Tableau Reviews

Tableau Desktop - The product is easy to use, and does not require IT skills. I can create dashboards and connect to databases very easy and quickly.

We experienced an 80% reduction in the amount of time it takes to prepare reports and dashboards using Tableau. Before that, we had to use Excel spreadsheets and that consumed a lot of time to prepare data monthly. In addition, there was a problem related to the amount of lines in Excel that are not enough for our database.

I’d like to see a better ETL preparation engine.

I have been using Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server for four years.

The product is very stable and ease to deploy. We can deploy an enterprise solution in two days.

Technical support is very helpful and provide quick answers. In addition, their technical support is in many languages, which is very helpful when you face some issues.

I previously used QlikView and MicroStrategy, and they are not as friendly as Tableau for the end user. If you do not have IT skills, you probably will be stuck with a basic level of visualization.

For simple and more complex setups, it is easy to set up the product without too many issues.

If you want to start with Tableau Desktop, you can choose an in-house implementation, but if you are going to set up an enterprise solution, my advice is to use a vendor team to support your implementation. It will be faster.

The pricing and licensing model is very simple. There is one price for Tableau Desktop and two types of enterprise prices. You always know which price you are going to pay.

If you have a lot of databases to bring together, you might experience some ETL issues. But in the next release, version 10, the product will have a cross-join database, and that will help a lot to bring in many datasources.

Various features are valuable. It is intuitive; Tableau have been investing and releasing regularly. A tech-savvy business person can run with Tableau if they have a decent DWH and engineer supporting it. Access rights can quickly get out of hand, but with Tableau's UI and a tech-savvy business person committed to using the product, they can take charge and not have to rely on the tech team.

It is helping to make Makerbot a data-driven company.

A simple mode for new/occasional users might be helpful. Occasional users will always have trouble coping with such a feature-rich product. Unless you are using it every day, and it is crucial for at least part of your job, the learning curve never flattens out. A simpler "mode" which removes many of the more complex features or just hides them in tool "ribbons" might present a less-daunting interface to aid adoption by the vast majority of users.

I have used it for four years (released ~5-10 years ago).

I have not encountered any deployment issues.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer service is good.

Technical support is good.

Domo: inflexible due to lack of expertise and confusing with blurred demarcation between DWH, ETL and BI layers.

Initial setup was straightforward.

I implemented it myself.

We achieved ROI in <1 year.

Don't buy licenses until there is actual demand - buy a couple of full desktops and a couple of cloud licenses and grow from there ONLY when you have tables/reports/dashboards for users.

We also evaluated Domo and QlikView.

Start ASAP with a tiny cohort of hungry users; let them drive it.

• Ease of creating visually appealing charts and dashboards
• Large user community

It is easier to communicate ideas to people in marketing who are more visual in their thinking.

It over-uses custom calculations to do simple format and other changes. This is time consuming, compared to the actual chart making and holds up the enjoyable process of data discovery.

I have been using it for 18 months.

Obviously, it is not very scalable with large data sets. Hence, it becomes slow and clunky when large data sets are introduced.

7 out of 10. They are helpful but SLAs can be better.

I rate the level of customer service and technical support 7/10.

Qliktech. We switched because the licensing strategy they used was not useful. It was a per dashboard license which means that if we develop several different dasbhoards the solution was becoming too expensive.

Set up is intuitive and instructions on using it are adequate.

An in-house team implemented it. I have no special advice.

At the moment, we have not worked out ROI; it is definitely more productive than using Excel.

Tableau is more GUI based and intuitive. I don't like to code and this does away with a lot of what its competitors force you to do.

The most valuable feature in Tableau Desktop developer version is the drag and drop feature of dimensions & measures in the view. Parameters and action filters are also great.

Me and my team work extensively on geo-spatial data, wherein we are supposed to deal with shape files and state/city/pincode boundaries. Tableau also provides a feature to make custom geographic shapes, which helped us in delivering a wide range of solutions. 

I would love to see dynamic parameter values & radial distance recognition on other WMS maps.

I have been using Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server for four years now.

I have not encountered any deployment issues. Deployment is really easy and simple until and unless you get your hands on the Server-Worker Configuration setup. That is a bit tricky.

It is super stable. No issues whatsoever.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

I used QlikView but switched; the UI was not that great.

Initial setup was straightforward.

I implemented Tableau Desktop & Server all by myself in my organisation.

ROI shows when you hear 'Wow' from your clients every time you deliver a dashboard or a report. They always come back with new projects and greater expectations.

The price is perfect, as the ROI is superb.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

The most valuable feature of this product is drag-and-drop visual analytics.

By deploying Tableau Server with an interactive dashboard built with Tableau Desktop, our company has gone through a journey of enabling self-analysis, and adopting a data-driven decision-making culture.

As a franchise model, we have enabled our franchisees and master franchisees to prepare self-service financial and operational reports to support their day-to-day operations.

• Better integration with R. Currently, users need to start R before running R scripts in Tableau. Ideally, it would be great if Tableau could save the step of firing up R to start with.
• Introducing more quite-common advanced analytics functions in Tableau. To enable users to perform simple advanced analytics at their fingertips.

