Tableau Reviews

We use Tableau in my company because we are trying to add another revenue line because we use Quantrix modeler, which is a multi-internal spreadsheet to build our financial models. We had intended to deploy another step of our value chain for our customers, because it is simpler to view the data via Tableau instead of reading across tabs. It's an applet form that can improve the decision-making process.

The most valuable feature is the drag and drop, then the simplicity to build dashboards which allows us to provide more usable data to our customers. In this version of Tableau (the latest version), the most valuable feature is Tableau Prep, which is a useful integration because I can prepare data in simple ways without errors.

I would like them to include the Italian language, even if it's not a problem for me to use English, because the Quantrix modeler is only in English. I can also see there is Portuguese, Japanese, and Chinese, so why not Italian?

It is super stable.

It has a very high scalability.

I have not needed to use technical support.

The initial setup was very simple.

I did the implementation for my company.

The price is good. The price could be higher for the quality of software, so they revised the pricing in this version, and I agree with the price for top version. The top version costs about $70 per month, and the price is cheap for the quality.

I did try another platform, MicroStrategy. I spent one year and several webinars on both companies, Tableau and MicroStrategy. I decided to invest in Tableau because of its simplicity; it's more simple to understand and less complicated than MicroStrategy. With Tableau's infrastructure to build a dashboard, I found the perfect instrument.

I also had interest in QlikView, but it did not fit my requirements.

I am very satisfied with it. I would recommend it.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Customer care quality
• The learning instruments provided via webinars and YouTube videos to improve my skills as fast as possible. 

I have been using Tableau since 2006; 3.5 years as an employee of Tableau Software and 7 years as a trainer/consultant. The more robust features include improved geo-encoding. Shape content is a big winner, as is cluster analysis. Cross-DB joins are helpful, as well. A huge improvement is the ability to render DV to any device from phone to PC.

As a training organization, the subject of improving organization functions is somewhat opaque. The overall view is that we see software as a service as the big win for any client. Note well: To truly realize organizational change, top management must embrace the use of Tableau.

• 100% in the cloud.
• Reduce the price once in the cloud.
• Go back to emphasizing simplicity.

I have used it for 10 years.

We have not encountered any deployment issues; still fast and easy overall.

We have not encountered any stability issues. The QC process seems to improve with each major release.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

On a scale of 1 to 10, customer service is an 8. It is helpful to hear a tel call from support but not without advance notice. Also, some of the new support folks are not up to speed with more challenging subjects.

There are no 10s in real life; technical support is 8.5.

Initial setup was not complex at all.

Generally, assessing ROI is a very open-ended question. Real ROI if that significant will never be revealed. Day-to-day savings are in time savings, which are viable, to say the least.

We do studies for firms as part of our services. QLTek is still viable but more and more we are hearing about Power BI. Carolina Health Systems just adopted Power BI to replace Tableau due to server costs.

We find that there is a new type of Tableau user emerging. These new users do not abide by the tenets of data visualization by thought leaders like Stephen Few. Hence, we created a blog for an open discussion comparing the work of the artist Jackson Pollock with this new generation. That blog is accessible below.

http://www.viainsights.com/Blo...

Note well: VIA Insights has no formal relationship with Tableau; we are completely independent.

There are so many smart features baked into this product, it's hard to even rank them. I think what makes Tableau stand out over other software I've used is that it doesn't start with a visualization, then pump numbers into it: It starts with numbers, and then represents them as shapes on a canvas. The result is more akin to an artist painting on a canvas using numbers as the brushes and colors. As a result, it is the flexibility of the mark types, and how they interact with data types, that make this product stand out. Someone who wants to create a visualization need only imagine the intended output, then use the numbers to create the marks in that output.

A non-trivial example is that a number can be considered continuous or discrete, depending on the context. In some cases, you need to use the same number both ways in the same visualization (histogram, anyone?). The flexibility to specify how a number is interpreted in terms of how an axis/mark will be generated is visualization at a more fundamental level. It is a completely different experience than pointing Excel at a highly manipulated table to generate an inflexibly structured chart type.

The use case has been different from one organization to another. In most cases, the initial buy-in and value-add is at the analyst level. The freedom to calculate, then derive, then iterate - that never-ending cycle every analyst out there knows well - to do that, do it quickly, and in a way that is remarkably beautiful, is every analyst's wet dream. Even if an analyst never shares visualizations they create during the course of a project, the tool makes them better and faster at deriving insights of their own by virtue of everything data visualization is meant to do for humans - improve understanding.

