Tableau Reviews

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.

One of its greatest strengths is that it can very quickly perform various analyses, tests and rules out different scenarios, in seconds. It works perfectly integrating different data sources and applying immediate updates.

Ease of use: It requires a brief introduction and then you can use your imagination to perform all the analyses you want.

Other valuable features are: the ability to graphically represent different ideas, integration with different data sources and the ability to perform the deployment throughout the organization. To perform analysis is important but being able to share empowers the organization.

Tableau has allowed automated analysis and delivery. We have managed to automate reports that previously took up to 10 days to produce. Now, we can deliver these reports in a day (including updating databases).

They can improve the integration of SAP BW (join between elements) and Tableau Server platform, better adaptation for tablets and cellphone by the application and organize displays more efficiently.

We have used Tableau for almost a year and a half.

The connection between Tableau Server and SAP BW can sometimes be unstable and lose the connection, at which point it does not display the query or the hub to which it was connected.

Tableau technical support is one of the best I've had. 9!

Installation is really quick and easy; you just download the version directly from the official website of Tableau. The server configuration was a bit more complex but we had the support of the local provider.

You should always analyze the variables; each organization is unique. However, for implementation, we ran the methodology suggested by Tableau Drive, which is based on others’ experiences.

It has allowed us to replace reports. The impacted report areas have been empowered by the tool, and are more aware of the data they report.

We evaluated Qlik Sense, SAP Lumira and Tableau. We decided on Tableau over Qlik and Lumira for ease of use by the functional teams, and because they have a direct supplier in Venezuela, including support and training. At the time of evaluation in May 2015, SAP Lumira’s analysis development capabilities and its integration with different data sources were not as good as Tableau’s. Even when connecting SAP Lumira with SAP BW, we could not publish analyses.

It is important to consider change management, definition of roles and performance analysts.
Tableau is a powerful tool for performing analyses and communicating them. We managed to empower the organization with Tableau and we are in the process of extending it to all the analytical community of our company.
We can integrate with SAP BW and perform analysis of information. However, we have found it difficult to join elements of BW such as cubes or queries, but this promises to be resolved in the new version, Tableau 10.
We are really pleased to have chosen Tableau as our ETL tool to support our analysis and sharing it within the organization.

• The ability to connect to different sources of data like SQL, Excel, etc. makes Tableau a very smart tool for data visualization.
• The way it incorporates user-level data with geographic mapping really helps in building strategy at the top-most level.
• Sharing dashboards among the team is extremely hassle free and also the data being up to date makes management extremely happy.

All-important, high-level metrics are at the fingertips of top management, which makes decision making less painful and more data oriented.

All employees have access to real-time data, which makes customer management a nuanced affair, because of which there is stark reduction in errors.

• Better dashboard creation
• Ease of making reports

I have used it for two years.

Once the reports are created, there are no issues at all. The only problem is the speed of loading data. For huge data sets, it takes a lot of time to load data. With Google' Data Studio coming out, they might want to improve this aspect of the tool.

Service is excellent and their support staff are very quick to answer any queries.

We did not evaluate any other solutions. We only worked with Tableau, as it was industry ready.

It is a pretty straightforward setup, as described on their website. If you follow those instructions correctly, there wouldn't be any problem.

• We did it in-house, as it helped us streamline things and rolling out required dashboards faster and more accurately.
• A team of two with basic tech background is more than enough to start off with.
• The learning curve is very flat, so within a month, resources can be ready to roll out reports.

Their price is as per industry standard and any company in analytics business will be comfortable with the pricing plans.

The most valuable feature is the ease of generating management reports on demand, and ease of generating incremental extracts live or work very quickly.

The integration with R for more complex algorithms in analytical data is also nice.

We use it to generate intelligence reports core business of insurance we develop. It is also part of the business intelligence tools we recommend.

Part graphical gauges compliance does not include the Balance Score Card style, however you can develop these graphics, another shortcoming in not having mondrian engines.

2 years

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no issues with stability.

We've had no issues with scalability.

Tableau is primarily used for analyzing data. It is not just a dashboarding solution, it is also a visual analytics solution, which means that end users can make their own analyses on that product. They can find lots of findings. The product has lots of capabilities that allow the user to focus on data. 

