can't identify precisely where the problem is. 

The scalability is good. We already have some help from professional services, and we've conducted an analysis showing that the number of users will be increasing every year.

Tableau support could be improved.

I've worked with SAP BusinessObjects. Tableau is a visualization tool built into the infrastructure for doing analysis. That's Tableau's focus. BusinessObjects is for doing analysis of some data and then sharing it on the server. 

BusinessObjects is an enterprise tool that needs an extensive infrastructure. It requires a proper IT team to configure the semantic layer and the universal support and then build the report. And the most significant advantage enterprise tools have is pixel-perfect reporting. You can create a pixel-perfect report and share it as a PDF or Excel file with the same format. Tableau is more or less a self-service analytics tool, so we do not have those kinds of features. There are a good amount of differences between these two.

Setting up Tableau is straightforward, and I don't think it took long. It took maybe a day or two for the installation and migration and all that. However, the planning took some time because we worked with professional services. Planning took maybe 40 hours. Tableau requires a good deal of maintenance. We have a team of about five or six people for the administration.

We had professional services to help us.

SAP and Tableau have different pricing models. Their code-based license is around $13 to $15 per year. I don't think Tableau has a code-based licensing model at all, so those enterprise tools are on the higher side.But on the other hand, Power BI is on the cheaper side compared to Tableau. Power BI is much more affordable and also good.

I rate Tableau eight out of 10. 

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.

We use the most recent version. 

We use the solution to engage the field teams and we integrate that with the data warehouse data and build the dashboards for them.

It is helpful that the solution provides access to one's own data. It allows a person to get insights out of the data provided by his tool, based upon the KPIs that the person wishes to look at. It all depends upon different use cases. We have dashboards for marketing people, field teams and executives. It all depends upon which insights a person wants, in which case he can prep the data accordingly. This is good. 

The most valuable features are the visualizations, the way they show the combination charts. This allows a person to jointly put in different measures in different axes and greatly facilitates the user in understanding the data better.

There should be a focus on memory data, which is the concept of Tableau. This is where they squeeze the data into their memory. Because of that, we see performance issues on the dashboards. The architecture should be improved in such a way that the data can be better handled, like we see in the market tools, such as Domo, in which everything is cloud-based. We did a POC in which we compared Tableau with Domo and performance-wise the latter is much better.  

As such, the architecture should be improved to better handle the data.

We are seeing a shift from Tableau to Power BI, towards which most users are gravitating. This owes itself to the ease of use and their mindset of making use of Excel. Power BI offers greater ease of use. 

For the most part, when comparing all the BI tools, one sees that they work in the same format. But, if a single one must be chosen, one sees that his data can be integrated at a better place. Take real time data, for example. I know that they have the live connection, but, still, they can improve that data modeling space better.

We have been working with Tableau for almost seven years.

The solution has pretty good stability. It's a robust tool, even though it has a steep learning curve. But, still, I feel that from the stability perspective, it's a leading BI tool in the market. It's pretty stable.

I personally don't like any BI tool to have that scalability. What we usually do is integrate scalability into our warehouse layer. We know how to scale up and down and we handle it there. We don't rely much on the BI tools to do that.

I am talking about the scalability of a program in general, be it in its relation with users or as it concerns dashboards. 

We recently started working with Tableau online and that particular solution is scalable. It ingests the hardware, the server capacity by itself. So, if users go from, let's say... 100 to 500, we don't see a dip in performance. It still behaves the same. Because of this new integration technology with the cloud, they are scalable in that regard.

We are in contact with technical support. One service we have is Tableau online. If we see a dip in performance, we raise a ticket to the Tableau support team, work with them and make certain they address our issues. I would rate my experience with them as three out of five. 

We used Tableau from the get go. 

While I was not directly involved in the setup, I know that it's not that easy. There is a need for a proper administrator who has experience in that field.

We used an integrator from Tableau when implementing.

Our experience was good and we were assisted with our implementation requirements. They were able to make notes to match our use case and answer all of our questions, including those concerning the number of users we have and how to set up the server.

I'm not part of the administrative group which handles the setup. I am mostly a consumer and responsible for building the desktop. I use the desktop version to build the dashboards and am not responsible for the server health check or maintenance. As such, I am not in a position to provide information about the staff required for maintenance, updates and checkups. There are a couple of people who are responsible for this, one from the customer side and another from our team. Both parties are in sync when undertaking these activities. 

I have no knowledge concerning the licensing costs of Tableau. 

The solution is mostly deployed on-premises, although we have also done cloud-based deployment. 

We have around 500-plus users making use of the solution and mostly 90 percent are viewers. We have very few creators or explorers. Creators comprise seven percent and explorers three percent. 

My advice to others would vary depending on their use cases, what they're looking for and the level of competency they have within their organization to use it. Tableau has a steep learning curve. So, it depends upon one's use case, the reason the person is going with that specific BI tool. The procurement department would need to evaluate the use cases very carefully, because there are so many BI tools available in the market. One's focus should be more on a centralized tool when bringing a new one to his organization. It should address all the answers to one's users, like what they're looking for. Definitely Tableau is good in the data discovery part and it can handle large data sets. So, all of these things should matter when one is trying to evaluate a tool.

I rate Tableau as a seven out of ten. This is because we are using it and it has a steep learning curve. It's not user-friendly. One must build a competency in creating the visualization and then support it. All of these things matter when one is evaluating a tool. That's why a shift is going towards Power BI.