Tableau Reviews

We are majorly using it for our procurement business area. We have created almost 50 to 60 dashboards for the entire procurement cycle. We have used it for procure-to-pay, and we have also used it for our retail business. We have a lot of petrol bunks, and we get a lot of data from them regarding sales and other things. So, procure-to-pay and retail business are the main use cases.

We've been using its latest update. It is on-premise. All our solutions are on-prem because we are in the Oil and Gas sector, and data is very critical for us. We have not yet migrated anything to the cloud.

It is very easy to build charts and drag and drop the fields that are there. It automatically identifies the dimensions and measures and makes our life easier when we need to build any dashboard. It is pretty user-friendly.

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.

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.

Tableau has recently launched a paid version for the documentation. So, documentation has become a little bit challenging when it comes to Tableau development because we do not have any tool to export the data out of it. It is a license-based feature that you need to purchase to prepare documentation. So, on the documentation front, for preparing clear documentation for any dashboard, it would help if we get an embedded option, rather than buying a license for each user for the documentation. To document anything, if I have to connect to each workbook and see what has been written as a formula and then document in the Word document, it is pretty time-consuming.

We have the Microsoft stack, and we are currently evaluating Power BI because Tableau has a limitation of 50 columns for a drill-down report. If we want more than 50 columns, we have found a hack, but there is no ready-made option for doing it. So, we have to use another tool in case we need a drilled report with more than 50 columns. There are many instances where users need 80 or 90 columns for their analysis, and switching between two technologies becomes a challenge. It is not a cost-effective approach for us.

Their support should be improved. We are not happy with their support. Whenever we raised queries, we were pointed to a few blogs, and we didn't get a proper solution from them.

Their licensing should also be improved. They want us to purchase a Tableau Creator license for business users, whereas Power BI Desktop is free for business users. They should come up with a basic license with one or two connectors that our business users can use for preparing their visualizations. Tableau also charges us per user for users who want the data only through email.

Tableau has been in our organization for more than four years.

Its performance and stability are good. Because we are not on the cloud, and it is on our internal servers, it is performing well.

I have a team of three people who are Tableau developers, and they have been working with me. We have one Tableau senior developer who does the server administration, as well as major Tableau development. Two members are supporting him on small dashboard developments.

When we were given the first project, we had hired a consulting company called PWC. They had implemented Tableau for us for procure-to-pay. They had deployed one project manager, one Tableau developer, and one MSBI because the data is on SQL. After that, for our support, we hired one senior Tableau resource, and then we internally trained two people. They have been using Tableau and supporting us.

We were not happy with their support. We did not get many solutions. Whenever we raised queries, we were diverted to a few blogs here and there. 

Even for the production issue, they didn't give proper support to us. There was a lack of clarity about how to resolve the issue. They work in shifts. So, one person hands over the ticket to another person, and we again have to explain. We had also approached our sales representatives, but unfortunately, because of Tableau being acquired by Salesforce, the team had changed. We had lost all points of contact because of which it was a little chaotic to get support when we needed it the most. 

Now, the first step we take is to go and search on Google about the issue and also on Tableau blogs and forums. That's because whenever we first approach Tableau support, we anyways get pointed to those blogs. So, we first try to search on our own. If we are still struggling, only then we approach Tableau support.

The initial setup of Tableau was not much complicated for us because we had hired a partner for its implementation.

It was implemented almost four years ago, and it probably took 10 to 15 days because it also involved getting the server, configuring it, and then doing proper configuration of the rights, etc. It is on-prem. So, we had to take care of a lot of security factors, such as opening the ports, etc. The vendor had to develop and establish proper architecture based on our security policies, and that is the reason it took more time. For simpler infrastructure, the deployment would take less time.

In terms of maintenance, Tableau does require maintenance from our end. We need to ensure that the servers are basically up and running. Sometimes, the upgrades come, and they have to be done properly. We had one instance where we rebooted without stopping the Tableau services and our entire server got corrupted. Luckily, with support from Tableau, we found the solution, and we could get back our project. So, it requires monitoring and server administration in terms of closing the services, giving the user access, and ensuring that the database size is proper because they use PostgreSQL as a backend for Tableau. These things are required to be maintained and overseen, and the licenses also need to be monitored. So, it requires a lot of administration activity and server maintenance because we are not on the cloud.

A partner had implemented it for us. We didn't find its installation much of a hassle.

Tableau is a little cheaper as compared to Power BI and other technologies that we have used in the past. However, if the business users in our organization want to make presentations, Tableau has been asking us to purchase a Tableau Creator license, and $35 per month is expensive for business users.

