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PeerSpot user
General Surgeon at a healthcare company with 51-200 employees
Real User
Robust features, gives meaning to your data, and easy to install
Pros and Cons
  • "It is a complete solution allowing a lot of integrations, different graphics, multiple operations and analyzes our date and gives us meaning from it."
  • "They need to improve the icons and the filters, because they look too old, resembling Excel from 1997."

What is our primary use case?

We use the solution to capture all the data from the business, we use it for many things.

What is most valuable?

It is a complete solution allowing a lot of integrations, different graphics, multiple operations and analyzes our date and gives us meaning from it. 

What needs improvement?

Some of the functionality of the dashboard can be difficult to operate and the color pallets are limited. They need to improve the icons and the filters, because they look too old, resembling Excel from 1997. It would be helpful if the solution was less difficult to use.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability was good, it worked well.

Buyer's Guide
Tableau
March 2025
Learn what your peers think about Tableau. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2025.
842,767 professionals have used our research since 2012.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability is not the best because the software is complicated to learn, this limits the number of people using the product.

How are customer service and support?

I did not use the support. However, there are many different platforms out there, such as forums on the internet, that you can get information that you require for assistance.

How was the initial setup?

The setup is really easy but it is hard to use it.

What about the implementation team?

The deployment is easy, it installs like a standard piece of software would.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The solution is very expensive. If you have many users then it is going to cost your company a lot of money.

What other advice do I have?

When purchasing the product, start out by only getting a minimal amount of licenses. This solution is not like Microsoft Office where many people know how to use it and can learn fairly quickly. This solution takes time to learn, buying too many licenses could be a waste of money if you do not have employees that can use it. Additionally, when you are using the solution work closely with stakeholders to make sure what you are processing what they are looking for by using the mock-up feature. If you do not then you could have completed a lot of work that they did not want.

I rate Tableau a nine out of ten.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user614262 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Development Engineer at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
Vendor
Enables data analysis without coding although lack of automated usage reports is a drawback

What is most valuable?

The following features were why we picked Tableau:

  1. Ease of use and integration.
  2. Analysis of data without need for coding.
  3. Gold standard intuitive, interactive, visualization experience.

How has it helped my organization?

Non tech users are able to use the self contained platform, interact with data and share findings.

What needs improvement?

  1. Tableau Online does not have any way of automating the usage reports. You can download them as a PDF but have to do so manually to distribute them. There is no way to schedule these reports for business users who would like to measure users activity.
  2. While you can see how many licenses are used, there is no way to see how many licenses are available for use. You have to contact support to get this information.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have used this solution for six months.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No, we have not experienced any downtime or stability issues as yet with Tableau Online.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No, we have not experienced any scalability issues as yet with Tableau Online.

How are customer service and technical support?

I would rate the technical support as eight out of 10. There are some inherent issues that are related to versions that they were not able to sort out and tickets remained unresolved.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We used SSRS as our reporting solution. We switched because the deployment was archaic.

How was the initial setup?

We deployed the solution using IFrame via Salesforce.com. We experienced issues while configuring SSO through SAML.

Tableau was not accepting any metadata files that were uploaded whether they were new or ones that have we had worked on in the past. It claimed they were “invalid”. We opened a support ticket to find that this was a known issue. With the help of support, the issue was resolved at the Tableau back end.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The quote is only valid for 15 days. There may be price changes (after 15 days) that might impact your cost and finance budget.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We evaluated eight vendors: Power BI, Tableau, Qlik, SAS, MicroStrategy, Domo, Sisense, and R Shiny. We compared FOSS and COTS options, assessed feature sets, vendors, and support. COTS was preferred, with Tableau edging out Power BI.

What other advice do I have?

Be sure to review all the vendors and features/functionality. There are many products out there in the market today.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Tableau
March 2025
Learn what your peers think about Tableau. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2025.
842,767 professionals have used our research since 2012.
it_user361425 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
It is a self-service tool that provides valuable data blending and storytelling features.

Valuable Features

  • Data blending
  • Storytelling
  • Easy-to-use dashboard

Improvements to My Organization

It is a self-service tool.

Room for Improvement

  • Enterprise deployment
  • Prompting features
  • Writeback to tables

I’d like to see extraction after publishing.

Use of Solution

I have been using it for three years.

Deployment Issues

Development report publishing to the test server should have pointed to the test DB instead of the dev DB.

Customer Service and Technical Support

I rate the level of customer service and technical support 9/10.