For organizations that have the capital to take it further, beginning to push out the interactivity, reports, and resulting insights up the ladders, or out the branches of the organization, with buy-in to the more-expensive server options - well, those organizations wield a much greater force. The ability for decision makers whose decisions affect many lives, higher in an organization, or the net effect of decision makers who make thousands of small decisions every day - Tableau, used well, makes it easier to make higher quality decisions faster. The same can be said of any technology used well, to be fair, but Tableau’s beauty and speed to insight is unmatched.

In my case, I have also used Tableau as a report prototyping platform. Designing and implementing is so fast in Tableau, when working with business stakeholders who may not know the specifics of what they want, and will ultimately be using whatever reporting platform their corporate standard is on - Tableau is great for iterating through version after version, change after change, until a report is built that is exactly what the business needs. Then, specific requirements can be written for a report builder using that corporate technology - which is invariably slower to iterate on. By moving the prototyping and proof of concept to Tableau, the development hours and agile lifecycle can be decimated.

Connectivity seems to be a sticky point, but it's also a hard nut to crack at the level that I would love to see. Tableau is fast, razor sharp on the whole - WHEN you use an extract. The problem is querying the data to fill the extract is only as fast as the source system. The result is that when you start working with large volumes of data, you often must start finding creative ways to improve the performance of your query. Here's where it gets tricky. I almost exclusively use SQL Server as a source. When I want to create custom data for an analysis (or some ongoing report with complexity), I have the latitude to write custom SQL. The problem is that in order for Tableau to retrieve metadata, the query sent to the server arrives as a subquery like:

SELECT * from ([your custom SQL here]) x

Because of this, I can't use a host of very useful T-SQL techniques that improve query performance or clarity. No CTEs, no temp tables, etc. In some organizations, the argument is that if you want that kind of complexity, wrap it up in a stored procedure and call the procedure (which, yes, you can call sprocs in Tableau), but that comes with its own disadvantages, which I won't get into too much here. But that is not to mention not all report writers or analysts have the privileges to create or alter sprocs on a server within their organization.

In any case, depending on how much control you have over your database as a Tableau user, as well as the nature of the data you are pulling, you may find yourself having to be very creative just to get data TO tableau to create larger extracts.

I started using Tableau in version 7, around 2012.

Desktop deployment is a cinch. Server, I had no involvement with setting up.

The user community is extremely vibrant and engaged, especially for how (relatively) young the product is, so I have only had two occasions to call support. In both cases, they were resoundingly helpful and responsive.

Back in 2012, we evaluated it against QlikView and MicroStrategy. MicroStrategy was more complex than our organization needed, and Tableau won out on ease of use and feature set, but I don't really remember the grittier details.

Initial setup was simple and fast for both Desktop and Server, but, as I mentioned, I was not involved in Server setup.

In 2012, we used an in-house team. I was not deeply involved at the time, so I don't have much implementation advice. For a larger organization, Tableau has created a consulting arm specifically for implementation, and having read a few of the white papers put out by them, I would highly recommend using them for a large implementation.

ROI can only be attained by use, so the ROI will be a function of adoption, not features of the product. Make sure you have the culture and an execution strategy to get people engaged and using it. Compared to other BI software, it's very easy to use, but not everyone will start using it just because there is a new icon on their desktop. Figure out adoption. Focus on it.

If people are using it, the ROI will be there, but if you spend 6-7 figures on an enterprise feature set and nobody uses it, it will have been wasted.

For the prototyping situation described earlier - one complex dashboard built from scratch then implemented in SSRS - the saved development time alone paid for the Desktop license.

This is a visualization software. Make sure you are looking at total cost of ownership in the context of other BI infrastructure that is still needed to get good ROI. Management of data at an enterprise level is more than just visualization, and if all of those things are in place, this product shines. If you have dirty data, slow resources, governance problems, etc., this software is not designed to solve those problems, and those problems will stunt the usefulness you get out of Tableau.

Actions, Story Dashboard, Parameters, maps

Self service tool and ease of implementation

Dashboard Version Control, Report Bursting, More capabilities on maps.

I'm currently using Tableau Desktop and Server 8.2. I've been using Tableau for 7 years.