Power BI is giving a free desktop version for business users to connect to any data source and build their own dashboards. That's why we have proposed to use Power BI for most of the business users in our organization. We wanted them to be able to create charts and presentations for the management, and we didn't want to spend $35 per month on a Tableau Creator license. We tried to give them a Tableau Explorer license. We had purchased 15 licenses, but the Tableau Explorer license had a limitation where it did not allow business users to connect to their own data source. So, they had to come to IT to connect to the data source, which didn't work well for us. That's why we told them to use Power BI Desktop. This is where Power BI wins over Tableau. 

In 2011, we had purchased perpetual licenses for Tableau, and at that time, they were selling its perpetual license at $1,500. We had purchased these licenses for our business users, and they were making a lot of visualizations for presentations, but about a year or two ago, Tableau stopped issuing that license. Tableau can come up with a basic license for connecting with Excel because most of the business users only connect to Excel for preparing their visualization. They can provide one or two connectors at a cheaper rate than the Creator license. It would help them in promoting it to more business users and increase users across the organization.

Most of our users are on the field, and because we are not on the cloud, one of the challenges with Tableau was about giving access to them. They didn't want to log in to Tableau Mobile, and they wanted the data in email. We have around 400 territory sales managers who want to see the data in email. When we have to publish that, Tableau charges us per user, even if they're not going to the dashboard to view it. For sending an email, they charge you per user. So, if I have to send an email to 400 users who don't even use dashboards, it becomes expensive. That's why we moved to MSBI, which is free for us. We have bought a perpetual core-based license, and we can send an email to unlimited users. We no longer use Tableau in this use case.

We are currently using two tools, and we are considering moving to Power BI. We are evaluating whether we want to move to the cloud or not. If we are moving to the cloud, we may completely move to Power BI in the future. If we move to the cloud, we mostly would move to Azure, and integrating Azure and Tableau doesn't make sense. We are also considering the pricing point.

First, I would advise evaluating the data stack or database that you have, and based on that, you should make the decision of going ahead with Tableau or another technology. If you are on Azure, going for Tableau doesn't make sense. If you are on AWS or Google cloud, they have their own visualizations. So, the integration becomes a little challenging. You also need to see whether connectors are readily available for your database stack. For example, Tableau has a connector for SAP HANA, but it doesn't have a connector for SAP ECC, which is the older version. My organization is still on ECC, so we had to buy another connector to pull the data into our SQL, which increased the total cost of ownership for the company. Therefore, you need to first understand your database architecture and the kind of data you have been using and then move to visualizations.

Second, while implementing Tableau, you should not keep developing dashboards after dashboards. That's because they would require maintenance as you grow. The maintenance cost increases as you grow. Therefore, you should first evaluate the scope and then go ahead and build dashboards. 

Third, there are many selling partners, and they loop you in with a minimum purchase, such as 5 Creator licenses, 15 Explorer licenses, and 100 user licenses for two to three years, which is binding. You should evaluate licensing options properly because when you are starting a journey, you don't want to spend so much at an initial stage. One Creator license, one or two Explorer licenses, and 20 to 30 user licenses are generally fine. You should negotiate on the number. Otherwise, your licenses are underutilized. This is where we could have saved money while purchasing Tableau. We are now juggling between two technologies for drill-down reports.

Fourth, if you want to send an email to your team on the field, you need to understand and ask about how many users would subscribe to emails. If most of the users are going to just subscribe to emails and not use Tableau as a dashboarding tool, it is a waste of money. In most organizations, senior management doesn't like to go to the mobile app. They want to get information through email, and if you are buying a license just to send an email, it is a waste of money for the organization. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. Two-point reduction is mainly because of the support quality, visualization limit, and lack of documentation capability.

It was for dashboards. The key use case was for creating visibility to performance metrics for the leadership team. It was the most recent version, and it was deployed on-prem. 

The key use case that we were going after very specifically created visibility to performance metrics for the leadership team. So, it allowed us to give that common view of performance metrics and drive business conversations based on the common shared set of facts. We were able to expose data and relationships that we otherwise couldn't do in our enterprise system silos. From that perspective, we were incredibly successful in really driving performance. When you combine that with some real championing in the business and with some leadership to push it down, the fact that it was Tableau wasn't as relevant as the fact that we had the championing pushing the process and pushing it down.

The number one thing was just the ease of getting something up quickly. The other thing that was good about it was that it was fairly fast for decent-sized data sets in terms of performance and run time.

