Tableau Reviews

Three years ago, Viber didn't have any visualization tool to present its massive data inside the company. One month after implementing Tableau, inside Viber we were able to understand much better the business, opportunities and technical problems.

• Drag and drop: It's easy for beginners to use Tableau as it's very intuitive and simple to create insights.
• Quick table calculations: There are some best-practice shortcuts for tables, which means Tableau can be implemented very quickly.
• Data Connectors: Tableau has many different connectors for different databases. It's very easy to connect to MySQL, SQL Server, Amazon EMR, Presto, Redshift, BigQuery, and so on. Just name it and they have the connector; the work they do is very impressive.

Data science: Tableau lacks machine learning algorithms that you can implement using R, SPSS Modeler, and Python. It has clustering and time-series forecasting abilities which are helpful, but adding machine learning capabilities like decision trees, CHAID analysis and K-means would make this product perfect! Tableau has a connector to R; you can use the ML algorithms there and visualize it back in the Tableau.

Previous versions suffered from instability but that has been fixed in later versions. The current version has no issues with stability as far as I can see.

Tableau is not scalable on the desktop version. On the server version, you can scale it by adding more machines and configuring Tableau to use all of them.

One of Tableau’s secrets is that they have one of the best tech support in the world of BI. The community of developers is great, with a lot of contributors; very nice and helpful – for beginners and professionals.

In the past, I used QlikView as the BI solution. It's also a great tool with many features and great support. The problem with QlikView is that it's expensive and it takes longer to implement inside organizations.

It's very simple and quick to implement Tableau in an organization; you can have helpful dashboards in a matter of hours.

Tableau pricing is low compared to other solutions that are in the market; for small-medium businesses, that would provide good cost-effectiveness. 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.

We compared Tableau to QlikView, Panorama Necto and TIBCO Spotfire. We evaluated them by:

• Price
• Ease of use
• Speed of implementation
• Use-case visualizations

Don't visualize more than 2M data points in a report. Use extracted data and not a direct connection to the database; it will run faster. Don't use too many sections in a report; 3-4 at most. Make most calculations during the ETL process and not in Tableau; every calculation that Tableau does will make the report go slower.

The ability to make interactive graphs, tables, and maps that can be shared on social media, linked to, or embedded on a website are the most valuable features. The ability to allow readers to view and download the underlying data is another valuable feature.

I just did an analysis of real estate sales in my county (Bay County, FL) and it allowed me to share the results with the public in a way they can make their own discoveries beyond what I have presented. 

Tableau Public is free, which is incredible. However, the paid version is too expensive per user. They need to reduce the cost of the user that is not making the analysis, but only reading / drilling down on the results. It is hard to get a client to pay that kind of money to view reports.

From my conversations with Tableau, their product Tableau Online is what allows others to view and interact with data online privately. The cost per online user is $500 per year. There is a free Tableau Reader, but it is limited. So, if I wanted to make data visualizations for a client or within my own company, I would have to pay for the desktop software to make the visuals plus pay an additional fee for everyone who wants to use the full functions online. Tableau Public is free and an awesome tool, but it is all publicly available.

I've had no issues with deployment.

I've had no issues with stability.

I've had no issues with scalability.

Ease of use. The power to do anything I want to do. The ability to connect to any data. The ability to merge ("Blend" data from multiple sources). Built in "best practices" in data visualization. Statistical capabilities with the "R" integration.

I'm a consultant - specializing in Tableau. It allows me to go into a client and be productive immediately. Also, it's ease of use helps me get in the doors, initially - I can walk in, connect to a client's real data, and find insights from that data, in a 30 minute meeting.

Everytime I make a request for a new feature, it is, typically, in the next release. I would like to see some additional calculation functions - maybe some statistical one for clients that do not want to have to learn R. As in every product, there are things it does not do, but, I've never had a user need I could not meet.

I started with Tableau Desktop in 2005. At that time I had been using Brio Query, Cognos, and some others. Once I saw Tableau, talked to the founders and heard where they were going, I started leaning toward Tableau & I've never looked back!

