Tableau Reviews

Self-service: Its ease of use means Tableau can be operated by business users. It is aligned with the mission “Help people see and understand the data”.

Tableau has extended the native capabilities of various type of data sources (database, big data). There are also significant features at the map and features level of detailed expressions.

With the Device Manager in Tableau 10, you can design, customize, and publish a single dashboard with optimized views for tablets and phones.

Other features include clustering segmentation data and a custom territories map.

I have been using it since 2012 (four years).

We encountered issues with Tableau 8. However, since Tableau 9, there has been significant improvement.

I rate technical support 8/10.

We evaluated others, but Tableau is the business intelligence platform which allows everyone to use the product in a way that supports how they work with data.

Tableau is easy to be deployed from the beginning, from the desktop up to Tableau Server, which you can implement at the organization level.

We have implemented Tableau in organizations of up to thousands of users.

We are a Tableau partner. We provide system integration services to our clients. We begin implementation by focusing on a specific subject area where it is the most important and it will have a significant impact for executive management.

Research the variety of licensing schemes and choose the best one for your organization.

Try it first by downloading the trial license. You will love it and experience how easy it is to use the product.

It can build in-memory data with an easy-to-use interface, connecting numerous data sources and linking referenced tables/origins. It also has an awesome Sense-Me tool that indicates the most appropriable graphic to use with selected information (dimensions and measures) and, in my opinion, works like a charm!

It shows us our client’s profile, our best services and what areas are not satisfying the target. Also, it gives us a better sense of market needs, using non-structured data (like social media, government data).

It needs a more robust way to connect and share the "big-data" origin. It also needs an easy-to-develop interface for creating new charts and tools in business dashboards.

Version 8: 10 months, Version 9: 1 month.

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

Tableau has incredible consulting people and comprehensive support professionals, solving and clarifying any questions.

We used (and continue to use) SAP Business Objects 4.1 Edge (and all the embedded tools...). We acquired the SAP BO licenses to initialize our business intelligence project. But, our bigger problem is using lot-and-not-linked tools to generate insights. Some of our needs are only answered by Explorer, another only by Dashboard Design (Xcelsius – and it’s so old...), another only by Lumira (and can’t be viewed on LaunchPad – The Web-Portal of BO - forcing users to install the app on their machines without mobile support).

Tableau is an easy-to-install tool, like Next-Next-Finish!

We installed it by ourselves, only viewing the vendor’s documentation to make sure we’re using the correct parameters. It is a good way to start; always see what the vendor’s site has in their documentation area.

Our employees no longer have to search for information in many systems and/or use a web search; they can just go to the BI platform and do a lot of analysis by just clicking. So, with this time savings, our ROI is more than 100% - a lucrative investment.

Before looking at the pricing/licensing, research all of the employees’ needs. Make a matrix with their needs and the available BI platforms on the market, checking which platform addresses the way your business way-to-do. Then, determine which users will use the platform to see information, to create information and to build information.

Just test before you buy. All BI platforms have a lot of functionalities and, also, a lot of needs.

• Highly interactive and intuitive data discovery: helps people see and explore their data.
• Ease and breadth of connectivity to so many different data sources.
• The interface to make joins between tables is greatly appreciated.

Management is simply getting more insights from visual representations of their data, and we’re becoming a more data-driven decision-making organization.

I’d like more data integration across data sources.

I have used it for almost 2.5 years.

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

I didn’t need much technical support, and I find the on-demand online video library for training new and experienced users is a great asset.

I used IBM Cognos 8 with a previous employer, and I found that tool to be slow and clunky.

The initial setup was done by our company’s Tableau Server team, which I am not a part of.

The Tableau Desktop install was easy.

Tableau has an extensive network of Alliance Partners with expertise in its implementations, so you shouldn’t have any problem in getting adequate support for such a popular product.

• Valuable to use smaller data sets
• Automatic Extract Creation
• Replace on publish data sources
• Online sync client
• Progressive-loading dashboards.
• Parameter to pass an initial SQL dynamically
• Combine multiple sets with union
• Subscribe and schedule the reports to receive email on data snapshot
• Ad-hoc reports and ease of use for the end user
• Reduces development effort
• Easy maintenance
• Security with role-based access and in line with Active Directory and SSO
• Alerts and scheduling
• Heat maps, geographical charts, 3D charts, drill down/drill up, drill through, cascading effects, and multi-dimensional and canned reports all in one tool
• Embedding into Microsoft SharePoint

• The end users need not depend on the regular BI developers for certain quick and ad-hoc reports.
• Generic avoidance of sharing the emails with an embedded Excel etc
• Can be accessed from multiple smart devices
• Snapshot facility to the end user for analysis
• Effective visuals

• Facility to add custom code to the dashboard will be helpful.
• Custom SQL feature is not working as expected from the performance perspective. Irrelevant of the SQL, the engine executes for everything available.
• Archive historical data using extracts
• MeasureName filter can’t be shared across multiple sheets in a dashboard.
• Cascading with relative has restrictions over the worksheets in a dashboard.
• Multiple selection in parameters
• Formatting option for individual filter is not available.
• Using HiveServer2 connector is a big challenge to pull, even with smaller data sets. Not sure if that has been improved with Spark Thrift server connector.
• Not much support for Hadoop / Hive as the backend in the market, connectivity issues not limited to the drivers.
• Few complex report requirements (for dashboards) could not be achieved with better performance (e.g. Dynamic Parameters).
• Reverse engineering from the front end report is not that impressive.
• For massive volumes of data, the performance acutely degrades.
• Permitting external users with no SSO is still a concern.
• Server support on Linux is lacking.
• Caps on report scheduling

I have been using this solution for more than three years.