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.

One of the key challenges is that you never know whether it is how your developers developed it or whether it was the tool. We did find that once we got into more complex models, the ability to keep objects that should tally the same way but didn't became more and more difficult. That was probably the big thing for me. I don't know enough about how the tool was developed to know whether that was because they didn't follow a recommended practice. That was probably the number one thing that I found frustrating with it.

When we started to try and get into some very granular data sets that had some complex relationships in them, the performance on it degraded pretty quickly. It did degrade to such an extent that we couldn't use it. We had to change what we were trying to do and manage its scope so that we could get what we wanted out of it or reduce the scope of what we needed out of it. It doesn't have a database behind it, per se. So, while doing some of the more complicated things that you might otherwise do on a database, we started hitting some pretty significant challenges.

I used it for about three years.

Tableau worked fairly well for straightforward data sets, but it struggled when we got into the more complicated data sets and larger data sets. 

We were able to deploy it fairly broadly without a whole bunch of work. From that perspective, it worked fine. I was deploying my stuff to about 200 users across Canada, and I don't think we saw a blip on the server when people logged in. It was fine. If we were to roll out some of the bigger applications broadly, like the ones that we were having performance challenges with, we probably would have crushed the box. We would have had to get more CPU. Most likely, it would have been a memory issue, but we never hit that inflection point.

There were about 200 users of the solution. It went all the way from the equivalent of a senior vice president and all the way down to the equivalent of a line manager. So, we had business unit leaders, vice presidents, and operational managers.

It was being used extensively for a specific use case. There were lots of other use cases that it could be used for, but there needs to be an appetite from leadership to go, drive, and commit resources to go do that.

I didn't have to deal with technical support. Mr. Google is pretty good on the topic.

We had previously used Cognos to do the exact same thing. The only reason why we replaced it was that the business decided to go towards Tableau. Otherwise, there really wasn't any real reason to replace it. It was probably a little bit easier and more interesting for people to learn and to develop applications in the program than in Cognos. The ramp-up time to get to reasonably proficient in Tableau plus the support through Mr. Google made it a lot easier for me to get resources and do development on Tableau as compared to Cognos.

The organization decided to move away from the old platform. So, basically, I was lost when they asked me to shift off so that they could shut it down. I personally prefer the previous platform. I understood it very well. I had used it for years, and it worked just fine. For the most part, the challenges that we had on the old platform were not resolved by Tableau, which just reinforced to me that it wasn't a tool problem. It was a people problem.

It was pretty straightforward. The big thing that confuses people in a project that involves Tableau is that Tableau is a very visible but small component of the overall solution. That's because 80% of the work is data. It is not Tableau. So, Tableau is actually a fairly small component over that overall solution. It took a few days to get it up and going. Almost 80% of the work is actually on the data side, which takes forever, but the actual Tableau component of it was pretty straightforward. It was not that difficult.

You can get a Tableau dashboard up on a weekend. It is not hard to get something up and running. It is pretty trivial. It isn't any more or less difficult than any other tool to get up and going. I've used a number of them, and they're all pretty easy to get up and going. Tableau was the first one out of the gate with this democratized data perspective, where they were going to do departmental BI and up to enterprise BI years ago. Now, they now charge a fairly hefty premium to leverage that product. It is not a cheap product.

In terms of maintenance, it can take as much or as little as you want because it just runs. So, technically, you don't have to have anybody to do very much. You just need a very skeleton crew to operate as is. The challenge that you run into with solutions like this is that you need to continue to refresh the information with new and different views because people want to know more, and they want to go deeper into it. It is not a function of the technology. It is a function of the use case. So, you tend to have lots of new requests for new reports and analysis, and that's where you tend to have more challenges.

We didn't get into analysis users who are able to sort of do a little bit more themselves. There were viewer licenses where you are just using preset reports, but there are obviously additional training and things like that, and you have to deal with it if you start getting into more advanced power users.

I was at another company, and we were the integrator.

It is fairly expensive. I have no idea what they paid. We were on an enterprise license, so whatever it is they licensed at the enterprise level is what we paid.

A good chunk of it has got nothing to do with the tool. It has everything to do with your leadership and your governance requiring it. We had our IT team roll up Tableau multiple times and not a single person used it because there just wasn't enough leadership support to use it. There is nothing wrong with the tool, and it worked fine for what it did, but every time I logged into it, I go, "Okay, but what did you want me to actually do with this? I see all this information. I understand it clearly. I'm not sure what I do with it though." So, without that additional guidance from leadership, rolling it out is irrelevant. You need to have that strategic leadership associated with it.

