Tableau Reviews

We use the product to build diverse dashboards for a revenue authority. It helps us analyze taxpayer behavior to understand payment patterns and identify areas for improvement in compliance.

The platform's most important feature is predictive analysis. We can map taxpayers' locations with data and connectivity to databases and sources. We can forecast future trends using the visualization feature. These are a few features that make it unique.

The product's features for cloud integration need improvement. They should revise licensing and pricing models to cater to smaller enterprises. Users must be able to customize and write their code similarly to one of its competitors. Many companies have in-house data science models for Twitter or Facebook based on predictive analysis. There is a possibility of integrating these models seamlessly into Tableau.

We have been using Tableau for a year and a half.

It is a very stable tool. I rate the stability a ten out of ten.

We have 10 Tableau users in our organization. We plan to increase software usage.

The technical support team is very supportive.

We also work with Power BI and an open-source solution. In comparison, Tableau has a sharp learning curve. It is intuitive and easy to use. It has less deployment time and impressive visualization features. We can connect different data sources, including SQL, Oracle, etc.

The initial setup process is easy. It takes less than an hour to complete. I rate the process a nine out of ten.

The product's price is relatively inexpensive and manageable for enterprise-level companies. However, they could reduce the cost or offer discounts for smaller companies.

I rate Tableau a nine out of ten. It is a stable and powerful tool compared to Microsoft BI.

I have used Tableau in the past with other clients for enterprise-level data visualization for financial and manufacturing industries. I have also used it for documents dashboard and different kinds of KPI visualizations. I'm currently using it for academic purposes. In my current organization, we are not using Tableau. We are using Power BI.

Tableau is very flexible and easy to learn. It has drag-and-drop function analytics, and its design is very good. It is a very good tool, and it basically brings life into data with good design. We have been creating a lot of interactive visualizations and dashboards.

It has a public version. There are public communities from where you can get a lot of examples for practice.

Its price should be improved. Its price is much higher than Power BI and QlikView.

Programming is not easy on Tableau. For programming, you have to have a separate model. They should include programming directly on the web portion of the Tableau desktop so that people can write Python or JavaScript code for customizations instead of using a different model. Currently, Tableau Data Prep is a separate application that you have to purchase. It would be helpful if they can include Tableau Data Prep and programming languages such as R, Python in the next version.

Tableau Public, which is a community version, doesn't allow you to save your work on your desktop. They should allow it. Currently, you can only upload it in the community.

I've been using Tableau for almost eight or nine years.

It is very stable. 

It is scalable. They have a cloud version, and you can implement it on the cloud.

Their technical support is good. Our own IT can also manage it, and I can also get support from Tableau.

We also use Dimension, Power BI, and QlikView. Domo is also there, but Domo is a little bit more expensive. Microstrategy is also a little bit more expensive, and it has different media storage.

Its installation is straightforward. It is a one-click installation. 

I installed it myself on my laptop.

Its price is higher than Power BI and QlikView. Tableau costs around $70 per user per month, whereas Power BI is around $8 to $9. QlikView is around $30. 

Tableau has various prices for various models such as Creator, Designer. 

I would recommend this solution if you do not have budget constraints. It is a very good solution with excellent visualizations. I plan to keep using it for academic purposes.

I would rate Tableau a nine out of ten.

On-premises

The primary use case is for household survey and population, and housing census analysis. I have also been using it for monitoring and evaluation of projects.

I provided Data Visualization skills to selected staff of The Gambia Bureau of Statistics (GBoS) in 2018 using Tableau. Previously, SPSS was used to analyze the data but after I introduced them to Tableau, the team was so happy that together we decided to look at the Census 2013 dataset and analyze it using Tableau.

I have also used it to develop a key indicator list based on the Living Standards Measurement Survey.

GBoS, with the help of the European Union, bought Tableau and have since been using it to analyze household surveys instead of SPSS or Stata, as they were doing before.

Another project that I am about to complete using Tableau is the Data Lifecycle Assessment of the Planting for Food and Jobs project in Ghana. I am working on this project with the Ministry of Monitoring and Evaluation and it is being sponsored by the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa.

Already, the staff is so much in love with Tableau that they want me to provide Advanced Training for them so that they can adopt it as their Data Visualization Tool.

The most valuable features are the ability to classify variables into Dimensions and Measures, Ask Data, and Show Me.

The Dimensions and Measures feature solves one of the basic problems most would-be data analysts have, which is to determine which variables to analyze or focus on. Tableau makes this easy by splitting them into Dimensions and Measures and then use Dimensions to dissect or dice and slice the Measures.  

