Tableau Reviews

The best feature of Tableau is its simple GUI with drag-and-drop feature. It helps even a rookie create a great visualization. But for experts, it also provides flexibility of writing queries to fetch data. It’s easy-to-integrate feature - with almost all the databases - makes it a great value.

We have used Tableau for creating dashboards for our clients to help them visualize their data for developing business strategies. They can easily use the dashboard for targeting strengths and improving the areas of weakness.

The feature I would like to have is publication of a live dashboard on a webpage, so that dashboards can be incorporated in webpages. We can do this currently on Tableau public but because of data security, we need the dashboards to be private. But in private dashboards, we cannot publish it on webpages. Sisense provides this feature.

I have been using Tableau for the last two years, with the first year being for college assignments. I have exclusively used Tableau for creating dashboards for hotel clients.

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

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

I have used QlikView, but I have always found Tableau simpler to use.

Initial setup was simple. I just had to install Tableau Desktop on my system.

An in-house team did the implementation. It’s easy to set up.

Pricing is steep.

If you have the budget, go for it. It’s the best money can get you.
I have loved working with Tableau for its simplicity and ability to handle large volumes of data. However, it’s a bit too expensive.

The feature we've found most valuable is Data Extract, which extracts a local copy of all required data in a columnar format store. It does in-memory processing which is lightening fast.

It placed the power of dashboards and scorecard development in the hands of business people, so there's less dependency on developers.

They need to make it more flexible for enterprise administration, e.g, more job scheduling flexibility, more robust permission control, and more comprehensive mapping service that is native and not dependent on a third party like Mapbox. They also need to develop more comprehensive DR and HA solutions.

I've been using it for over three years.

It's excellent for deployments and upgrades.

We have had no issues with its stability.

We have had no problems scaling it for our needs.

They have good customer service support, although they do not always solve the issues. Also, sometimes support takes too long to find the root cause or a solution to an issue.

We previously used Cognos, and Microsoft BI. We chose this due to user-friendly structure. There aren't too many components to manage and understand like in Cognos or Microsoft BI, etc.

The initial setup was straightforward -- very easy installation and upgrades cycle.

In-house - very easy to implement in-house, just follow the installation and upgrade guide check-lists and first try on test environment before doing a production installation or upgrade.

ROI for Tableau when compared to other BI tools we have is excellent.

Tableau has both core-based licencing (for higher number of consumers scenario) and subscription based licences (for limited users scenario) - chose appropriate licencing based on your estimate of number of users.

It's very user friendly and its self-service approach helps business users to develop dashboards in no time. The learning curve is very short - lot of learning resources available.

Still need to do some catch-up on enterprise administration and Mobile friendly reporting e.g Android App is not yet available - expected to be released 10.0.

Tableau releases frequent major releases three to four versions per year, and monthly patch fix releases, so plan a strategy that you want to follow. We are generally one to two releases behind so we can keep up with them, and at the same time leveraging all new exciting features the release.

Once you are comfortable with the product, building visualizations and dashboards is extremely quick.  I also have not seen a better geospatial drag and drop visualization tool out there yet.

It’s an excellent tool to quickly build visualizations supporting QA and data validation activities.

• Governed data discovery
• Collaboration
• Other enterprise features

We've used it for over two years.

We had no issues deploying it.

There have been no issues with the stability.

Older versions had trouble with performance when looking at larger datasets but it does not seem to be as much an issue now.

Sales support when we were first engaged with them was minimal.

There was no other solution in place.

It’s excellent for desktop analysis but make sure to include other tools in your evaluation if you are looking for enterprise support features.

• Visualization
• Data capacity

Where I'm working, we have many reports developed in Microsoft Excel to present results about the business. However, when we need to work a large volume of data, they are developed in Tableau because access to data from Oracle and managing large data volumes is easier than Excel. All the reports that we develop using Tableau are complimented by our directors, as the information is visualized well.

When we need to work with a large volume of data, we can create an extraction, validate data easily, and then present it to our users using Tableau Server or Tableau Reader.

I have difficulty working with many filters on the dashboards, and I'd like to see more options in the "Histories" section. QlikView makes better use of the dashboard filters.

We've used it for two years.

In some departments we chose to install Tableau Reader, but it's necessary to create a ticket to update the software for each new version. This process is not good as it disrupts our day-to-day functions.

I work with 4GB RAM and rarely I have a problem with it. My OS is 32 bits.

We've had no issues with scalability.

I always take support from Tableau's forums and communities.

We also looked at QlikView.

It's a great solution to present data, and our directors love to work with it.