The key piece of advice would be that you got to look beyond your tool. You need to look at how you're going to get this information used in your organization. What kind of leadership support, governance support, and ongoing support are you going to have? It is all based on trusted data. The value of the tool is based on the quality of your data and the leadership's support to use it. So, if you don't have high-quality data and you don't have leadership support to use the data, you don't need any tool because nobody is going to use it.

I would rate Tableau a seven out of 10. It suits the purpose, but in and of itself, I don't think it is significantly better or worse than its key competitors.

We are into the distribution of licenses, and we also have a services arm that takes care of the implementation.

Our customers use it for different use cases, such as fleet management, HR analytics, and retail analytics. They also use it for forecasting and predictive modeling. In the EMEA region, the analytics market isn't very mature. Therefore, many customers just restrict themselves to basic statistics in Tableau. At the most, they go for the predictive functionality, which is inbuilt in Tableau.

Its deployment depends on the use case. Some customers use it on the cloud, which is Tableau Online, and some of them go for Tableau Server, which is on-premises.

Our customers love the visual capabilities on top of it and the ability to explain and get the required data. There is no other product like Tableau in the business intelligence and analytics space.

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.

I have been using Tableau for three years.

With respect to stability as a performance-driven metric, it is wonderful. Tableau is being used by one of the biggest gaming companies. Stability has mostly got to do with:

• Connectivity to your different data and database platforms
• The amount of data that you're dealing with

The Tableau platform can handle both of these because there is no limit per se in terms of the data size. However, a big fee is a challenge for everybody, and there is no escape from it. 

Tableau has recently acquired Hyper, which speeds up the performance. Hyper is also something that Facebook uses. Therefore, when it comes to stability, it is one of the best solutions in the market. You don't need to worry about it. 

If there are some glitches because a huge amount of data is coming in, there is an inbuilt performance monitoring option in Tableau where it actively monitors every user click on the platform. It will show you the results on the fly and tell you the part of your dashboarding or activity that is consuming the most memory. This way, you can optimize its performance.

It is scalable. The beauty of this product is that it is for everyone. Tableau is a good fit for small enterprises to large enterprises. It can also be used in small departments of a company. The mission of Tableau is to help people see and understand data. So, it is not only for the IT people who understand the technicality of it. It is end-user-centric, and therefore, everybody can use it. It can be used by the marketing, finance, credit, and sales departments. The developers, data scientists, statisticians, and other people can also use it. It is for everyone. 

You can scale it vertically or horizontally, or you can go both ways. You can have a single node configuration and add more RAM or more memory to the same node, or you can have a multi-node configuration. Both are supported. You can add nodes depending on the number of users who want to consume the analytics.

I am not completely aware of it because I mostly handle pre-sales, but I do know that you can raise a support ticket with Tableau very easily. They have 24/7 support, and the priority of your use case depends on the agreement or the contract that you have with Tableau. There is Tier 1, 2, and 3 support.

I have used SQL on different platforms. I have also worked on Python and R to generate plots. I can't stress enough on the fact that as compared to other solutions, Tableau is much easier, clearer, and more intuitive while using your data. You can actually see every bit of your data. They are able to achieve their mission and help people see and understand data. 

Its initial setup is very easy because Tableau has a new graphical user interface, and there is no need for you to script or code your installation process. It only takes a day to set up everything, and it does most of the configuration on its own. It is a very easy process.

In terms of maintenance, there are product upgrades that get released every quarter. It has quarterly upgrades and updates because it is enhanced so rapidly. They spend 25% of their annual revenue on R&D. They have constant interaction with its broad community, and they constantly take in user feedback. If there is a maintenance requirement or some issue with the product, most of the time, it automatically gets resolved in the next upgrade.

Tableau has core-based and user-based licensing, and it is tied to scalability. The core-based licensing is about you buying a certain number of cores, and there is no restriction on the number of users who can use Tableau. The restriction is only on the number of cores. In user-based subscription licensing, there is a restriction on the number of users. Big companies and government organizations with a lot of users typically go for core-based licensing.

User-based subscription licensing is a more common model. It has user roles such as creator, explorer, and viewer. A creator is someone who does the groundwork or development work. An explorer is someone who is into middle management but is not technically savvy, such as a category head. A viewer is like a typical decision-maker in senior management. For each role, Tableau is priced differently. The viewer role has the minimum price, and the creator role has the highest price. This pricing is available on their website. Everybody can see it.