Initial Setup

Initial setup was straightforward.

Implementation Team

I implemented it independently.

Pricing, Setup Cost and Licensing

An Interworks license is required if you do not directly purchase it from Tableau.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Assistant Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
With its data blending feature, we take transaction data from the DB and goals data from an Excel file, and it easily blends the information.

What is most valuable?

  • Rich visualization
  • Data blending

Probably, these factors set Tableau apart from many of its competitors.

How has it helped my organization?

Because of data blending, we are able to source from multiple data sources. For example, we take the transaction data by connecting to the DB and the goals data comes as Excel from the business. It helps us easily blend the information.

What needs improvement?

Performance is one big area of improvement I believe. Being an in-memory analytical tool, I think lot of work needs to be done to make the reports’ performance faster.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using it for three years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

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

How are customer service and technical support?

I rate technical support 9/10.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I've previously used Oracle Business Intelligence and SAP BusinessObjects. Both of them lack the rich viz that Tableau offers.

How was the initial setup?

Initial setup was very straightforward.

What about the implementation team?

Implementation was done in-house.

What other advice do I have?

If you've previously used other BI tools, you need to be aware that Tableau doesn't have any semantic layer like OBIEE or BO. So, you might have to write lot of queries if the report involves complex logic.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user372978 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Intelligence Director at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
We evaluated other solutions, and selected Tableau mainly because of the licensing costs.

What is most valuable?

Self-service.

How has it helped my organization?

Talking about self-service, now we can provide information enterprise-wide. Before Tableau, about 15% of the organization had access to information; now with Tableau, about 80% of the organization have access to our data warehouse, and other information sources such as Excel and SQL Server databases.

What needs improvement?

Well at this point, we are in the process of implementing the in-memory feature for our costing process. We need to have online costing information. We think if we have more parameters or tools to customize this feature, we can improve the performance in the processes that generate and load the information.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used it for two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We can tell you that Tableau 8 had issues mainly with SQL Server databases, but with Tableau 9 and above, the issues with SQL Server have been solved and now we have a very stable solution.

How are customer service and technical support?

Our local vendor support (in México) was so bad!!! However, we have encountered in the online support a very good source of information that helps to solve our issues. In fact, we have submitted a lot of cases to the Tableau support team, with very fast responses.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We evaluated other solutions, and selected Tableau mainly because of the licensing costs.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was pretty straightforward; we only had one issue with the Active Directory configuration.

What about the implementation team?

Our in-house training program consisted of two teams for one week: one team for Tableau administration, and one team for Tableau super users.

I think that it is good advice to consider a well-organised implementation program.

What was our ROI?

I don’t have authorization to provide numbers for our organization, but I can say that Tableau is a product with great price performance.

What other advice do I have?

Tableau is a user-friendly product, but I think that is very important to consider a well-organised training program based on the user roles (administrators, super users, information consumers, etc.).

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user221823 - PeerSpot reviewer
Architect-Technology at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
The drag and drop feature that provides self-service analytics with absolutely no coding is the most important feature.

Valuable Features:

The drag and drop feature that provides self-service analytics with absolutely no coding is the most important feature. It’s pretty strong in geo-spatial analysis as well.

Improvements to My Organization:

We are a services vendor for this product and our team have grown over 300% in just one year just providing support for this product, among others.

Room for Improvement:

While they continue to make a lot of changes for every version, in the current BI landscape, they need to be more device agnostic, especially to compete with other similar products in the market.

Use of Solution:

I have been using this product for more than three years now. I started with version 8.0. I have been through 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 and then to 9.0, 9.1, 9.2 and 9.3.

Scalability Issues:

With data exploding exponentially, handling huge data that runs into billions of records is still a concern at an enterprise level. Organizations will also have to understand the right use cases, but then affordability would come into picture, where organizations do not want to invest on different tools. They try to make best use of the available tools.

Customer Service:

The customer service has been great from Tableau. They also have different categories defined for premium service.

Initial Setup:

The installation and configuration of Tableau consists of just a few clicks. I don't think it can get better than that.

Implementation Team:

The implementation has been done in-house. In fact, as service providers we implement for others. Once the requirement is frozen and architecture has been decided, implementation is fairly easy and straightforward.

ROI:

The ROI is immediate.

Cost and Licensing Advice:

The price-war has already begun among competing tools. However, I still believe Tableau is fairly priced and there are multiple options.

Other Solutions Considered:

The team I am part of works on different tools, not just Tableau. The tools are chosen based on the use case. Tableau is not the best choice for traditional reporting, which are still in demand.

