Plotly vs Tableau comparison

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Plotly Logo
1,030 views|1,094 comparisons
Tableau Logo
17,947 views|15,259 comparisons
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Plotly and Tableau based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Reporting solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Plotly vs. Tableau Report (Updated: March 2024).
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
"The level of interactivity that the product provides is valuable to me.""When reviewing and interpreting data, I typically examine it in a tabular form to understand its structure. However, when explaining or presenting the findings to others, I often use visualization tools such as Plotly. These tools allow me to create visual representations of datasets.""It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten."

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"The solution deployment was straightforward.""The most valuable features are the visualizations, the way they show the combination charts.""The most valuable feature is that we can integrate with our own database, and it will displays the KPIs. This is highly required from the business side.""The platform's most important feature is predictive analysis.""The best part about Tableau is the visualization.""I really like the interactivity of the dashboards.""I have found Tableau easy to use and the features are superb.""From the data science point of view, we use it for model building purposes. For example, if we are using it for a bank and we want to understand how much loan the bank can provide, we can use visualization to show the educational qualification, salary, gender, and city of a customer, and by using this information, we can arrive at the loan amount that this person is eligible for. I can also use it to view all prospective customers, so essentially, this is going to help me in model building as well as in understanding and segmenting customers and doing forecasting and predictive analytics. We use model widgets, and we can create thousands of visualizations, such as motion charts and bubble charts. We can also create animated versions of the graphs and view the data from multiple dimensions. These are the features that we typically use and like."

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Cons
"I believe that the prices of the tool's paid services could be on the premium side, so the pricing model can be considered for improvement.""The tool needs to improve its pie charts. Regarding Plotly, I find the online documentation somewhat challenging to navigate, especially when dealing with many parameters. Searching through thousands of parameters can be a tedious and less straightforward process. While the documentation is available online and serves its purpose, I often encounter difficulties in finding the information.""The solution cannot be deployed on the website and shared with others through its own platform."

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"The pricing is a bit higher than the competition. They'll need to lower it to stay competitive.""They need to improve the bar chart position and width.""It should offer better features for customization.""The performance could be better.""Tableau is an end-to-end analytics platform, and it is doing a pretty good job in terms of connecting to the data and analyzing it. It can, however, do better in terms of data management and the ETL features, which are not on the advanced analytics or machine learning side. Tableau Prep is where users would want to see more advancements. They can improve Tableau Prep, which is an analytic platform tool for data cleansing. People who work with data spend most of their time curating the data. Cleaning up the data and getting it ready for analysis is what takes the most time. If Tableau can invest more time in improving the Tableau Prep platform, it would be great. Previously, Tableau didn't have the functionality for writing to a database. So, you couldn't really alter the database tables and write to your database, but they fixed that in one of the very recent releases. However, it isn't really advanced and should be improved.""Maybe the price could be a bit cheaper, especially if you're a personal developer that uses Tableau just to explore smaller data sets and you're not a company or something like that.""People are migrating to Microsoft BI due to the speed, which is quite slow to load, and the lack of visualization options.""They need to improve the icons and the filters, because they look too old, resembling Excel from 1997."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "I only use the free tier of the product."
  • "It is an open-source tool. My company hasn't explored Plotly's premium services yet, but I believe the prices could be on the premium side."
  • More Plotly 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
    Top Answer:It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten.
    Top Answer:It is an open-source tool. My company hasn't explored Plotly's premium services yet, but I believe the prices are on the premium side. I rate the product price as five or six on a scale of one to ten… more »
    Top Answer:I believe that the price of the tool's paid services is on the premium side, so the pricing model can be considered for improvement.
    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
    15th
    out of 50 in Reporting
    Views
    1,030
    Comparisons
    1,094
    Reviews
    3
    Average Words per Review
    614
    Rating
    7.7
    2nd
    out of 50 in Reporting
    Views
    17,947
    Comparisons
    15,259
    Reviews
    19
    Average Words per Review
    620
    Rating
    8.6
    Comparisons
    Microsoft  Power BI logo
    Compared 44% of the time.
    TIBCO Spotfire logo
    Compared 9% of the time.
    Qlik Sense logo
    Compared 4% of the time.
    RStudio Connect logo
    Compared 3% of the time.
    QlikView logo
    Compared 3% of the time.
    Microsoft  Power BI logo
    Compared 17% of the time.
    Amazon QuickSight logo
    Compared 11% of the time.
    Domo logo
    Compared 8% of the time.
    SAS Visual Analytics logo
    Compared 4% of the time.
    SAP Analytics Cloud logo
    Compared 4% of the time.
    Also Known As
    Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online
    Learn More
    Overview

    Plotly creates leading open source tools for composing, editing, and sharing interactive data visualization via the Web.

    Our collaboration servers (available in cloud or on premises) allow data scientists to showcase their work, make graphs without coding, and collaborate with business analysts, designers, executives, and 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
    Google, Goji, VIT, Smpl Bio, U.S. Air Force, C12 Energy, New York University
    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
    Financial Services Firm20%
    Manufacturing Company12%
    Government5%
    University5%
    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
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business14%
    Midsize Enterprise7%
    Large Enterprise79%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business32%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise50%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business14%
    Midsize Enterprise39%
    Large Enterprise47%
    Buyer's Guide
    Plotly vs. Tableau
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Plotly vs. Tableau and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Plotly is ranked 15th in Reporting with 3 reviews while Tableau is ranked 2nd in Reporting with 290 reviews. Plotly is rated 7.6, while Tableau is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Plotly writes "An interactive and easy-to-use solution that can be used to create dashboards". 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". Plotly is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, TIBCO Spotfire, Qlik Sense, RStudio Connect and QlikView, whereas Tableau is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Amazon QuickSight, Domo, SAS Visual Analytics and SAP Analytics Cloud. See our Plotly vs. Tableau report.

    See our list of best Reporting vendors.

    We monitor all Reporting 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.