I would advise checking your minimum configuration. There is a specific hardware configuration that you need before installing the software, which varies based on your development, test, and production. You should also decide on whether you need Tableau Online or Tableau Server. Tableau Online supports most of Tableau Server functionalities, but there are some limitations for certain data connections and refreshes. This is something that you need to be aware of while choosing between Tableau Online and Tableau Server.

Sometimes, organizations that can spend or have a good budget just go for Tableau Online because they don't have to worry about maintenance and upgrades. You're already on the latest version, and everything is taken care of by Tableau. The trade-off is that sometimes you may not have your refreshes and connectivity in the widest section possible, which is something that you can do with Tableau Server, but it happens only in rare cases.

It is the best product at the moment. If you look at Gartner's report for BI and analytics, Tableau has been the leader for nine years in a row, which is a very big achievement. There is nothing else like it. You will see Microsoft above Tableau, but Microsoft provides a product suite, whereas Tableau is just BI and analytics. It is not an apple to apple comparison. 

I would rate Tableau a nine out of ten.

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 primarily use the solution for our data visualization, our different types of data. It is linked to our normal data visualization. It's not usually related to the medical side of the business. However, it is related to the revenue, and financial accounting, and submission on the RCM side. 

If I compare Tableau with Power BI, I prefer Tableau. It's easier to use.

The solution has very good drag-and-drop functionality and the screens are easy to navigate. You can easily create measures and dimensions. It has a user-friendly layout that makes task completion simple. In comparison, in Power BI, all of these actions are quite cumbersome.

It is quite similar to Excel. If a person has good Excel knowledge, it will be quite intuitive to learn.

Tableau is the whole package.

The solution allows you to write in SQL and Python. We don't need to write the Python code and we don't need to write the SQL script. However, it is an option that's on the table.

The solution is very stable.

You can scale the solution well.

It's very easy to set everything up.

There is another ETL tool for Tableau that is new. It takes time to reach some level of experience. IN Power BI, they have Power Query. I find it easier to convert the information in Power Query with a single shortcut key. That's not an option in Tableau. 

You have to prepare your data. It will take a lot of time to clean the data. 

There's no mature ETL tool in Tableau, which is quite a negative for them. They need to offer some built-in ETL tool that has a nice and easy drag-and-drop functionality.

There needs to be a bit more integration capability.

I've used the solution for about six months to one year. It wasn't very long. I used it at my previous organization. We're also using it at my current company. At this organization, we've only had it for about three or so months. It's quite new here. 

The solution is extremely stable. It's much more stable than, for example, Power BI. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's very reliable. The performance is great. We've never faced any stability issues while using the product.

I'm not sure how many users we actually have within the company. 

Tableau is one package and there isn't too much complexity. The main pieces are Tableau itself, Prep Builder and Tableau Server, and Tableau Mobile. Sorry, Tableau Online. These four are the most basic software pieces of Tableau.

Whenever you purchase Tableau, you will pay a bit more and more. You will have access to the four main software products. After this, there is no need to purchase something extra. Therefore, in Tableau, there is no scalability issue. In comparison, if you will to Microsoft, there is a lot of products - such as Power BI. There is Power Automate RPA and Power Apps and MicroPower Apps also. You will need to call to Microsoft and they will integrate this Power App with your account. It takes time. With Tableau, there isn't an issue like that. 

We haven't had any sort of technical issues. They did assist us a bit at the outset. and they were very good. They are always online and easily approachable. We're quite satisfied with their level of service.

We also use Power BI.

The initial setup was very simple. It's not a complex process.

They have an excellent team here over at Tableau. They assisted us. 

The setup wasn't too difficult due to the fact that our system is not very complex. We work with rather simple data, which helped save us from suffering through many complexities. 

Maintenance is required at our database level. Our database is smart and lean, and therefore it's pretty straightforward. However long it takes for maintenance tasks is based on the level of data and on the heaviness. We basically do a sort of troubleshooting and some fine-tuning at the database level.

At the time of making visualization, we have to do some research to load everything properly on Tableau and have a refresh rate we can maintain. There should not be too much of a refresh rate every time. 

We had Tableau's technical team help us here and there. They were great and we were satisfied with their help.

The pricing is $70 per month. You have to pay about $800 or something in that ballpark annually for one license.

We are a customer and an end-user.

We are currently using the latest version of the solution.