One of the most valuable features of Tableau is that it's a visual analytics solution, not just a dashboarding solution. Compared to Power BI, which is a dashboarding solution, there are no limitations with Tableau. For example, when you add a chart or a map to Power BI, it has a 3,000-point limitation. When you try to track your whole vehicle on the map, you only see the first 3,000 rows on the map, and Power BI doesn't tell you which part of the data is shown on the map. But Tableau doesn't have any limitations, which means that you can see five million data points on a map. It starts the project by creating the visuals that directly converts to SQLs. In that way, all the components have no limitations. 

When we compared Tableau to Power BI, we also found Tableau to be more fancy. Fancy means you can create more visual graphics and more visual dashboards. With Power BI, this isn't so—it's just some tables and some simple charts together. 

Tableau is more for business users who want to analyze data. Tableau can directly connect the analytics systems, like R or python, and get the results in screen, so it's a good solution for analytics scientists. It has some predefined capabilities to understand the data. 

Tableau's automatic insight could be improved. It has some predefined capabilities to understand the data, but I think they need more. Customers need more insight automatically from data—they don't want to discover them, they want to get the forecast automatically. 

The data preparation should also be improved because it's not easy. 

Tableau tries to focus on the business side, but the backend side has not improved much. They also have an ETS solution, but it's limited. 

I have been working with Tableau for four years. 

Tableau is stable, but the analytic tools don't distribute. You should subscribe in analytic prospectus. In that way, Power BI or Calique or Tableau uses subscription instead of publication, so if the user should ask something or should want to avail of something, they focus on a report and click on subscribe. In that way, they get the data, so the business case is changing a little. Old products, like Oracle BI or SAP BusinessObjects, have more publication features that these kinds of products don't have. I think Tableau's publication feature needs to be improved. 

Tableau is scalable. 

We also evaluated Power BI. We chose Tableau because it is a visual analytics solution, not just a dashboarding solution, so there are no limitations with Tableau. The second reason was because Tableau is more fancy—you can create more visual graphics and visual dashboards. However, Power BI has the advantage on the backend side. It has a huge cloud environment, but Tableau doesn't. 

I rate Tableau an eight out of ten. 

Tableau has a good site named publictableau.com. There are lots of examples and millions of Tableau dashboards already published there. You can download the dashboard and see what's behind it, to analyze it. It's a good chance to create different kinds of dashboards. 

To those considering using Tableau, I would also advise that they understand the infrastructure of Tableau. Tableau uses lots of big data technology inside their product: Elasticsearch, Red Cache, Amazon Apache, etc. I think there are more than 50 different big data technologies inside them. If they know their infrastructure, they should understand the big data technologies also. 

We use the solution for multiple functions internally, mainly for finance, accounting, and the operations team.

I have found many of the self-service features valuable. One tool allows anyone within the business to create their own dashboards. However, their data has to be prepared properly. Everything is user-friendly, and the visualizations are high quality and esthetically pleasing. Additionally, there is a tool that enables not just the developers, but even the end business users to create jobs for them.

The process of embedding the dashboards on external portals and websites could be improved. We also experienced challenges with integration with analytics.

In an upcoming release, if the capabilities of Tableau Prep are improvised and expanded, that would be an added advantage.

I have been using the solution for one year.

We have found the solution to be stable and reliable.

We have increased the number of users when we develop more dashboards for the new departments. We did not face challenges when we increased the number of users. We have approximately 50 users using the solution in my organization.

We are planning to increase the usage of the solution. We are doing internal training to help our employees because a lot of people do not know how to use it properly. This has caused a bit of an expansion problem.

The technical support is good.

The initial installation was straightforward. The deployment took approximately three months, this included the development of dashboards and customizations.

There is a license for this solution and we pay on an annual basis.

We did evaluate other options before we choose this solution.

My advice to those wanting to implement the solution would be, if you are looking for ETL heavy tools, this may not be the right choice. However, if you want beautiful visualizations and getting insights from data at high speed. This would be a good solution for that focus.

I rate Tableau an eight out of ten.

• 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 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.