Other Advice:

Use this tool with the right use cases. Use your creativity to build dashboards. It’s a great tool for data discovery.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: We are Global SI Partners with Tableau.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Lead Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Vendor
Easy and intuitive chart creation. Easy conversion between different chart types and crosstabs.

Valuable Features

  • Easy and intuitive chart creation
  • Easy conversion between different chart types and crosstabs
  • Easy map-based charting
  • Built in geo coordinates for cities, states, countries- Easy-to-create fields with formulas
  • Ability to connect so many kinds of data sources

Improvements to My Organization

  • Now, the business decisions are "data driven" based on Tableau
  • There are standard interactive reports/dashboards.
  • And there is a dedicated data analyst role.

Room for Improvement

  • Tableau can handle only one joined/denormalized table, e.g. students, classrooms, teachers.
  • Sometimes I need to analyze the joined/denormalized table from multiple perspectives in one single workbook.
  • Create analysis both for students, teachers and classrooms
  • To use simple drag-and-drop is not enough to show
    • Average student age per classrooms or teachers because some students have classes multiple times in the same classroom
    • Average grades per teacher
  • Sometimes I would like to analyse both student-classroom and teacher-student or classroom-student relations out of the original joined/denormalized table.
  • I think the Qlik Sense approach is better for this very specific case.

Use of Solution

I have been using it for nine months.

Scalability Issues

Tableau 8.3 did not scale properly.
I had four cores, but Tableu 8.3 was single-threaded. Tableau froze once in a fortnight, and without saving either *.tde or *.twb, they lost their sync.

Customer Service and Technical Support

I used and liked the documentation and user forum very much, and found there either a solution, a workaround or at least an explanation to my problems.

Initial Setup

Initial setup was easy.

Implementation Team

  • We bought official basic and advanced Tableau trainings.
  • My local Tableau instances (on my desktop and AWS instances) were installed by me.
  • The central Tableau server was installed by the BI and administrator teams.

ROI

For a large company, the ROI is really fast.

Pricing, Setup Cost and Licensing

Always buying the latest Tableau Desktop Professional is too expensive for an individual analyst/developer.

Other Solutions Considered

My team evaluated 50 visual analysis tools in 2014. I also was one of the key developers of Cygron Datascope.

Tableau was selected because it is the common platform for both data analysts and regular users. Both groups can use it. Of course, analysts can utilize more advanced techniques, but even an average user can understand charts and do basic things after 60 minutes of training.

Other Advice

Go for it. It is an excellent product for the majority of analyses. However, for complex reports and decision support cases, custom application development might be needed.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
VP Associate Director at a marketing services firm with 501-1,000 employees
Vendor
It shortened the interval between raw data and actionable insight.

What is most valuable?

  • Easy interaction with data
  • Variety of visualizations possible
  • Integration with R and Alteryx

We do a lot of work for our clients helping them understand the impact of marketing campaigns on their business results. Tableau helps us tell stories with data.

How has it helped my organization?

It helps us shorten the interval between raw data and actionable insight. We used it to standardize basic tracking and optimization functions for our digital media campaigns. We’re also developing a broader analytics practice, diving into the impact of on-line and off-line media combined.

What needs improvement?

There is a pretty steep learning curve, the product would be better if it were somehow more intuitive to use.

For how long have I used the solution?

I’ve been using Tableau for about three years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

We have a small number of licenses with one Tableau server; we haven’t had any deployment, stability or scalability issues yet.

How are customer service and technical support?

Generally, technical support is very good; responsive with generally effective solutions.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We primarily used Excel prior to Tableau. We are aware of some of the others, but for us, it is not worth investing the time re-inventing our process.

How was the initial setup?

Initial setup went well; straightforward to install and get started. Takes a while to master the basics.

What about the implementation team?

Implemented in-house. It would be helpful to have someone with a year of Tableau experience on staff to speed ramp up.

What was our ROI?

ROI is difficult to estimate as a lot of our use case revolves around streamlining internal processes / analysis. We are now providing analytic solutions to clients where we price on our hours, plus pass through costs for seats on the Tableau Server and a monthly maintenance fee. As we scale this up, we expect to drive profitable revenue through our analytics products.

What other advice do I have?

It makes sense to implement it in tandem with Alteryx. Use Alteryx to clean / prep data, and then visualize in Tableau. Tableau is not the place to try to clean / join data.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Tableau Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: March 2025
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Tableau Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.