I would recommend the solution. If a company really wants to go for some easy solutions, and something that is robust and dynamic this is a great option. Microsoft's Power BI also has its advantages and could be a good option as well, depending on what a company needs. If Mircosoft offered a bit more, we might even consider switching over. However, for us, Tableau is the better option. 

I'm using Microsoft Power BI also. Therefore, personally, I see the importance of the ETL tool. Microsoft is also adding many items rapidly - with new features two or three times a month. Tableau isn't making such advances regularly. 

Many people are considering shifting from Tableau to Microsoft very seriously. Therefore, Tableau needs to begin to compete. They need to offer more integrations and invest in a robust and easy ETL solution. It would really assist in cleaning the data.

If a company wants to onboard Tableau, they need to have some sort of ETL tool on the side as well. If they don't, and they don't have SQL or Python, I'd actually direct them to Power BI - simply to get that ETL capability. However, if the data is ready, and no ETL is required, Tableau is an excellent solution. If you just need to visualize the data, Tableau is the best.

Overall, due to the lack of ETL, and the inability to effectively clean the data, I would rate the solution at a six out of ten.

We use the most recent version. 

We use the solution to engage the field teams and we integrate that with the data warehouse data and build the dashboards for them.

It is helpful that the solution provides access to one's own data. It allows a person to get insights out of the data provided by his tool, based upon the KPIs that the person wishes to look at. It all depends upon different use cases. We have dashboards for marketing people, field teams and executives. It all depends upon which insights a person wants, in which case he can prep the data accordingly. This is good. 

The most valuable features are the visualizations, the way they show the combination charts. This allows a person to jointly put in different measures in different axes and greatly facilitates the user in understanding the data better.

There should be a focus on memory data, which is the concept of Tableau. This is where they squeeze the data into their memory. Because of that, we see performance issues on the dashboards. The architecture should be improved in such a way that the data can be better handled, like we see in the market tools, such as Domo, in which everything is cloud-based. We did a POC in which we compared Tableau with Domo and performance-wise the latter is much better.  

As such, the architecture should be improved to better handle the data.

We are seeing a shift from Tableau to Power BI, towards which most users are gravitating. This owes itself to the ease of use and their mindset of making use of Excel. Power BI offers greater ease of use. 

For the most part, when comparing all the BI tools, one sees that they work in the same format. But, if a single one must be chosen, one sees that his data can be integrated at a better place. Take real time data, for example. I know that they have the live connection, but, still, they can improve that data modeling space better.

We have been working with Tableau for almost seven years.

The solution has pretty good stability. It's a robust tool, even though it has a steep learning curve. But, still, I feel that from the stability perspective, it's a leading BI tool in the market. It's pretty stable.

I personally don't like any BI tool to have that scalability. What we usually do is integrate scalability into our warehouse layer. We know how to scale up and down and we handle it there. We don't rely much on the BI tools to do that.

I am talking about the scalability of a program in general, be it in its relation with users or as it concerns dashboards. 

We recently started working with Tableau online and that particular solution is scalable. It ingests the hardware, the server capacity by itself. So, if users go from, let's say... 100 to 500, we don't see a dip in performance. It still behaves the same. Because of this new integration technology with the cloud, they are scalable in that regard.

We are in contact with technical support. One service we have is Tableau online. If we see a dip in performance, we raise a ticket to the Tableau support team, work with them and make certain they address our issues. I would rate my experience with them as three out of five. 

We used Tableau from the get go. 

While I was not directly involved in the setup, I know that it's not that easy. There is a need for a proper administrator who has experience in that field.

We used an integrator from Tableau when implementing.

Our experience was good and we were assisted with our implementation requirements. They were able to make notes to match our use case and answer all of our questions, including those concerning the number of users we have and how to set up the server.

I'm not part of the administrative group which handles the setup. I am mostly a consumer and responsible for building the desktop. I use the desktop version to build the dashboards and am not responsible for the server health check or maintenance. As such, I am not in a position to provide information about the staff required for maintenance, updates and checkups. There are a couple of people who are responsible for this, one from the customer side and another from our team. Both parties are in sync when undertaking these activities. 

I have no knowledge concerning the licensing costs of Tableau. 

The solution is mostly deployed on-premises, although we have also done cloud-based deployment. 

We have around 500-plus users making use of the solution and mostly 90 percent are viewers. We have very few creators or explorers. Creators comprise seven percent and explorers three percent. 