No issues with deployment.

Sometimes have issues with stability which are dependent on network bandwidth, latency and user logon from multiple browsers

No issues with scalability.

3.5 (1-5 5 Being highest)

3.5 (1-5 5 Being highest)

Business Objects. I switched to Tableau because of self service capabilities and quick turnaround on dashboard development.

In house (I installed and configured server set up)

4 (1-5 5 being highest) Financials can’t be disclosed.

$60K

Best Visualization and analytics tool

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. 

We have Tableau installed in a massive environment. The Tableau sector is on a seven-cluster node, including one with two nodes for high availability. In our initial setup, Tableau was deployed across the entire infrastructure, so that's more than a hundred sites and around 30,000 active users, and each site has several projects, too. We have around 11,000 workbooks in total.

The maintenance of the entire infrastructure is done on-premises, including user management, authentication, authorization, permissions, and publication. We are constantly doing these tasks, including the SSL certificate renewals. 

Tableau is an advanced specialized tool. One of the best features I've seen is the lack of an intermediate semantic layer. I think that's an advantage compared to any other tool like BusinessObjects or Power BI, which are Tableau's biggest competitors. All of these have semantic layering, so the learning curve is high. Users have to understand the data model and the relationships, but Tableau has no data model, so you only need to know the relationships of the direct inquiry to build a report. 

I've been using Tableau for about six or seven years.

Tableau is stable, and I believe stability is essential. Our infrastructure has been set up right. The last two updates have had very few bugs, so stability-wise, it is excellent. However, performance is something we need to investigate further. It's hard to say whether performance problems are on the Tableau side or an issue with the infrastructure or the data sources. If there is a performance issue, we can't identify precisely where the problem is. 

The scalability is good. We already have some help from professional services, and we've conducted an analysis showing that the number of users will be increasing every year.

Tableau support could be improved.

I've worked with SAP BusinessObjects. Tableau is a visualization tool built into the infrastructure for doing analysis. That's Tableau's focus. BusinessObjects is for doing analysis of some data and then sharing it on the server. 

BusinessObjects is an enterprise tool that needs an extensive infrastructure. It requires a proper IT team to configure the semantic layer and the universal support and then build the report. And the most significant advantage enterprise tools have is pixel-perfect reporting. You can create a pixel-perfect report and share it as a PDF or Excel file with the same format. Tableau is more or less a self-service analytics tool, so we do not have those kinds of features. There are a good amount of differences between these two.

Setting up Tableau is straightforward, and I don't think it took long. It took maybe a day or two for the installation and migration and all that. However, the planning took some time because we worked with professional services. Planning took maybe 40 hours. Tableau requires a good deal of maintenance. We have a team of about five or six people for the administration.

We had professional services to help us.

SAP and Tableau have different pricing models. Their code-based license is around $13 to $15 per year. I don't think Tableau has a code-based licensing model at all, so those enterprise tools are on the higher side.But on the other hand, Power BI is on the cheaper side compared to Tableau. Power BI is much more affordable and also good.

I rate Tableau eight out of 10. 

SAP BW , TABLEAU Server an TABLEAU desktop, the Info from SAP were downloaded using SAP Data services and ABAPin a very large Steel Makin company in Latin America

Better an accuracy info every morning for decision takers regarding sales production and Customers Financial situation 

They were considered the gold standard for dashboard development. However, many people also have SAP.

The initial setup is very easy.

It's very easy to use and users don't need any IT support to access it as the information is right there. 

There were a lot of dashboards everywhere in the organization, however, when the company wanted to get the operational databases they were not connected.

The solution needs to improve its integration capabilities.

The performance and security could be better.

Many people saw Tableau as a silver bullet and it isn't. It's good for small things, however, not for an institutional way of doing things.

I'd like to see better integration with SAP.

I'd like an integrated ETL or some sort of data preparation capabilities. 

We've used the solution since 2013.

The solution is stable.

In the past, you couldn't do a full query. You could do the right query or the left query but not the full query. They fixed that n 2016. 

