IBM Watson Explorer vs Tableau comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between IBM Watson Explorer and Tableau based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Data Mining solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed IBM Watson Explorer vs. Tableau Report (Updated: March 2020).
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"I have found the auto-generated document very useful as well as the main keywords that are highlighted, which are used for the search functionality within IBM Watson Explorer.""The ability to easily pull together lots of different pieces of information and drill down in a smarter way than has been possible with other analytics tools is key. Watson is all based on a set of AI and deep learning, machine-learning capabilities, and it is looking behind the scenes at some relationships that you likely would not have spotted on your own. It's pulling things together, categorizing some things, that are not something that you might have seen on your own.""Ease of use is pretty good as is the standardization of not actually having to have my own natural learning algorithms, just to use the Watson APIs.""We take natural language that was happening in our repositories and our application and then feed it to the Watson APIs. We receive JSON payloads as an API response to get cognitive feedback from the repository data.""For me, as a user, the most valuable feature is the ability to ingest and then retrieve information from a range of separate sources; the ability to dissect questions in context and actually answer them.""The valuable feature of Watson Explorer for us is data entities, and to see the hidden insights from within unstructured data."

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"Visualization attributes: Marks – Color, Size, Label, etc.. Easily Accessible and Intuitive.""The best thing I like about Tableau is that you don't have to go for creating; it is calculated free.""The most valuable feature is the ease of use.""The solution is configurable and flexible. We can customize the dashboards and configure the interface the way that we want. The data can be manipulated and arranged in different ways, such as columns.""It most valuable feature is its ease of developing visualizations, not just charts and graphs.""The solution has great features which nobody can beat, you can do a lot of customizations, such as use different dimensions and colorize them. Additionally, you can use the numeric values for the customization, which is an exceptional feature.""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.""I have found the solution easy to use and the interface is very good."

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Cons
"It needs better language support, to include some other languages. Also, they should improve the user interface.""Much of IBM operates this way, where they have sets of tools that are in the middleware space, and it becomes the customer's responsibility or the business partner's responsibility to develop full solutions that take advantage of that middleware. I think IBM's finding itself in that spot with Watson-related technologies as well, where the capabilities to do really interesting and useful things for customers is there, but somebody still has to build it. Is that going to be the customer? Are they going to be willing to take on that responsibility themselves""The solution is expensive.""Small businesses will probably have a little harder time getting into it, just because of the amount of resources that they have available, both financial and time, but it really is a solution that should work for them.""It is a little bit tricky to get used to the workflow of knowing how to train Watson, what can be provided, what can't be, how to provide it, how to import, export, and what it means every time you have to add a new dictionary""More cognitive feedback would be good. The natural language analysis is great, the sentiment analyzers are great. But I would just like to see more... innovation done with the Watson platform.""I would say, give some kind of a community edition, a free edition. A lot of companies do, even Amazon gives you some kind of trial and error opportunities. If they could provide something like that, it would be good.""Stability is actually one of the areas that could use improvement. Setting it up is always tough. Setting Explorer requires experts, but also the underlying platform is not that stable. So it really needs a good expert to keep it running."