TDS deployment will not encourage editing after the deployment.
With the TDS deployment, a few of the formats are lost. So far, this is not a serious issue.

Approached from the client side, waiting time is reasonable high.

I previously used MicroStrategy, QlikView, SQL Server Reporting Services, SQL Server Analysis Services, Panorama, SAP BusinessObjects, and in-house Java-based reports.

The reasons I chose this product were: ease of doing things, faster performance, and it is an all-in-one tool.

Comparatively, basic setup is not a hard task.

Our use case is met, but the pricing is still a matter of concern.

It is a nice visual and high performance all-in-one BI tool which is becoming more popular with its ease of use and user-friendly features, effective visuals and apt major functionalities of BI.

However, it depends on one’s requirements and budget to balance the need.

We would recommend using it for mid-size datasets to visualize near real-time data, as there is no control over the execution model.

I have used Tableau to generate visualizations to calculate system trend analysis for business. 

Tableau has been very helpful to give a high level of insight into our business.

Tableau's most valuable features are user-friendliness and have a connection between multiple source systems. You can publish a report by using Tableau Public and there you can make your data online, not only batches of data, you can use it as an online analytical tool.

There are more than a powerful tool in the market, such as Microsoft BI.

I have used Tableau within the last 12 months.

Tableau is a stable solution.

I have found Tableau to be scalable.

I would recommend this solution for large enterprises.

I have not contacted technical support. However, after reading many reviews others have found the support to be good.

The setup and deployment of Tableau are very easy. I did not have a problem.

The price of Tableau could improve. The license is too expensive. 

There is a 14-day trial version available to those who want to try it.

I would recommend Tableau, but if any organization wants to use it, they can see if the solution fits their business requirement. There is a very competitors market and with a low price. Those wanting to use this solution need to study the requirements to know which repository to use.

I rate Tableau a nine out of ten.

It is mainly used for reporting and dashboarding purposes.

We implement it for our customers. We have different customers. For some, it is on the cloud, and for some, it is on-premises. Our customers have been using Google Cloud. 

In terms of its version, we are probably using the latest minus one version.

The visualizations are quite rich. It has charts and other visualizations. 

Its performance is pretty good, and the development time is very low.

Its integration with Microsoft products such as Teams should be improved.

I have been using this solution for three years.

It is quite stable.

Its scalability is quite good. The negative side would be the cost, but it is quite scalable.

For the projects we have worked on, one of the projects had about a thousand users, and one of the projects had about 200 users. I handle a development team here, and my team is not very big. It is just a four-member team.

It is used by the management, CXOs, and even the mid-level management people. It's basically for decision-making, so mainly the executive board uses these dashboards.

We have not interacted with them. Our clients deal with that part. We don't do that.

It is not very complicated. Deployment hardly takes a day or two.

We do it on our own. We are a consulting company.

Its cost is quite high. A corporate license costs about 150-200K per year for all the users, but there was probably some discounted amount. This cost includes everything.

A practical piece of advice would be that if you really have a requirement to use Tableau as a tool, you can go for it. Otherwise, there are some open-source and low-cost tools. For example, Amazon QuickSight is a relatively new tool by Amazon, and it is a very good one. It is a very good competitor for Tableau. Apache Superset is another one that has recently been gaining lots of traction. So, it depends on your budget. If you want to have low costing, you can go for these low-cost and good alternatives.

Tableau is quite a mature tool. I would rate it an eight out of 10.

We have used this solution for enterprise reporting, ad hoc data exploration, and visualization.

While using this solution I have found the valuable features to be ease of use and the visualization. It is a complete solution.

The data preparation could integrate better with Tableau.

I have been using this solution for approximately eight years.

When it comes to stability this solution is very good.

I have found this solution to be highly scalable, we have approximately 800 people in my organization using it and plan to increase usage.

The technical support responsiveness was good. However, we had some tough questions that they could not help us with.

I previously used another solution and switched because Tableau is easy to use, support is good, lower price, and for their community.

The installation is very straightforward for both desktop and server solutions. The desktop only takes a few minutes and the server takes half an hour.

We used consultants for the implementation. We have a team of six that does the maintenance, which includes, server, application, and content administrators.  

This solution is a bit expensive.

The pricing options have become more difficult over the years. I think they are bordering on pricing themselves out of the market. They need different pricing options for various-sized businesses. Where my organization is a large organization, we are happy to pay a higher price because we can leverage the products very extensively. For smaller enterprises, different pricing options would be good.

I would recommend this solution to others to start using it.

I rate Tableau a nine out of ten.

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

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

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.

The stability was good, it worked well.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.