Ask Data enables non-technical personnel to quickly derive insights from data just by knowing which variables are available.

Show Me is a feature to help with knowing which chart is an appropriate one for the selected variables, and it makes helps in creating appropriate visuals.

I cannot end without mentioning the overall seamless flow of how to derive insights from data using Worksheets, Dashboards, and Stories.

I think predictive analytics is the main driver of business decisions and hence Tableau should strengthen the ability to make predictions.

The forecasting feature in Tableau in my view is too limited because it must have dates but I should be able to predict the outcome of an event without having a date as part of the input.

In situations where you are analyzing or using just one measure such as Sales, Tableau does not create the header for you. Furthermore, it is not straightforward as to how to create it.

I would like to have the ability to perform multiple pivots and creating different variables. For example, if I have the regional population for six regions and branch offices, together with the number of clients per branch, all as a record or observation, then I should be able to pivot them separately resulting in the Region, Population, Branch, and Clients.

I have been using Tableau for three years.

The scalability is simply awesome.

The technical support is awesome.

I have worked with Excel, SPSS, and Power BI.

Tableau is easy to use and the support from the community is awesome. Also, I see Tableau as a product for the future due to the commitment from the development team.

The Tableau Development Team listen to suggestions from the users and follow discussions on the community forum and factor that into product upgrades. 

End users want things to be done quickly and intuitively and the only way that any product will survive is by listening to end users 

The deployment was straightforward. I would say that it was a nice and easy, no-brainer setup.

The implementation was done in-house but there was an occasion that I had issues. I contacts support and it was super.

The ability to make insightful decisions quickly is a big benefit to all and therefore reduces cost in terms of manhours spent in cleaning and creating visuals.

It is a bit difficult for some people when they hear $70.00 per month, as some solutions are available for less than $10.00 or for free. What I always tell my trainees is that it is not so much about the cost, but rather, how you can quickly get the insights you have derived into the minds of your audience or stakeholders.

It is important to consider the ease of use. If a product is free but usability is a problem then it is not actually free because it cannot be even used.  

I had already used other tools and also wrote my own program in VBA to analyze data.

Customers need more insights and hence, they should look into Natural Language Processing (NLP). The ability to analyze text data or focus group discussions or radio phone-in programs would be helpful. 

When there is a major upgrade and you install it, it wipes off all of the recently used files and newbies get frustrated. If something can be done about it then that will be very helpful

On-premises

We use Tableau and Tableau Server for data visualization. We have a Global Tableau Server used by five thousand users on a monthly basis, with fifty thousand email notifications and more than five hundred workbooks for sales, marketing, revenue management, and operations analytics.

The solution has improved the organization by allowing quick access to data visualization and data exploration. Also, it helped to have a global server used as a repository to see all of the reports in the same place.

The features that stand out in this solution are:

• Scheduled extract and the multiple connectors are fantastic.
• Tableau Prep is fantastic.
• Tableau mobile on the tablet is also great for operations and the field users.
• "Ask Data" is good.

The performance could be better. At times, it can take up to one minute or more to open a workbook, which is very frustrating for the users.

Three to five years.

Stability is okay, although performance is slow on our side.

Our solution handles five thousand users per month.

Premium customer service and technical support are fantastic. Best in class!

We previously used Cognos and Power BI. We switched because with Tableau, you do not need IT support. Users can create their dashboard really quickly.

The initial setup was a bit complex, more so than expected. I would use a fully managed solution if I had the choice again.

Our in-house IT department implemented this solution.

The initial cost that is set according to CPU cores is expensive. You need to go with at least thirty-two CPU cores for five thousand or more users.

Before choosing this solution we evaluated Qlik, Domo, and Power BI.

The solution is very good. Loved it and the employees also love how quickly they can create a workbook and share it. Overall, a great solution and a great team.

We use it for different groups within the bank. They produce the visualizations they need based on their requirements. It's just rolling out. It's mostly for reports or visualizations - different financial applications. There are also HR applications as well.

For the groups that are advanced, they are pretty happy with the results, and the ones that are just starting the process, the journey, our group is ready to help. There are a lot of learning materials out there to get them trained and try different things out.

In the long run, things should be faster to deployment, to production, than they used to be before.

It's the speed of getting results, based on what the user actually requires. Before it was a very strict, follow the FDLC process. There was a lot of documenting and control that you had to follow before it went to production. We have decreased those a little bit so that they can move to production a lot more quickly than they used to. So time to market, or time to production is a lot faster than it used to be, because of self-service.