Also, there was another problem in that their selling approach was very aggressive and they were selling to sales directors. However, the problem is that after that you need the Tableau server. You need the deployment of the Tableau server and you have your dashboard. You needed IT buy-in. In order that them to be able to be seen in all the organizations, or even outside your organization, you need to get the Tableau server. With that in mind, companies must have IT people or training in the Tableau server, and then the dashboard is just developed in the desktop so you can upload them to the server. With all of that comes a lot of issues around security, modelization, and performance theses issues were not approached or considered in any by the users 

Scalable in the sense of a very good performance in te Tableau Server , nevertheless the info must be prepared or downloaded in a very well defined DataWarehouse

We had a lot of trouble with Tableau at the beginning. There were issues that nobody had dealt with in the past.

There was an issue that was open for about two months. They couldn't reach a resolution. We started the Tableau server in an English version server, however, it was decided to install the Spanish version instead. We defined success criteria for our developments, our systems. In the analysis and the scope of work, we decided that every Tableau dashboard or whatever was going to have an acceptable loading time of six to a maximum of eight seconds. The problem was that it took 30 to 60 seconds. Technicians from Tableau, from Brazil, from the USA, came and looked at it. In the end, it was the Spanish version that was causing performance issues, and therefore we had to install the English version again.

They had the Portuguese, French, or Spanish versions behind in terms of updating all their software. That was the problem. There was a bug in the Spanish version that in the  English version didn't exist.

Positive

I'm also familiar with Power BI, SAP, and QlikView as well as Snowflake. 

The initial setup is easy. You can install it on your computer and you can start to do a lot of dashboards. They have a gateway for many databases and you can get to the information in a very easy way. 

The thing is if you don't provide it with a very good ETL design you have the problem that all the fields are going to be dashboards. That's pretty common. Many organizations have a kind of operational database. With specialized databases. It's updated daily. The information is validated and confirmed and authorized. Whatever you do with Tableau is your problem. They install Tableau in that new server and the users go to that information. 

They make a copy of the transactional databases. They put it there and the users start to work. It's very easy.

In terms of deployment, for the desktop, you can have a visualization of information and you can get copies of the data on your personal computer. That can happen in minutes. It takes minutes or maybe half an hour to get going.

The problem is that you have to have some training. The training is going to take one week or so. In another week or two weeks, although you are not an expert yet, you start to understand Tableau. You don't have to be technical. If you understand Excel well, you will find Tableau pretty straightforward. 

You only need one or maybe two people to deploy the solution. You need a technician mostly for security.

The vendor team were sales especialist, not consultants 

We evaluated in 2013 QLICKVIEW . 

We're consultants. 

We're using the most recent version of the product. What we do is download the on-premises for testing in order to see the new capabilities.

It's a very mature tool with a lot of enhancements in the last two or three years. Our advice is that, if you are going to use it as an end-user, it's a very beautiful tool. If you are going to use it in an institutional way, you have to take good care of your ETLs and you have to design a very good data warehouse. That's what they don't do. That's what many, many, many organizations don't do. I don't know if that's the case with Snowflake or Microsoft Power BI.

You must take care of your warehouse information if you are going to have a very good design, granularity, and time framing after three months to one year of information.

The dashboards and the ETLs must do more work than Tableau. If not, you're going to crash. One of the problems that we had was due to the fact that Tableau said that you could reach the SAP information and that was not true. You need a third-party developer. That's an additional cost and additional training. However, with a solution like QlikView, they have a very beautiful integration with SAP.

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

We have a lot of use cases. We use it for real-time finance dashboard, real-time operations dashboard, and marketing insights.

Self-service is most valuable. Users can pick up quickly and do the resolution. There are a lot of out-of-the-box features, and it satisfies most of the needs. If users are properly trained, they can deal with any situation.

The Tableau community is really good. If we have an issue, it is already answered in the community.

We need big servers to perform the operations that we are doing. They should probably relook at its architecture. 

There are limitations to the data source that we are building. We can put only 32 tables in a data source, which means we have to transfer some of the workload to a database.

I have been using this solution for eight years.

Scalability depends on us. It depends on how we are configuring it based on the users' needs and experience. It has nothing to do with Tableau.

We have about 70 active users at any time of the day. Even Tableau was surprised to see that level of active users.

They're good. We have got enterprise support or premium support, so they respond quickly.

It is easy to set up. It is also easy to manage. Ours is a huge implementation, and we have five people for maintaining this solution. They take care of user provisioning, dashboard creation, and other admin work.

It is more expensive than other solutions.

I would recommend it depending on the use case. If you have money to spend and want something done quickly, then definitely go for Tableau.

I would rate it a nine out of 10.