We performed a comparison between SAS Visual Analytics and Tableau based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Data Visualization solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
"What I really love about the software is that I have never struggled in implementing it for complex business requirements. It is good for highly sophisticated and specialized statistics in the areas that some people tend to call artificial intelligence. It is used for everything that involves visual presentation and analysis of highly sophisticated statistics for forecasting and other purposes."
"Data handling is one of the best features of SAS Visual Analytics."
"It's quite easy to learn and to progress with SAS from an end-user perspective."
"It provided the capability to visualize a bunch of data in an organized way."
"We've found the product to be stable and reliable."
"It integrates well with SAS, making it simple and quick for developers."
"Great for handling complex data models."
"It's a stable, reliable product."
"The ease of presenting findings is very helpful."
"The ability to create complex calculations."
"Its ease of use and ability to convert drag and drop gestures into queries."
"The solution has a lot of customization when comparing to Microsoft BI."
"It is easy to use, and it can handle a large amount of data."
"Business insights are shared across various departments."
"The solution makes for very productive and really informative decision making. It can lead the whole business and build a strategy across whole working departments."
"One of the most valuable features of Tableau is that it's a visual analytics solution, not just a dashboarding solution. Compared to Power BI, which is a dashboarding solution, there are no limitations with Tableau. For example, when you add a chart or a map to Power BI, it has a 3,000-point limitation. When you try to track your whole vehicle on the map, you only see the first 3,000 rows on the map, and Power BI doesn't tell you which part of the data is shown on the map. But Tableau doesn't have any limitations, which means that you can see five million data points on a map. It starts the project by creating the visuals that directly converts to SQLs. In that way, all the components have no limitations. When we compared Tableau to Power BI, we also found Tableau to be more fancy. Fancy means you can create more visual graphics and more visual dashboards. With Power BI, this isn't so—it's just some tables and some simple charts together. Tableau is more for business users who want to analyze data. Tableau can directly connect the analytics systems, like R or Titan, and get the results in screen, so it's a good solution for analytics scientists. It has some predefined capabilities to understand the data."
"I haven't come across any missing features."
"There are a few little things that are predefined and can be done out of the box immediately. There is no business intelligence application that is predefined, which is something some customers or prospects would love to have. Small and mid-sized companies would struggle with it because they prefer something standard that has been predefined by somebody else."
"The reason we haven't rolled it out across the board is due to the fact that the licensing is so expensive."
"The deployment isn't smooth. Deploying Visual Analytics on the cloud takes a lot of work, or you can use some providers that give you SAS as a service. For example, there is a provider called SaasNow. They host SAS Visual Analytics and the license. You can buy the license and deploy it there without the hassle of installation because deploying the software isn't easy."
"There is a need for coding when it comes to digital reporting which can be intimidating."
"There is room for improvement in anti-money laundering prevention and operation monitoring, as well as operation monitoring surveillance."
"The solution is a little weak at the front end."
"A bit more flexibility in the temperatization will be helpful."
"Other tools are more competitively priced."
"In the next release, there should be more information describing each chart because users have a difficult time telling them apart. They should also include the animations/videos, similar to Power BI."
"I think Tableau could be improved with cheaper or more flexible licensing, though this is a generic improvement and applies for any product. It would be better if they had more flexible payment and licensing plans so that they could suit small- and mid-sized organizations."
"The customization in the front end is a bit difficult."
"Whenever it comes to specialized visualization, Tableau is an absolute failure."
"What is happening, with so many tools coming up in the market, is that people have to continuously get educated in order to use some of the more advanced features."
"From a downside perspective, some of the more advanced modeling techniques are actually fairly difficult to do. In addition, I just fundamentally disagree with the way you have to implement them because you can get incorrect answers in some cases."
"I have used Power BI as well as Tableau. There are a couple of interesting features that I like in Power BI, but they are not present in Tableau. For example, in Power BI, if I am looking at country-wise population, I can type and ask for the country that has the maximum population, and it will automatically give an answer and address that query. This kind of feature is not there in Tableau. Similarly, in Power BI, for integrating with the latest ML algorithms, we have decision trees and primarily multiple machine learning algorithms. The decision tree essentially visualizes the patterns in the data. We don't have such a feature in Tableau. If Tableau can integrate with the machine learning algorithms and help us to do visualizations, it would be a wonderful combination. Most of the people are going for Tableau primarily for visualization purposes. However, in the data science industry, users want to do model building as well as tell a story. As of now, Tableau is fulfilling the requirements for visualization purposes. If they can bring it up to a level where I can use it for machine learning purposes as well as for visualization, it would be very helpful. Many people who want to do data science don't want to write a code. Tableau is anyway a drag and drop tool, and if they can provide those options as well, it will be a powerful combination."
SAS Visual Analytics is ranked 4th in Data Visualization with 13 reviews while Tableau is ranked 1st in Data Visualization with 102 reviews. SAS Visual Analytics is rated 8.4, while Tableau is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of SAS Visual Analytics writes "Easy to learn and use with good scalability potential". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Tableau writes "Lets me train new users quickly, easily, and intuitively". SAS Visual Analytics is most compared with Microsoft BI, Databricks, Qlik Sense, Dataiku Data Science Studio and Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio, whereas Tableau is most compared with Microsoft BI, Amazon QuickSight, SAP Analytics Cloud, MicroStrategy and Qlik Sense. See our SAS Visual Analytics vs. Tableau report.
See our list of best Data Visualization vendors.
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It totally depends on what SAS licensing are in place. Tableau provides integration with R as far as I know.
These products all do more or less the same things but often in a very different way. The differences that I am able to report are mainly:
-Look and feel and here Tableau is definitely superior.
-Usability, both on the user and developer side and here the products are not very far apart, I would say Tableau a little better.
-Managed data volumes and here SAS is unmatched (in Unicredit I have seen an installation that serves about 11000 users).
Tableau is a great tool for visual analytics but when it comes to statistical analysis, it has limited features. You can find basic descriptive statistics like mean, median, mode, SD, Skewness, Kurtosis, etc but for advanced statistical analysis, you can have machine learning models too along with advanced forecasting. If your work does not involve advanced statistical analysis then Tableau is a great tool for basic statistical analysis. In case you have further doubts, please feel free to ask.