Tableau Reviews

We are using the solution to monitor data platforms. This helps us to make forecasts of the use, growth, and disk space. 

I believe one of the most valuable features of the solution is trend analysis.

I would like the solution to have certain features allowing the delivery of reports to the email. For example, publishing Pixel Perfect reports.

Since I have been using the solution it has been stable.

The installation was simple and is easy to learn for the users.

The deployment took a couple of weeks. Once the information for the data is ready, it only takes a couple of hours.

I rate Tableau a nine out of ten.

I primarily use the solution for data visualizations. For example, for analysis in my job, you can use a cloud of words and data with zip codes that you can then use to pull up maps. It's very powerful. You can use also use it to create tables and data frames. You can cross-reference a lot of variables. 

I just used the product to review data and for data visualization. For example, I was studying the numbers surrounding COVID-19. We were cross-referencing zip codes and data of infection in Brazil, and we are creating an assessment of regions in Sao Paulo state as COVID-19 was growing, so that we could suggest political actions to mitigate the risk of contamination.

It's very easy to visualize data with this product. The visualization maps of and frames that we have been able to cross-reference has been excellent.

It's extremely user-friendly. You can cross a lot of variables. It's much easier, for example, than Excel.

I'm not sure if the solution needs any improvements. It's the best solution we have here right now.

The pricing is high. I'm using a student license, however, I know that even this license is very expensive. I've tried to have this product in our organization, however, it's quite expensive. We don't have the internal budget.

If you're looking for other kinds of data, for example, non-structured data, they could make it much easier to use this kind of data. Tableau could create other features just for data visualization and non-structured data. It's a beautiful solution when you've got frames and tables. It's structured. However, if you don't have this kind of information on the data, it's quite difficult to use Tableau. I would say that if you have any feature that opens the opportunity to work with non-structured data, it would be excellent. For example, we do end up creating a lot of word clouds. With unstructured data it just doesn't translate quite right.

If you could use non-structured data to count the frequency of important words to find which word is more important, for example, that would be useful. I don't see Tableau doing this - counting the frequency of important words in a specific kind of text. 

It would also be great if there was statistical modeling for non-structured data.

I've been using the solution for more than six months. It's been less than a year.

I don't work with large amounts of data. I don't have millions of data points. In terms of how I use the product, I've never had issues with stability.

It the solution was better with non-structured data, its scalability might be very good.

I just have the student license for myself. There aren't a large number of people in our company that use it.

I've never had a reason to contact technical support. Having never dealt with them, I can't speak to their level of knowledge or responsiveness. It's so simple to create my own account and use it, I've never had a reason to reach out.

The initial setup isn't too complex. The entire solution is pretty user friendly from beginning to end.

The deployment, in total, took less than three weeks.

The solution is quite expensive.

We're just a customer. We don't have a business relationship with Tableau.

I currently have a student license. I'm not sure which version I currently have. I mostly leverage the solution for personal use.

I would warn those considering the solution to take a look at the price and make sure it is within their company's budget.

Overall, I would rate the product nine out of ten. I've been quite happy with it.

Our primary use case of Tableau is for reporting purposes for our clients. We provide analytics for clients, giving them the ability to build reports. We also have our own product which provides the data analytics platform. I'm a product manager and we are a customer of Tableau. 

I like the data flow and the ability to easily manage the data. The solution also has good building capabilities. When we apply filters, we tend to order different reports and it becomes easier for us.

The solution requires a lot of user training before reports can be created. That can make things difficult and require us to have Tableau specialists. It's difficult for a newbie to start developing reports. 

Tableau queries and analytics, as well as development could be improved. The solution could also include an option to incorporate more open source libraries. I know Tableau has this closed loop so they might not want to provide that but if they did have integration capabilities with open-source libraries, I think that would be great. 

I've been using this solution for three and a half years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. 

We don't generally need technical support although the clients do but I'm not sure if they provide good service. There are Tableau videos we can use if necessary. Whenever we need some solution we go to Tableau training and go through the videos.

People who have always used Tableau want to stick with it but those just getting into the field will look at options that can provide almost a similar functionality with the main difference being the cost. It's a trade-off between the different features offered on the solutions in this market and the cost. 

The initial setup is straightforward and can probably be completed in two or three hours. The client is responsible for maintaining their own solution, we only implement. If they want to upgrade the platform, that's their responsibility. 