It's the ease of use, the quick deployment from developing it and then moving it on to our servers. It's much faster than our Cognos deployment.

It is also a self-service tool so it decreases the burden on having centralized IT-type teams or developers. It has now gone out to the different groups within the bank, and we just have to make sure that they follow certain governance rules so that they don't create crazy queries. It's easier for them. Hopefully, in the long run, they will get their visualization much more quickly. They are closer to the team members that are giving the requirements so they get feedback right away.

I think they have just come out with a tool called Prep, which we just heard about today. It was something that was missing, a little data preparation type of tool. I believe it is an ETL tool but it's not, as far as I know, a robust type tool.

The other thing is a data modeling tool, a little bit more advanced modeling. I would like to see functionality like Cognos has in the Framework Manager.

Less than one year.

We are somewhat new at it, so as more and more people onboard to the server, we'll see how that is being managed. Of course, if the performance is slow, we have to find out the reasons, the causes. If it has to do with how they are building certain things, we have to send that information back to them and then they have to correct their models.

We are in the early stages right now. I wouldn't consider ourselves in the middle or advanced stage yet. We're onboarding a number of customers now to our servers.

This is one of the things that we're going to have to address as people start onboarding. It's going to be the challenge, where we have to choose which BI tool to use. Thre is scalability in term of the number of users and in terms of the volume of data. We don't know the volumes of data that we're dealing with. If they're extracting data and putting it onto our server, that all will take up space. Those are things that we're going to discover over time.

Tableau is also improving its product. We're not using the latest version which has some performance improvements. That's because we don't have the hardware to support it. That is something that Tableau will, I'm sure, improve over time as well and catch up with some of the bigger players.

I haven't personally used support but when there is an issue, an internal ticket gets placed and if we can't resolve it ourselves, then we have a platform team. There is a member there who will submit it to Tableau. There have been a few of those.

The switch was driven by the end-user level. We discovered that people were actually getting the self-service tool without us really being aware of it. Once we found out that they were using it, we did some research and looked at the market, saw how popular this tool is and how easy it is to use compared to our existing tool. We said, "Okay, let's not fight the end-users. Let's help the end-users, let's adopt it and help them grow." 

That is how we've moved to this level where we've actually built out of a center practice. We're now a group, not so much of developers, but of people that will help the individual businesses build their own projects.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are support, for sure, and their ability to advance in the technology. We have found with Tableau that there is such a community out there. They have a lot of information that is freely available. Those are the main things, support and that they advance their products, that they don't get stale.

I wasn't the one that did the server setup. Definitely, on the desktop, it's very easy to use. And I suspect that the server is also fairly easy. It's pretty straightforward in terms of deploying projects onto the server and promoting it on to production. I haven't heard of any real hiccups yet.

In our case, people were already using Tableau. There are other groups within our company that are using other types of tools like MicroStrategy, and we already had BusinessObjects and Cognos here. But because of the ease of use and the self-service nature of the product we decided, for products in that category, that Tableau was the best.

My advice would be that you should consider Tableau. Certainly, for visualization-type projects, it would definitely be one of the products to look at, and I would recommend it at this time.

Because we are just starting the process, I would definitely give it an eight out of 10. We are getting a lot of good support from the groups using it, but that can only get better as we get more and more groups adopting it, and they are happy. It's really going to be a matter of how happy our users are in building their projects. As that grows, and if their feedback is good, then that will only increase the product's rating.

Tablo has a good community base and we're trying to recreate that community within the bank as well so that different groups of individuals can help each other. That's what we're promoting, and it's working. We have our own intranet site that people can go onto and ask questions and get answers. We also have training and all sorts of different information that's Tableau related.

We use it for internal monitoring purposes.

I like Tableau a lot as its visualizations are great; there's no doubt about it. It's easy to use. 

The look and feel and features are very good. Dashboarding is very good.

The product has been stable. 

While my experience has been mostly positive, there are certain limitations, as every tool has.

If I have to develop any, for example, pie charts, I can develop them just fine. However, if I have to develop a donut chart, that I cannot do it in a simple way. There are tricks that I need to use if I have to design a donut chart. It should be more flexible and provide more visualization options.

It does not provide detailed reporting like other reporting tools such as Microstrategy or Cognos, or other enterprise reporting solutions.

If they could provide better reporting as well as visualization, it would be a perfect product.