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"The product's features for cloud integration need improvement.""I take a long time to process the hundreds of thousands or millions of records that must be processed every day.""When you create new fields in Tableau and you enter the formulas, there is a new small window that is there in the interface. You can enter the calculated fields, it could be more user-friendly. At this time it is limited and hard to understand at the beginning. The fields should be easier to use, such as in Microsoft Excel. You can have a difficult time understanding what to do in the fields, you end up doing trial and error to figure it out.""When it comes to visualizations, Tableau has a limitation as compared to Power BI. It has a limited set of visualizations. Power BI has the entire marketplace, so you can connect and import many visualizations and use them, whereas Tableau has only 10 or 15 visualizations. There should be more visualizations, and there should also be data integration with more cloud providers.""Its documentation can be improved so that a user can get a good hands-on experience. Tableau is well documented, and on their website, there are a lot of tutorials that are available for free. I started my learning process through those tutorials, but there are certain loopholes in those tutorials, which only got filled through a couple of good YouTube channels that talk about Tableau. YouTube helped me a lot. So, the documentation could be better, I understand that it is evolving day by day, and with more usage, there would be more such documentation.""The user experience for less savvy or non-technical people (from my experience).""Other tools are more competitively priced.""In the next release, I would like to be able to have the option to see more raw data that I'm converting on the dashboard."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "For big business, Tableau could be expensive as having a lot of Tableau server users (entering with a browser to reports) could be a bit expensive."
  • "Best advice on pricing is to anticipate the desire for more licenses once the results of this product are acknowledged in other parts of your company."
  • "Paying for users you never setup or buying expensive desktop licenses for users who can solve their users with web editing on the server are the two biggest expenses."
  • "Buy 50 at a time. Project your use base every three months, and project your requirements forward."
  • "Tableau can be costly (but this can be indefinable, such as user experience vs. cheaper etc.)"
  • "I wish there was more of a subscription model with the pricing when it comes to Tableau, so you can get all the latest version upgrades/features if you pay monthly/annually."
  • "The cost is high."
  • "Deployment of dashboards to viewers and unit supervisors can be prohibitively expensive."
  • More Tableau Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Anonymous User
    After a recent presentation, several attendees asked me about the applications of Visual Insights and Tableau. Many companies are investing in both tools and are trying to figure out the right tool for specific applications Tableau has found its sweet-spot as an agile discovery tool that analysts use to create and share insights. It is also the tool of choice for rapid prototyping of dashboards. Tableau is very flexible with its data import. Tableau's data blending capability is very intuitive. This capability is useful when you have data spread across several different sources that has not gone through ETL processes. This is a problem analysts deal with routinely. They are unable to wait for the data warehouse team to develop ETL processes to provide the physical models they need to build an analysis. The Tableau interface is Excel-like and has a low barrier to entry for analysts that are used to working in Excel. Building a dashboard by mashing up visualizations in a Tableau worksheet is extremely simple. Users are able to build good presentation-quality dashboards in a very short amount time. Tableau's annotations capabilities and its time and geographical intelligence are key differentiators. Tableau has overcome limitations in data sharing with the introduction of a Data Server in Tableau 7.0. The Data server allows Data sources and extracts to be shared securely and opens up interesting new possibilities. If your application can take advantage of the above… Read more →
    Questions from the Community
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    Top Answer:It depends on the Data architecture and the complexity of your requirement Some great tools in the market are Qlik Sense, Power BI, OBIEE, Tableau, etc. I have recently started using Cognos… more »
    Top Answer:Both tools have their positives and negatives. First, I should mention that I am relatively new to Tableau. I have been working on and off Tableau for about a year, but getting to work on it… more »
    Top Answer:Tableau is easy to set up and maintain. In about a day it is possible for the entire platform to be deployed for use. This relatively short amount of time can make all the difference for companies… more »
    Ranking
    8th
    out of 18 in Data Mining
    Views
    117
    Comparisons
    88
    Reviews
    0
    Average Words per Review
    0
    Rating
    N/A
    Views
    26,921
    Comparisons
    23,202
    Reviews
    19
    Average Words per Review
    620
    Rating
    8.6
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    IBM WEX
    Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online
    Learn More
    Overview

    IBM Watson Explorer is a cognitive exploration and content analysis platform that lets you listen to your data for advice. Explore and analyze structured, unstructured, internal, external and public content to uncover trends and patterns that improve decision-making, customer service and ROI. Leverage built-in cognitive capabilities powered by machine learning models, natural language processing and next-generation APIs to unlock hidden value in all your data. Gain a secure 360-degree view of customers, in context, to deliver better experiences for your clients.