I've had no deployment issues. With some clients that have "specialized/custom designed environments", it may take a few minutes/hours longer to get everything running, but, Tableau Support has always been there for me.

I have had a couple crashes - usually linked back to something stupid I did in my Windows machine. I've done some work with the latest Mac version - have had no issues, in it...

Never. I do a BILLION+ record demo on my notebook, with sub-second response time. As in any other tool/application, proper design is still needed. Tableau affords me the advantage of being able to implement increment aggregate data sets without having IT involvement. THAT is BIG!

Customer Service: Excellent - best Customer Service in the industry, from my experience. I've never had a question or issue where I did not feel like I was their top priority...Technical Support: They suffered some growing pains, for a while. But, they seem to have implemented processes and procedures that aid in the support function. Right now, I rate them as excellent.

I was a Cognos and a Brio user / developer. Every update became more fragmented and harder to use - always seemed to be from acquisition, not smart & integrated, development. As an experienced BI consultant, I saw that Tableau's direction was where they all should have been going. Switching was the smartest business decision I ever made!

Server and Desktop install the same way. Double-click on the installer program - click "Next" a few times. Done. You can customize the Server installation, along the way. in many cases, that is not needed. The whole process is easy and fast. Desktop installs in a minute. Initial Server installation can take 10 minutes.

I've always done my own Tableau installations and upgrades - too easy to think about paying someone. There are consulting companies, that specialize in Tableau, for businesses that have too few resources, or, might have a complex environment. For the most part, Tableau Support can help with installation issues. Once set up, I advise clients to work with experienced consultants, for a short period of time, to set up a "production process".

As an independent consultant, I have no "projects" of my own. Two comments, 1. My entire income from consulting is based on my Tableau knowledge. In that sense, my ROI is an infinite percent. 2. I've seen clients find actionable insights so fast, and with so much bottom line impact, that the cost of implementing an enterprise environment was paid for, up front, from a two week trial copy of Tableau Desktop.

Tableau Desktop is $1999 per named user (Professional version). There are no add-on fees. Mapping, census demographics, R interface, ALL data connectors - are all included... From my perspective, and from my client's perspectives, the pricing model is ideal. You get it ALL for one price - no issues after the fact...

Yes & no. No real "project" to review where I was going. Many times, the client dictates what I would be using. As I developed into more a higher level consultant, I was always looking at new products, and updates from existing ones. In the last nine years, no one has come close to unseating Tableau as my choice...

Start NOW, In the free, full offering trial (2 weeks), coupled with the free on-demand training and passionate & active user community, you will be amazed at what you can accomplish. Many find they PAY for it, BEFORE they buy it! If you need help, there is Tableau Support, Tableau Consulting and a bunch of us in the independent world, all ready to assist.

I use Tableau in a jewelry company to analyze sales and service inventory.

I can't comment on the valuable features of Tableau. I am familiar with some of the other tools, but I can't point out one specific big feature of Tableau.

A specific thing in Tableau is that I have looked at how to add pictures to the reports. I don't have the ability in Tableau to create a tooltip and see the picture of a piece of jewelry or watch that is a best seller.

I have been using Tableau for over five years. I don't remember the version of the solution I am using, but I feel it is the upgraded version. Maybe the server is not the latest one, which might be behind by a year. I am a customer of the solution.

Tableau does break down a little bit. The server version of Tableau doesn't allow you to see what is going on, making it a part of Tableau that is not great. Tableau's server version doesn't provide the ability to extract the information to see why the reports or dashboard didn't run properly. When you refresh in Tableau, you can't see what it's doing, and nothing happens since it doesn't show you what's going on, and then Tableau gets fixed all of a sudden.

One of my biggest problems is getting all the users to use Tableau, but that's not a specific problem of the tool alone since it is one of the most common problems among BI tools.

I only have ten Tableau licenses that are used in my company.

I have only sought some local support within Israel for Tableau. The only way to solve the problems in Tableau is through checking on forums.

Tableau is deployed on-premises.

Tableau's initial setup was straightforward. When you need to make complicated dashboards, that can be very difficult in Tableau, but the initial setup was very quick. Connecting the data sources was very easy in Tableau.