Licensing is charged per user, I believe. Even if they're just providing you a minimum specification there will be added costs if you need more processing power. If you want to connect to the data sources, then that needs to be included in the complete solution. It's an adaptive cost. 

I would recommend anyone looking at this solution to check the validity of the business case. If you don't have a very expensive business case and you're going to be on the data processing side, I wouldn't necessarily recommend the product. But if you have standard templates and can just put in the data, export the defaults and send it, then it's a good solution because there's no complexity.

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

Data connectivity, data transformation, and web editing, because being able to connect to a variety of data sources and bring them together, and store that dataset in an environment where others can also access it, consistently, drives a lot of self-service within the organization without a lot of fear of dispersion of truth. The Web Editing capabilities allow us to grant end users enough capabilities for them to do self-serve discovery without the added cost of needing to get everyone desktop licenses.

Still working to get properly implemented at my current organization. However, it has helped my previous locations be able to get a pre-built visualization that anchors them on the truth, with access to datasets for them to explore and continuously push the envelope on new inquiries. The more questions we ask, and get answers to, the more informed we are to make better decisions, which leads to revenue growth and cost reductions.

At the organizational level, increasing the servers' capabilities to support us as an enterprise tool: data management, semantic layer, and integration with other collaboration tools. At the analyst level: Better connection with Python data frames.

I have used it since 2011.

No.

Yes. In earlier versions, it was tough to scale without a lot of expense. With the addition of Web Editing, you can control your costs better and keep your usage to the things they do the most frequently. Still experiencing challenges in the VM world, but sounds like they are exploring options to address this.

If you are fortunate enough to have a dedicated technical guy, it is great. If you have to work through the common help desk, it is tough. In most cases, analysts have problems they need to solve right away; having them spend hours pouring through KB files to only find something similar, but not exact, and then waiting 5-10 days to get resolution from a help desk agent generates a lot of frustration on the team.

Several companies ago, we were using Cognos and switched to Tableau due to ease of deployment, total cost of ownership. At my last three places, Tableau was already in-house.

Not applicable.

Really work across the organization to understand the user personas of your audience. Who is a builder, who is an audience member? Being able to set up the server licensing right (core vs user seats) is the fastest way to manage your costs. Paying for users you never setup or buying expensive desktop licenses for users who can solve their users with web editing on the server are the two biggest expenses.

Not applicable.

First and foremost, outline the value proposition of BI. Getting a plan on whether you are going to go with a centralized, decentralized, or blended approach will help aid you in how you can maximize the tool. On its own merits, it is a great tool. Most failures come from a mismatch in the organizational needs and the implementation approach.

Easily visualize data.

I'm able to prototype charts/dashboards in hours vs days or weeks with other tools (mainly Excel). Doesn't require me to think about the level of aggregation that I'm going to need as it deals with large data sets. Blends disparate datasets together which is awesome for plan vs actual reports where the data is a two different levels of granularity.

Needs a metadata solution plus some enhanced ETL functionality.

Edit: v9 introduced some light metadata solutions that are helpful from Excel.

4 years

None.

Initially used Tableau at a large electric utility where we were largely using Excel. Utility had bought into SAP BusinessObjects but IT had locked down these tools so much that all we had was Excel. Used to work at BOBJ myself but I haven't used their tools in while. We're going with Tableau right now because it works for our dept and we could get it working quickly and without an enormously long and expensive project to get IT involvement.

Now I work for a small start-up but one of the first things I did was to get a copy of Tableau. 

Very easy to build with a rudimentary understanding of databases and data.

So far we're just using the Tableau Desktop, so just the licenses for that. The Reader is free to deploy. We've just started to pilot Server.

Everyone is always impressed with the charts that Tableau can produce. As well as the ability quickly modify them.

• Ease of use
• Data visualization
• Predictive analytics and forecasting

We are a consulting company, so we could use it internally. However, this is more for other clients. It does help those clients in analyzing their data.

There are certain things that I would want it to do, but it wouldn't be something that I could easily describe.

I have been using this solution for around three years.

It all depends. You have to make sure that you've designed the data part well. It is doing better at handling scalability. In other words, you can throw more users at it and it shouldn't impact the system performance.

The setup part depends on what Tableau products you're using. For Tableau Desktop Developer, the setup was very straightforward.

