Tableau Reviews

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.

• Flexibility producing visualizations
• Scalability

Anything and everything becomes fact-driven; we don't do a lot by gut feeling.

ETL functionality is limited, which is both a strength & weakness. It would be nice to have Alteryx & Tableau as a package, but I believe Tableau have deliberately stayed out of the "deep" ETL capabilities to "stick to the knitting", which they have done very well.

I have been using it for eight years.

Any issues we have encountered have been related to data preparation rather than the tool itself.

Technical support is excellent.

I have historically developed using SAP BusinessObjects and IBM Cognos for visualization and various tools for ETL. I have trialed Qlik and Power BI, but this has a much higher level of maturity at this stage.

Initial setup was significantly easier than other products I have used.

An in-house team implemented it. Your investment needs to be in data preparation, then the implementation of any of these analytics tools is much easier. Typically, I spend between 70 & 90% of project effort on data not the tool. If data is well prepared, the Tableau development is very quick and best handled by the business analysts, rather than any tech personnel.

To get the best from Tableau you need:

• Data preparation suitable for analytics applications. (This is not Tableau specific, the same is required for pretty much all analytics apps.)
• People bouncing off each other to get the creative process going. Consider internal show & tells and take advantage of local user groups
• Subscribe to "Viz of the Day” to get exposure to as many viz's as possible
• Tableau is (I believe) the best tool for data visualization. Equally consider investing n the best tools for data preparation, such as Alteryx. The combination of best data prep with best analytics capabilities is MUCH more powerful than either without the other.

• Rich graphics
• Dashboard

• Trends
• Opportunities
• Automated reporting

• Faster implementation
• Processing speed

I've used it for six months.

Not really.

No issues encountered.

It felt a bit slow.

Very good.

I haven't needed to call them.

We used Cognos BI which was fast but a bit complex.

We implemented it in-house.

It's taken us six months to get an ROI.

It cost us US$3,000 for the initial setup.

We evaluated it alongside QlikSense, which we also use, and Cognos BI.

Try it alongside QlikSense as depending on user preferences and requirements, either product will do the job.

For both Tableau Public and Desktop, the ability to quickly pull together data sources into a meaningful (visual) display. Also, the intuitive design and ability to work with increasingly large and real-time data sets.

Mostly, I focus on the management and operational reporting aspects, enabling businesses to make better decisions at all levels through improved access to data.

It's hard to say right now but I can see challenges ahead as the market share and common standards become an issue - if the goal is to replace Excel, then it will be a winner-takes-all type of battle. For clients this may make them delay purchase and adoption.

I've used it for around eight months. My hands-on experience is mainly Tableau Public and Desktop trials. Project experience working with people who are expert in Tableau and Alteryx.

Tableau Public crashes on opening on my iMac. So far the web-based tools have worked very well.

Tableau Public crashes on opening on my iMac. So far the web-based tools have worked very well.

Not encountered any so far, but this appears to be one of their big selling points.

So far, very proactive. They have a lot of good training resources available online and very fast response from sales team.

It's been very good so far.

At my last company I tried to encourage the IT team to adopt these tools, but they were very focused on developing everything themselves. This turned out to be quite an expensive error and I would encourage companies - even those with their own in-house analyst teams - to consider using these tools as a way to quickly build models. They should only consider building models themselves if they know they have a product and solution that justifies it.

So far it's been very easy but I think a large enterprise would need to consider widespread adoption quite carefully so it aligns to the overall IT road-map.

We used a vendor team. What was useful about this in the examples I’ve seen is their ability to demonstrate "quick wins” to get support for wider deployment, and then to train key staff around the organisation to increase the pace of adoption.

I’d expect it to pay back within a year if the avoided costs of existing IT platform upgrades is included.

We are currently in the evaluation process.

Get some help to evaluate the options and identify the opportunities, find a test case to demonstrate the benefits, engage the IT team early.