Tableau Reviews

• 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

We have used this solution for six months.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

It is a self-service tool.

• Enterprise deployment
• Prompting features
• Writeback to tables

I’d like to see extraction after publishing.

I have been using it for three years.

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

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

Initial setup was straightforward.

I implemented it independently.

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

• Rich visualization
• Data blending

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

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.

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.

I have been using it for three years.

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

I rate technical support 9/10.

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

Initial setup was very straightforward.

Implementation was done in-house.

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.