Make sure that you have your requirements and your use cases. You need to know what exactly you are trying to solve. You need to know the story that you are trying to tell. The business needs to know.

If you are an IT organization, then you need to understand what the business is trying to do before you just go and start using the product.

Tableau was able to handle the challenges that we've had, in terms of reporting and analytics. It's flexible enough, so that you can bring in other data and be able to quickly marry that data with what you have, report on it, and be able to tell the story that the business wants fairly quickly.

The best feature of Tableau is the usability. It allows a business user to prototype something without going through IT and spending a lot of time and money trying to translate requirements. Going back and forth, it allows you to rapidly develop things that you need to analyze the data.

I also think, as I used SAP Business Objects before that and built out the reports, that you can build almost anything you need to, but it's a little more complicated. I would say Tableau is more like Apple, it just looks nice. It formats things. It just gives it to you in one way, as it assumes that is the way that everybody wants it. So it might be frustrating if Tableau doesn't give it to you the way you want. But usually, it does give it in a good enough way. So, it saves you a lot of time.

The thing I don't like is the refresh feature . The users can have the web page open and there's a browser refresh every 10 minutes, or every 30 minutes, whatever IT sets as the refresh rate. You lose everything when you have to refresh the page and it may take 30 seconds. So, that's a bit frustrating too. You expect that when you leave a browser page open, you want it to keep that view there.

I don't know if they've introduced it yet, but there is a connector with Smartsheet. We use Smartsheets a lot for project management and capturing data. We are basically exporting from Smartsheet to Excel, and then creating in Tableau and publishing it. I believe there is a connector now but I haven't actually used it. So that would be one useful feature; more connections to data sources.

I would sometimes get an error message stating “out of system resources”, but when I checked the RAM/CPU utilization in my laptop, it would appear that I had lots of resources.

Cisco has been using it for about seven years. Teams that I work with use it. I've contributed to the requirements of building dashboards with IT. I have been using Tableau for about three years.

There can be a memory hang, or the memory crashes sometimes. I'm not sure, but generally it's stable. I think it's when I build complicated data sets, like too many worksheets or too many reports in my workbook, this can happen, which is annoying.

I don't think it is scalable because of the stability issue. I think it's good for desktop; it's quick and dirty, making things you need, and you can actually build some really nice dashboards. It's scalable when you publish it to the server. Also, you can have as many users as you want accessing it. I have some impressions on how much data you can actually use at a time when you're building your reports.

I think technical support is OK. We have in-house support at Cisco, which is a team that supports Tableau as well, but we can go outside to Tableau support itself if we need help.

I found it easy to get started. I'm more of a technical user with an IT background, so I had no problems setting it up.

Get started using Tableau as it serves the purpose for most people.

• Easy to connect to random sources of info. In my case, to MySQL + Google Analytics + an Excel file with Facebook Insights in one case, and another MySQL + PostgreSQL in another case.
• Easy to build with drag & drop even for a rookie like me.
• Fancy graphics in the end result. This is important when I use it during a demo in front of potential customers.
• Interactive filters. A selected option in one widget can filter automatically the other widgets that are used in a dashboard. This is awesome!
• A wide range of customisations.

In less than 3-4 hours, I started from a pure installation on my Mac and succeeded in investigating a trip of a vehicle recorded in our records and had created a visualisation of that trip on a map.

That was used to prove a hypothesis that we can find answers to various questions about our vehicles without needing to wait for developers to handle the custom specific case.

I need to be able to combine in a worksheet from different sources because the insights could be much more powerful. It is possible that the product can do this now, but it was not easily found.

An option to interrupt the process of loading of external data (like from Google Analytics) would be helpful. A few times, I had issues with interruption of the initial data loading process, when it took longer than the expected.

I have been using it for a month.

I did not previously use a different solution. This is my first time with this. I did a lot of research into the final result of my BI work.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward!

It was an in-house implementation. Pretty easy.

If the price was cheaper, then my rating could have been a perfect 10 ;)

If you are looking regularly for answers that are hidden inside your data - like 3-4 times in a week - then it is undoubtedly more valuable to take a shot with a BI solution (even if you don’t use Tableau). The speed; the deadlock dependency on your R&D resources leads to a loss of time. Tableau gave me the freedom to experiment with the hypothesis that I had.