Tableau Reviews

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.

It provides access to many kinds of data sources. For example: big data/SAP BW.

The second-most valuable feature is the wonderful usage experience. You cannot find this on any other vendor’s solution such as Microsoft or SAP. Even though Qlik’s QlikView is similar.

We use it for a very complex dashboard design showing our raw material trend analysis. Even though there is huge amount of data and information in these dashboards, Tableau easily provides high-quality UI presentations, along with quick response and design times.

Its server lacks traditional BI solution capabilities such as job scheduling, HA and etc. If you want to roll out it as an enterprise-wide application, you must consider many usage scenarios and operation-level items. Tableau has a robust design UI and presentation layer, but lacks many of the capabilities of an enterprise BI solution. We have been using the SAP BO BI solution for many years. We feel Tableau Server still has a long way to go.

I have used this solution for nearly one year.

I have had poor experiences using its mobile app when I demo some dashboards to high-level executives. Sometimes, it does not respond with results very quickly. But, the web UI is OK. I don’t know why there is a discrepancy.

Technical support has been good so far.

We have used SAP BO BI for many years. We liked the WebI /BO dashboard. We also evaluated Microsoft PowerBI and QlikView. Finally, our IT and project team chose Tableau because its UI/user experience is the best.

Its initial setup is simple, but server installation took some time to finish. We use Desktop and Server on our Windows platforms.

We have a local partner to support us. But, we also try each product by ourselves. A vendor partner provides some technical support or Q&A.

ROI has been good so far.

They must understand their real business goal and user’s needs or behavior for using the dashboard design. That impacts your tool’s usage and design approach. Try using Tableau Desktop anyway. Pay more attention to the Tableau community’s sharing or other experts’ design sharing on the website. It will give you many ideas or best design practices and reference.

• Ease of use - very intuitive
• Same design for both the desktop and server solution - Easy configuration
• Easy and intuitive manipulation of data
• Program automatically suggests the best data representation
• Graphical design - modern and nice

It brought easy and comprehensive access to company data to managers, without needing the IT department.

It would be nice to be able to use the reports as a data source. Calculations in reports are still tricky.

I have been using it for a few months.

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

Customer service and technical support are very good; the free tutorials are especially great.

I used IBM Cognos for many years, I am now working with BO, and I have evaluated many others. I choose this product for a particular customer because he needed analytical access to data for managers without having an IT department in the company.

Initial setup was very straightforward, and configuration was easy. Both the client and the server solution have the same UI design. It is easy to begin with the desktop solution and then upgrade to the server.

I implemented just a pilot project and I did it myself.

I have not calculated ROI.

Pricing is very competitive.

The product is probably not very suitable for standard corporate reporting, but if your users need analytical insight to data, it is an excellent solution.

• Amazing data visualization
• Excellent mobile support
• Low-cost solution to implement and upgrade
• Impressive integration
• Large customer base and resources
• Good customer support

It's a powerful business intelligence tool and is recognised as the cream of the crop for its visual-based data discovery that helps achieve our goals by responding faster to changes and needs in the market. We have reduced analysis delivery from weeks to days. But it is important to note that was for a PoC.

Some features where the product can improve are:

• It can be cost prohibitive.
• Little change management issues
• There is no functionality for scheduling and reports notification
• Needs the ability to build complicated reports
• Risky security and permissions

I have been using it the past eight months.

Tableau has been "good enough" for us in deployment.

It is very stable and we have been trying it without any issues for PoC purposes.

Technical support has resolved thousands of issues and is still expecting to improve in some areas of support through peer-to-peer assistance. It cements customer retention and loyalty.

Initial setup is simple and straightforward.

We implemented the solution in-house.

We installed a number of modern BI tools in order to evaluate them for our purposes. It didn’t take me long to discover that Tableau was much easier to use than the other tools. Since ours is a small organization and most importantly we tried it for a PoC because this tool has an amazing look and feel.

Proceed in a step-by-step manner of engaging users to find the best solution for the business. Be prepared to explore for yourselves how to analyse needs according to market trends, with the highest level of security management. Each and every step should be recorded and performed based on cross-domain analysis, so that it will be easy to implement in any kind of scenario.

Data visualization: Simpler and cleaner charts, easier for users to perform self-service, not so steep learning curve for non-technical users; good integration to big data Hadoop and predictive analysis, well integrated with other ETL tools. Less-technical maintenance cost compared to QlikView, which requires the developer to do more scripting.

It is easier for users to do self-servicing; simpler, cleaner and story-telling charts; and requires less lead-time to develop charts/dashboard integration with predictive analytics and big data platform Hadoop.

Enhance standard reporting like QlikView (scheduled reports, notifications etc.); for MNCs, the server version license is not cheap; and row-level security: every user needs a DB account, which can give a hacker more opportunity to attack via more DB accounts.

I have used Tableau for two years.

I had a deployment issue: No version control means you can't roll back to earlier versions once overwritten/published.

I rate technical support 8/10.

Initial setup was straightforward.

An in-house team implemented Tableau.

Tableau seems to have easier user acceptance than QlikView because of the simpler charts and big data integration, increasing the possibility of helping an organization transform from reactive analysis to predictive analysis.

Server versions are not cheap and pretty similar for both Tableau and QlikView in terms of price. I don't see a big difference; it really depends on your organization's need.

I also evaluated MS BI and QlikView. Compared with MS BI, I find Tableau and QlikView have stronger visualization; intuitive data insights; less development lead time - MS BI requires creating OLAP cubes, which takes more time; clearer and simpler charts; and intuitive data mapping/insights.

If you have more developers/technical people and want to do more standard reporting without Hadoop, go for QlikView; if you have more business users with some SQL knowledge and would like to do predictive analytics, and integration with big data platform Hadoop, go for Tableau.

• It's easy to connect to, and supports, a variety of datasources
• It supports multiple languages well, which is very convenient for me. When I develop a dashboard in English or Japanese, it can display time differently based on the language you choose. For example, EN: 2010/01/01, JP: 2010年01月01日.
• Stunning graphs, easy to drag & drop dimensions into your dashboard.
• Compresses data well.

We use it to develop dashboards for our customers; they will use these to analyze their business using BI knowledge.

• Multiple choice for filter selection. This is a very big shortcoming.
• Dynamic parameters.
• Currently, it cannot aggregate further on a measure that has been aggregated already
• A button function for dashboards. Sometimes, we need a button to link to another dashboard.
• Display/hide an object based on a parameter as a real function, not using tricks. You can do it using tricks, but it looks so ugly.

I have used it for about two years.

As I mentioned above, sometimes we need to use tricks to develop dashboards, and it has stability issues.

I rate the level of customer service and technical support 8/10.

Initial setup was very easy; just "agree", "next" and "finish".

Our IT support team did it.

No complaints. Reasonable price for professional version.

• QlikView: not worth trying. Not good for support (Qlik Japan); ugly charts; limited functions. It’s one strength is that it's free.
• IBM Cognos: very scalable. You can do anything with your dashboard/report using HTML; good at all functions. However, it's only suitable for big companies, hard to maintain, and very expensive.
• Oracle PBCS/Essbase: good for medium-sized or big enterprises with big/multi-dimensional data; supports Excel. Difficult to set up, and browser-based PBCS is so bad, you may lose your work at any time because of its corrupt JavaScript.
• Tableau is good for small-sized companies; reasonable price. But you get what you pay for: limited functions. It's a data visualization tool, not a BI tool.