I have been using Tableau for three years.

In terms of stability, we encountered compatibility issues when we upgraded the server version from 8.3 to 9.1. Several reports encountered error messages and were not able to render properly. Later, it was resolved by the server administrator together with Tableau support.

We were using Excel-based solutions. Tableau was much more advanced and user-friendly at that time.

Pricing is certainly a bit expensive.

For smaller organizations, Tableau Online would be a better solution. It is always up to date with the latest version, and no complex administrative duties are involved.

For bigger organizations that prioritize data security over cloud infrastructure, Tableau Server could be considered, which would allow full control by the organization.

The ability to have a question and be able to quickly find the answer without having to reconfigure the data like you would have to using Excel. It also makes it much easier to visualize data in different ways quickly.

Seeing visuals of data makes more of an impact than the numbers alone, as most people are more affected by visuals rather than just numbers. We’ve been able to spur change by using visuals to back up points that we wanted to make more effectively than by just using the numbers alone.

Share-ability. If your audience isn’t using Tableau, getting them to see and use the insights can be challenging. Tableau’s approach to communicating information around data is great, but it requires a shift in how you communicate it and they purposefully don’t make it easy to share via traditional methods (e.g. PPT).

I have used it for ~2 years.

Not really applicable to me, but it still is in the process of scaling to the entire company (3,000-plus employees).

Technical support is average. It’s a lot of self-service forums that require you searching through the relevant postings on issues. It’s pretty comprehensive and as long as you are comfortable with a Stack Overflow-like approach to Q&A, it’s fine.

We used QlikView. I’m not 100% sure what drove this selection over QlikView.

N/A for the technical setup. It does require a learning curve as you need to adjust from the way you’ve interacted with data previously, to how it’s set up in Tableau.

As with any software implementation, it's going to require learning, adoption and acceptance, so you want to temper your expectations of immediate success and reinforce the use of Tableau throughout your company.

Tableau’s flexibility is its best feature. The types of data it handles, and the various data sources, allows me to quickly analyze and present data in ways that Excel (our old way) never made possible.

The old way of preparing reports in the past was to have an analyst extract data from an Oracle database, export the results into an Excel spreadsheet, and then format that spreadsheet for client consumption. This process was very time consuming and the final product rarely consistent, especially visually. Tableau has made it possible to skip all those steps, allowing the analyst to touch the database directly, do the analysis, and create an interactive - and much more informative - report with a standard look and feel. This allows the analyst to “connect” more with the data they’re analyzing and not act as data pullers only.

There are a couple of areas where I’d like to see improvement. One: in creating visual templates so that the vizzes can be standardized with our fonts/layouts/colours. As more analysts are starting to work with Tableau, it is becoming harder to maintain some of the visual standards. Being able to have more control over the layout of sheets on a dashboard would also be helpful. Two: we use a lot of statistical formulae in our work to determine standard deviations, percentiles, etc. Currently I’m working on a project where those SDs had to be pre-calculated in order to create a funnel plot correctly. I’m not exactly sure how we could have done this in Tableau directly without being able to create custom functions.

One tiny thing ... being able to have no colour for a mark would help hide marks you can’t exclude in other ways. Yes, sometimes we have to trick Tableau to do what we need to do ;)

Oh, and one more thing ... we’d love to see more Canada-specific map details built in ... things like health authorities, postal code areas, etc. Creating custom background maps is not easy.

We started working with Tableau (a limited number of licenses) in the beginning of 2015. I’ve been working with it since October 2015. Today, more and more licenses are being added throughout the ministry as Tableau’s benefits and uses become evident.

At this point, we have not had many issues of this sort. We don’t have a server yet. The only thing I can think of is there not being a warning when multiple people open the same workbook to work on – causing work to be lost in the process.

Technical support is very good ... that said, I’ve been lucky to not need it much. ;)

We have SAS (Enterprise Guide) as our main data extraction tool. Some areas of the ministry also use MicroStrategy. After reviewing all three BI tools, it became evident that Tableau offered the best solution for the kind of work we do.

I work in the Performance Measurement and Evaluation Branch and our main task is to monitor and report on the health system’s performance. We get data in a variety of formats from a variety of sources, and at various times throughout the year. In order to analyse and report these types of data, Tableau proved to be the most nimble and flexible of the three.

The setup was very easy – our IT department had no problems installing the software. They did have more trouble getting the Tableau Reader packaged for our enterprise-wide SelfServe store.

I believe it was through an in-house one.

Dynamic interactive visualisation and publishing to server for distribution are the most valuable features of this product.

Used on client projects, it was mainly helpful for visualizing proofs of concept for further implementations.

Data preparation and joining different data sources is still not very intuitive and could be improved.

I have used it for three years.

I had no issues with deployment, stability or scalability.

Customer service is very good, very responsive and helpful.

Initial setup was very straightforward, no issues encountered.

The pricing is complex and could be simplified.

Some very good and fancy visualisations are possible with "tricks" (not very obvious how to do it). It is very helpful to use the Tableau community to see if the visualisation one is looking for is possible and how to do it. There are also many ways to get to a result, so don't look for one perfect solution as long as you get what you want.