    Tableau is a tool for data visualization and business intelligence that allows businesses to report insights through easy-to-use, customizable visualizations and dashboards. Tableau makes it exceedingly simple for its customers to organize, manage, visualize, and comprehend data. It enables users to dig deep into the data so that they can see patterns and gain meaningful insights. 

    Make data-driven decisions with confidence thanks to Tableau’s assistance in providing faster answers to queries, solving harder problems more easily, and offering new insights more frequently. Tableau integrates directly to hundreds of data sources, both in the cloud and on premises, making it simpler to begin research. People of various skill levels can quickly find actionable information using Tableau’s natural language queries, interactive dashboards, and drag-and-drop capabilities. By quickly creating strong calculations, adding trend lines to examine statistical summaries, or clustering data to identify relationships, users can ask more in-depth inquiries.

    Tableau has many valuable key features:

    • Tableau dashboards provide a complete view of your data through visualizations, visual objects, text, and more.
    • Tableau provides convenient, real-time options to collaborate with other users and instantly share data in the form of visualizations, sheets, and dashboards. 
    • Tableau ensures connectivity to both live data sources and data extraction from external data sources as in-memory data. This gives users the flexibility to use data from more than one source without any restrictions. 
    • Tableau gives many data source option, ranging from spreadsheets, big data, on-premise files, relational databases, non-relational databases, data warehouses, and big data, to on-cloud data. 
    • Tableau has a lot of pre-installed information on maps, such as cities, postal codes, and administrative boundaries. 
    • Tableau has a foolproof security system based on authentication and permission systems for data connections and user access. Tableau also gives you the freedom to integrate with other security protocols.

    Tableau stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Some of these include its fast data access, easy creation of visualizations, and its stability. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

    Romil S., Deputy General Manager of IT at Nayara Energy, notes, "Its visualizations are good, and its features make the development process a little less time-consuming. It has an in-memory extract feature that allows us to extract data and keep it on the server, and then our users can use it quickly.

    Ariful M., Consulting Practice Partner of Data, Analytics & AI at FH, writes, “Tableau is very flexible and easy to learn. It has drag-and-drop function analytics, and its design is very good.

    Sample Customers
    RIMAC, Westpac New Zealand, Toyota Financial Services, Swiss Re, Akershus University Hospital, Korean Air Lines, Mizuho Bank, Honda
    Accenture, Adobe, Amazon.com, Bank of America, Charles Schwab Corp, Citigroup, Coca-Cola Company, Cornell University, Dell, Deloitte, Duke University, eBay, Exxon Mobil, Fannie Mae, Ferrari, French Red Cross, Goldman Sachs, Google, Government of Canada, HP, Intel, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Macy's, Merck, The New York Times, PayPal, Pfizer, US Army, US Air Force, Skype, and Walmart.
    Top Industries
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company18%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Educational Organization9%
    Government9%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Computer Software Company12%
    University7%
    Healthcare Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization34%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Computer Software Company8%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise64%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise64%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business32%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise50%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business14%
    Midsize Enterprise39%
    Large Enterprise47%
    Buyer's Guide
    IBM Watson Explorer vs. Tableau
    March 2020
    Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Watson Explorer vs. Tableau and other solutions. Updated: March 2020.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    IBM Watson Explorer is ranked 8th in Data Mining while Tableau is ranked 2nd in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 290 reviews. IBM Watson Explorer is rated 8.4, while Tableau is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of IBM Watson Explorer writes "Ingests, retrieves information from a range of sources; enables dissecting questions in context and answering them". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Tableau writes "Provides fast data access with in-memory extracts, makes it easy to create visualizations, and saves time". IBM Watson Explorer is most compared with Salesforce Einstein Analytics, Microsoft Power BI and KNIME, whereas Tableau is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Amazon QuickSight, Domo, SAS Visual Analytics and SAP Analytics Cloud. See our IBM Watson Explorer vs. Tableau report.

    We monitor all Data Mining reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.