My advice to others would vary depending on their use cases, what they're looking for and the level of competency they have within their organization to use it. Tableau has a steep learning curve. So, it depends upon one's use case, the reason the person is going with that specific BI tool. The procurement department would need to evaluate the use cases very carefully, because there are so many BI tools available in the market. One's focus should be more on a centralized tool when bringing a new one to his organization. It should address all the answers to one's users, like what they're looking for. Definitely Tableau is good in the data discovery part and it can handle large data sets. So, all of these things should matter when one is trying to evaluate a tool.

I rate Tableau as a seven out of ten. This is because we are using it and it has a steep learning curve. It's not user-friendly. One must build a competency in creating the visualization and then support it. All of these things matter when one is evaluating a tool. That's why a shift is going towards Power BI.

We primarily use the solution for data visualization and data analytics. I normally use it for analyzing data from social media, for social media analytics, mainly Twitter and data from the Twitter API. I use it to analyze what is being said on social media and also to look at the interaction on social media on specific topics. 

I also use it for educational purposes. I analyze the data from student information systems to check about their student progress and provide visualizations about this data.

I create a lot of dashboards, mainly using these tools. 

Tableau helped our organization to provide our ckients organizations with cloud-based  Data Analytics service. Through using the Tableau's anilities in the field of Data Analytics, and Data Preperation & Transformation, and Data Visualization
we collect, cleanse, transform client’s data and discover insights and patterns in this data. Using Tableau, we help our ckients to improve the way data is utilized to support the decision-making process, enhance strategy implementation, and apply KPI monitoring within the business process. Tableau helped us to provide our clients with data driven decision making power through utilizing high quality  data analytics and vizualization so that they can continue to comply with the standards and best practices in teir field of business.

The solution is very flexible. The ability of filtering and segmentation of the data makes it very flexible compared to other tools.

The ease of use is great. It's a good platform from an ease of use point of view. It's easy to use and easy to learn. The learning curve is not difficult to grasp. 

The user interface is very friendly. The onscreen help, and also the resources that Tableau provides, including training videos, a support website, and knowledge base, are very helpful. 

I use the Tableau training portal and I found it very enlightening. It provided me with online training and certifications. I use it mostly for strengthening my abilities in Tableau.  

I like the way it integrates with multiple data sources. The data blending aspect of Tableau, in which I can blend and merge data from multiple sources, is great. I found that the things that I was doing previously, such as using SQL or other tools over the course of hours I can do in Tableau within minutes. Instead of doing my job using SQL with multiple queries and instructions, now I can do it in Tableau in minutes.

Its ability to handle large amounts of data is very important. 

The initial setup is easy.

I would like to have the product be more flexible in terms of creating online shared dashboards. When I need to publish a public dashboard, I use Tableau Public. However, I don't find it flexible compared to Tableau Online, which is the paid version. Tableau Public is a free Tableau portal in which I can publish my data, however, Tableau Public doesn't provide the flexibility that I find in Tableau Online. If we compare this with other tools, such as Zoho Analytics, for example, publishing web-based shared dashboards is more flexible, in terms of publishing web-based shared dashboards.

If they can add the feature of machine learning and the predictive analysis to Tableau, it would be very helpful. After Salesforce acquired Tableau, they have been merging Salesforce with Tableau, in terms of machine learning. That said, in this case, I need to use two products - Salesforce and Tableau. I want to have the Einstein tool, which is available now in Salesforce, be integrated into Tableau, so I don't have to use Salesforce for machine learning, to use the Einstein tool, and I can use Tableau for the product. If the Einstein tool for machine learning is integrated into Tableau, that would be very good for us.

I've used the solution for around four years. 

The stability has been good. In general usage cases, it's reliable andhere are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. But we face some stability (crash or freezsing) and performance (slowness) issue with large datasets especially when we export our Tableau visualization to Tableau Public.

Basically, I'm the one using it. However, others consume what I make. I create the dashboard, I create the analytics, and I give my analytics as a shared dashboard or as reports to the decision-makers and other employees. Normally they consume what I do, however, for the creation of dashboards, creation of analytics, I do the job. I'm the main user in that sense. 

It's very scalable, especially if you choose the online option.

Technical support has been great.

The implementation process is not difficult. It's very easy. When I use Tableau Online, it is given as software as a service, which means I don't need to deploy anything. I just give the username and password, and I use it directly without any issue. For the Tableau Desktop, I need to install the software. It's a very normal installation and happens without any issue.

We handled the implementation process ourselves. It's pretty easy. therefore, we didn't need outside assistance. 

The return on investment from Tableau is very high.

The pricing of the solution is very good. We find it much cheaper than other options.