Tableau can be helpful for BI reports and data dashboards. For example, say you are getting data from a few systems, and you want to see a consolidated report, like a management report or a transactional report. We use Tableau to build a dashboard using the data that we get.

I'm in a pre-sales role, so I don't have a lot of practical hands-on experience with Tableau, but there are experts in my company, and we've been using the solution for more than five years.  
We're consultants. If a customer wants to build a dashboard or run some custom reports using Tableau, we do the engineering part.

Performance-wise, Tableau is good but it could always be better. 

Since Tableau is on the cloud, we haven't faced any challenges around scalability. Since I'm not an engineer, I don't know if that scalability comes from the cloud infrastructure or Tableau itself. I can't rate it properly on that front.

The complexity of deploying Tableau generally depends on the size of the project. As far as I know, it takes two or three Tableau engineers for the bigger projects where we're using utilizing them to build a database. 

To clarify, I'm talking about the engineers building the custom solutions for our clients, not consuming them. To construct the Tableau reports or the database we use to generate the reports, we need two or three Tableau engineers and around the same number of database engineers to generate the data or write the scripts required for generating the reports.

I would rate Tableau seven out of 10. Other tools are more competitively priced, but I wouldn't give it a low rating because Tableau still provides the functionality our clients need. I would recommend it.

I'm a computer science professor and I teach analytics. We use Tableau to teach students how to develop visualizations of data sets.

I like Tableau's heat maps and the storyboard. You can create data stories and tons of visuals with it, and it goes together really well. Tableau lets you manipulate the data in various ways. But since we are teaching, we have to accommodate the needs of the students. Often, we have to go back to basic stuff like Excel because that is what the students will be working with at whatever jobs they get. So we try to use the type of tools that their workplace will offer. We know Excel is widely used and Tableau is not.

I've been working with Tableau for about half a year or so.

It's an individual solution so it works on as many desktops as you can download it to.

We were using Azure, but we're trying to get away from that because Microsoft is very expensive. We're trying to keep our expenses down while trying to find some decent products. 

Setting up Tableau is straightforward. You just can download it and set it up on your system in five minutes.

The price of Tableau is too high.

I rate Tableau eight out of 10.

It's a very good, flexible product, and it's easy to learn.

It's a new technology, so it's easy to get somebody up and running.

Scalability for large amounts of data needs improvement, as well as its performance.

From a scheduling perspective, if there is a sync up of the desktop dashboard into the server that we can publish as a web version, in an accessible way, that publishing scales and keeps on executing for hours. This can go on for eight to nine hours, but you have no indicator, you don't even see that it is processing. For example, there is no spinning wheel and all I see is a black screen.

The interface can be improved, in part because there is no indication that something is running or that it's processing. I would like to have some kind of indication that there is something processing on the interface.

Technical support could be faster or if they have any limitations of the product, they should openly communicate it. They could also just tell you that this product is intended for small volumes of data and may even suggest another solution.

We have been using the latest version of Tableau for several years.

As far as using low volumes of data, it is stable. If the data is too large then it becomes a problem.

From a data perspective, the problem with scalability is after a point in time, the data becomes very large. For example, there is a way to sync the data and bring it to the desktop, and if the data is going to be seven GB or more, that is a huge amount of data and creates a problem with Tableau.

Based on our customers, we have different licenses. We have approximately 15 different customers.

Technical support is fine, but it could be better. When we reached out with the large amounts of data, we were not provided with the correct solution.

We started with Tableau.

The initial setup was straightforward. There were no issues.

It's a very simple installation, it doesn't take a lot of time to deploy.

We did not use a consultant, we implemented ourselves.

We have a single person team for installation and maintenance.

We plan to continue using this solution and I can recommend it.

It's a good product but large volume data is an issue. Maybe people will have to work around it to make it smaller. It requires splitting up the data into smaller data files or we need to find another way from Tableau itself. They may have another scalable product, that can be used for large amounts of data.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

As a BI system integrator. we design performance solutions for different industries. We do use different tools in our solutions, and Tableau software is one of the our partners. One of the solutions we developed for a telecom client was a performance management tool. The solution used reporting dashboards based on network performance KPIs.

Using Tableau, it has made the reporting stage simple and enabled us to focus mainly on the ETL part.

The most important feature is the tool is very easy to use. This makes it simple to introduce it to CxOs. After a rapid demo, they are usual impressed by the results shown, because it has such a rare simplicity. 

• Needs more ETL capabilities, to be able to address the end-to-end BI need. 
• The ability to use it on MAC machines. As far as I know, this is not possible.