Pricing is a major thing. If someone has to use it within an organization, it is not that cost-effective, especially when a competitor like Power BI or some other reporting tool comes almost free along with their cloud solution. If someone is opting for any cloud solution, any cloud platform, especially if I talk about Microsoft, they will give you Power BI almost free of cost, or at a minimal cost. In such scenarios, people would prefer using Power BI or a similar kind of tool rather than using Tableau. That is a major concern which Tableau should look into.

I haven't been using it continuously, however, I started using Tableau around six years back. Since then, there have been two projects in which I worked on Tableau. I did work with it in 2021.

The stability has been good. there are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

I'm not managing any scaling aspects. I'm basically from the development team. Every company has its own scaling goals. In my company, I don't really follow that aspect.

I can't say how widely used it is in my organization. When we deploy a tool, there are different teams. There are different stakeholders who are actually using it. I manage my team. I know about only my team, not other teams.

I'm not part of that team that manages the setup. I cannot comment on that.

As far as ROI goes, I'm not directly aware of it, however, likely you can Google statistics. 

The pricing can't compete with Microsoft, for example, which basically gives their BI product away for free to those that purchase cloud products.

I'm also aware of solutions such as Microsoft BI, which is bundled into Microsoft Cloud products. It makes it less expensive for users if they are already heavily using Microsoft.

I'm a customer and an end-user.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. 

On-premises

I work in the hospitality industry and I use Tableau Online and Tableau Bridge with our food ordering company. In our specific uses, I have found that Tableau is very good for extracting data, rather than for working live on the data.

Although the process of transferring data to Tableau isn't the best, once the data is already on Tableau, it works completely fine. I will typically make use of layer aggregation and other operations such as slicing and analyzing it by getting right inside the data in various ways.

Due to the demands of our industry, we always have things that we would like to see more in-depth over different dimensions, such as restaurants, branches, cities, and so on. With Tableau's help, our company can aggregate all the raw data and then analyze by rows, to see, for instance, which restaurant is doing the best by comparing them with one another. It also enables us to easily split areas into zones and use the data to test for not only which restaurants are doing the best, but also where (i.e. in which cities and branches). 

Although Tableau isn't the best for us when it comes to processing and working on live data, it is very good at extracting data for analysis. Once you have extracted the data, the aggregate layers you can create, along with slicing and other operations, are very handy. It allows us to really get inside the data, and it is, in my opinion, better than any other tool I have used with the same pricing model.

Of the best analysis features, multi-aggregation layers come out on top for me, because they let you extract raw details while making multiple aggregations on different time levels and different dimensions, and you still manage to get your work done quickly without having to load a lot of data grouped over different dimensions.

Tableau Bridge is also a very good tool, however I can tell that it does need a few fixes and some maintenance. That said, it's still good for its first few years since release.

Most of the problems in Tableau Online that I have noticed have to do with performance or weird, inexplicable bugs that I can't pin down. For example, you might try unloading some data, and you'll be waiting for a long time without anything happening.

These bugs always seem to happen when we perform big upgrades or do maintenance work, and we have had to send a lot of tickets for unexplained issues during these times. It doesn't seem to be a problem only for us, but also for customers all over the world, such as in Ireland, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and the US, too.

As for future features, I would like to see major upgrades in Bridge and the Flow Tool, allowing us to do more data engineering work. I think it would give Tableau a big edge in the market to look into how to incorporate more data engineering tools into their product. 

Besides that, I would also like the charts to be more realistic and easier on the eyes.

I have been using Tableau Online for three years now.

The stability is okay. It's not 24/7, but you can say it's stable enough. In the start, it's more stable, especially compared to our OBIEE problems, which have taken two or three days to solve in the past.

It's easy to contact Tableau and ask to increase users or resources. They'll do it in the blink of an eye.

At present, we have 20 users, 12 of which are shift users. The majority of our users in total are board members or high-level managers. 

I wouldn't give their support more than a seven out of ten rating.

I have previously used Power BI, Qlik Sense, and Qlikview. I switched because Tableau was better in working with different sources compared to Power BI which was the only one that was truly on par. Qlik Sense and QlikView were easy to use but didn't have most of the features that Tableau and Power BI offered. Then there's OBIEE which I have used for the past two years, but it is quite difficult for non-technical users.

I also didn't like that Power BI is typically coupled with Microsoft Azure, whereas Tableau works well with AWS and Google which are a lot easier. 