I'm just a customer and an end-user. I have tried several times to have a partnership with Tableau, however, it seems a little bit difficult getting the partnership. This is maybe a negative aspect in terms of having a partnership program. It's not easy to have a partnership or a fellowship relationship with Tableau.

I'm using Tableau Online, as software as a service, and I'm also using Tableau Desktop. I use it on my machine.

I really recommend it for any organization that wants to have data visualization with a tight budget.

I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

We use it in our parent company as well as in client companies. A few of our environments are on-premises, and a few are on Tableau Online. We have a mix of both.

The UI part is the best. The end-users can easily get started with Tableau Desktop or Tableau Online because of its user-friendliness.

I also work as an SME on the platform side. Tableau is very nice and jazzy for the end-users, but there are pain points for the admins. Performance is something about which we hear a lot of complaints, such as the dashboard doesn't open in time. It performs well on the desktop but not on the server. I know that there is always a limitation when it comes to a huge amount of data or the complexity of the calculations, but we often hear from end-users about the performance on the server side. It is easy to drag and drop all the columns and do what we want, but if it is not going to load better on the server, users are not going to like it.

Their standard support is not good. They should improve it. I don't know if it has anything to do with the acquisition, but lately, their support has not been great.

Their upgrades have always been an issue. They never work. 

Tableau is a little bit costlier than other tools such as Power BI.

They should make it easy to integrate with tools like SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, etc. Its integration with Office 365 should be improved because most of the users already have tools like Outlook, Teams, and SharePoint, and they want to integrate a reporting tool or a visualization tool with their existing tools. 

It is very easy to integrate scripting in Spotfire. We can do a lot of changes in the UI by writing some scripts. That could be something that Tableau can look into. They can also consider providing APIs, but most of the people who work with Tableau do not really work much on the scripting side. So, I am not sure if it is feasible or required technically.

I have been using this solution for almost eight years.

It is scalable for online and on-premises versions. With the online version, they take care of the load, and we don't have to worry about that. For on-premises, initially, we used to have core-based licensing in which we had a cap on the number of cores we could expand to. We then moved to user-based licensing, which makes it easy to scale.

In our parent company, we have close to 200 users. We also have two clients on this platform. One of the clients has about 400 users. For another client, overall, we support close to 20K customers on this platform. That's one of the biggest environments.

Their premium support is really good, but their standard support is failing. Their standard support is the worst. We recently had an experience where we waited for more than seven days for a ticket to be picked up. It was vacation time, and there were a lot of factors, but their standard support is not good. For a few of our clients, we do have premium support, and they respond to any issue because we include the technical account managers in the communication.

Comparing it with Power BI, the main differences are the cost and the integration with Office 365. It is very easy to integrate Power BI with Teams or SharePoint because they all belong to the same company, whereas with Tableau, I have to integrate it with a third-party vendor. It is a little tough to integrate Tableau with SharePoint or Teams. Nowadays, everyone wants everything in one place; it could either be in SharePoint or in Teams. 

I have been working with Spotfire lately, and it is very easy to integrate scripting in Spotfire.

The Tableau server-side used to be very good initially, but for the last year, we are having issues with the upgrades. Their upgrades never work. We always get stuck while doing the upgrades, and we end up taking a different approach. We take the data and keep it somewhere. After that, we wipe out the entire server and install it again. We then restore the data into that environment. 

In terms of maintaining this solution, I used to belong to level three (L3) support till last month. We were only handling the performance issues and any issues that need RCA. The L3 support used to have close to five people. L2 support, which usually included adding a user, removing a user, adding a new group, and providing usual production support, was taken care of by the Ops team. They used to have more than five people on the team.

Cost is where tools like MicroStrategy, Power BI, or Spotfire come into play. Cost-wise, Tableau is a little bit costlier than other tools such as Power BI.

I have been using Tableau all these years, but about four years ago, Power BI came out at a very low cost. Their desktop version was free from the beginning. Power BI Desktop has always been free, whereas Tableau Desktop is costly. When it comes to cost, people prefer Power BI because it integrates very well with Office 365. You don't have to worry about integration with Teams or SharePoint.

It is easy to use for most business users, but before using it, you should understand the basics of dimensions or measurements. If you directly come to this tool without understanding the concepts of warehousing, dimensions, and fact tables, you would not get what you want. This applies to any reporting tool. You should have a basic understanding of what data warehousing is all about and then get started with the tool.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. Tableau has always been at the top of my list. Because of the technical hold that I have on the tool, I always prefer Tableau. It would always be on top as compared to any other tool.