The setup is straightforward. I mean, there's not much setup at all. It's easy for any mid-level user to do it. For example, I just used the documentation they provided and did everything myself. The documentation was sufficient
and the implementation strategy doesn't take more than 20 days.

I implemented Tableau by myself using the documentation they have made available. And for maintenance on one single node, you might need only two to three people involved.

For data extraction and analysis, Tableau is better than any other tool I have used with the same pricing model.

My ultimate advice is that you should know what the tool is capable of first and what your needs are. I think it's better to use the Server edition, and not Cloud, because there are a lot of problems in the Cloud version that don't seem to be present in the Server version. As for myself, I will likely switch to Tableau Server next year after doing a bit more research on how to do the changeover.

I would rate Tableau an eight out of ten.

Public Cloud

We primarily use the solution for HR and energy dashboards. We have made and a few other dashboards for opportunities and accounts. 

Tableau has really good and interactive visualization and interactivity. 

The action feature which Tableau has is very useful for us. If we click on one visualization, it will pass the value to another visualization. That interactivity within different visualizations is the most valuable feature of Tableau.

Tableau would be really good if we could have predefined templates. I was doing a POC another newer tool, Einstein Analytics. They have predefined templates already set up. These predefined templates do the heavy lifting for the initial dashboards. We don't have to build them from scratch. Our dashboards look really good and 20 to 30% of the look and feel of the dashboard completes with the predefined templates. If Tableau works on the predefined templates, that would be so helpful to a lot of companies. It would save time for the developers.

The pricing is a bit higher than the competition. They'll need to lower it to stay competitive.

They need to move more into machine learning AI. Right now, in a POC that I'm doing with Einstein Analytics, they are more into machine learning and AI. Tableau is lagging as of now. If they want to have a long run in the market, they need to integrate machine learning and AI. It has to be very robust.

I've been using the solution for two years now.

I can say that this solution is quite scalable. I'd rate it eight out of ten. It integrates with many solutions. I haven't used our code in everything, however, I have used it for our HR integration and I find the code is quite scalable. 

In the last project I managed, there were 110 regular users of the solution with about 20 suer-users that were able to edit reports and dashboards and tasks of that nature.

I'd give technical support a nine out of ten. There were time zone differences. However, I got a timely reply and call from them, so it was very good. The support is very good. It's both responsive and helpful. I'm quite satisfied with them.

I've used BusinessObjects and MicroStrategy as well. I used to use Power BI for a few months.

The main competitor to this product is Power BI, which I also use. This license is a bit costly compared to Power BI. Not more, but a bit costly from what I've seen.

There's not much of a difference between Power BI and Tableau. They have the same kind of interface and the features. The main difference between the BusinessObjects and the others is that its an enterprise tool. The licensing cost of the BusinessObjects is very, very expensive. The visualizations and objects etc., all have separate licensing for dashboarding. On top of that, the chart's not that interactive. If you click on one chart, it will automatically change the data of the several other charts related to that. That is not very interactive compared to Tableau or Power BI.

The initial setup was not exactly straightforward. It was complex, or, to be fair, had a medium amount of complexity to it. The use cases were complex also and few of them had medium complexity to begin with.

Deployment was basically in the development environment and then we deployed it in the UAT for the users. They had a look at our reports in UAT first and then we deployed it into production. I was also working as a Tableau administrator also and then I learned Tableau administration in order to handle that aspect. I handled Tableau administration with the user and deployed the reports, etc.

The company has different verticals basically. I worked on HR and energy verticals. They also had finance and accounts. I have to maintain that administration part for all of them; not just my dashboards. From a deployment perspective, it was tough for me to maintain all the users and all the rules for the accounts department and for finance, and to be in the group for them, and to assign permissions for them. I did have issues in the servers in terms of gateways. I resolved them myself in the end with the help of Tableau support. 

I handled the implementation myself. I didn't need the assistance of a reseller or consultant.

The company chose to purchase a creator license for me, which was $70. With that license, you can also be an administrator. We also have 20-25 extra licenses and they cost around $20-$35 each. Those are for normal users who will be viewing the dashboards. Those are monthly charges.

There aren't any other costs over and above that.

Apart from that we had database licensing. So because we used Snowflake as a cloud database.

Our company has a partnership with Tableau.

I've used both on-premises and cloud, depending on the requirements.

This particular solution is quite an easy to use product. It's very robust. Even a layman who has previously was not worked with any other BI tools would love to work on this. They will find many things easier to implement. There are a few other tools that are in the market. However, from an implementation point of view, it's very robust. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten overall.

On-premises