The pricing for Tableau is the same as the other products in the market. I haven't checked Tableau's price recently, but I don't think it is a factor when choosing the tool.

Before choosing Tableau, I had checked QlikView, which is now Qlik Sense, and I preferred the way Tableau works over Qlik Sense. Tableau made me feel independent and not dependent on programmers, making it more user-friendly.

I would look at Microsoft Power BI. I am unsure if I would push Tableau since it is not a widely used tool. I don't know if others in the field of jewelry use Tableau.

Overall, I rate the solution between a seven and eight out of ten.

On-premises

We use this solution to create dashboards, analyze data and create presentation of data to have discussions with clients. We also use it to sort huge amounts of data. 

The solution is very user friendly, particularly in terms of the ease of analyzing data.

Tableau would be difficult to implement without training or the in-house technical support we have.

I've been using this solution for three years. 

The stability is very good, especially now that they've joined with Salesforce.

We have support from within the company. 

The initial setup is straightforward because the solution is already set up in the company. It was just a matter of requesting it and downloading.

We have a global package but I'm not involved in licensing and don't know the cost.

I had a look at Qlik but didn't get a chance to really evaluate the benefits from one platform to another, other than what you find on the internet. 

I rate the solution nine out of 10, there's always room for improvement. 

I've used Tableau primarily to visualize data on asset performance. These visualizations pertain to reliability engineering and I've created charts and dashboards showing key performance indicators such as mean time between failure for different asset components, trend/pattern of asset behavior (different types of events occurred in the asset) prior to failure and asset grouping based on their health and performance.

Tableau is so flexible as to enable the user to show events that have occurred over the entire lifespan of each asset. Normally, this requires a bit of data-wrangling but in my experience this graphic has found a lot of favor with multiple clients.

All of these visualizations were created in a local environment (at the desktop-level) using data from .xlsx and .csv files.

In our line of work, we primarily use Tableau Desktop/Server to visualize data based on our clients’ requirements. Once, while dealing with a procurement scenario, we found that the client could save $2.00 on each unit of Part A if they ordered it from Supplier X rather than from Supplier Y.

In another case, we designed dashboards that showed data from different sensors located throughout a building. This kind of an application could enable stakeholders to monitor building climatic conditions in real time and adjust thermostats according to CO2 levels and occupancy, thereby driving efficient consumption of power.

In this way, Tableau visualizations can be used to take more intelligent decisions as they bring out patterns buried under a mountain of data.

I believe the most valuable feature of Tableau is the flexibility it offers with regard to the types of visualizations the user can create. A lot of other products in this space offer limited chart types and work in a way that provide little room for customization, if any. But Tableau allows the user to work with its predefined templates such that the end result can be a visualization that is highly customized - in terms of the design, colors, sizes, shapes and the overall visual appeal. This is an invaluable feature as it enables one to communicate more powerfully from the data.

I would also consider the ‘Create Calculated Field’ feature as very valuable. It’s one that I’ve used quite extensively. Most of the time, the data we work with will not have all the necessary features that enable us to tell a good, convincing story out of it. Therefore, it becomes imperative that we create them and extract the maximum amount of information possible from the data.

Formatting charts - colors, lines etc. - is also simple and there are a lot of options for customization.

I would like to see the inclusion of a template to create a speedometer chart. I can understand that Tableau doesn’t have it as one of its default chart types because it’s not a good way to represent the data. Indeed that’s true, but speedometers are quite popular and once we had a client who was insistent on having highly-customizable speedometers and I had to spend a good amount of time to create them via multiple workarounds. In my experience, I've seen many customers who do not want to consider alternatives to speedometers.

I’ll address these two points:

• Speedometers/dial charts are a not-so-good way to represent data
• I had to resort to multiple workarounds to create a speedometer in Tableau

First, I’ll give you a few reasons as to why speedometers are not considered to be a good way to visualize data:

1. Low data-ink ratio: ‘Data’ here refers to the data that you want to show on your chart/graph and ‘ink’ refers to the aesthetic elements of the chart such as lines, colors, indicators or any other designs. A low data-ink ratio implies that the quantity of ‘ink’ on the chart is very high relative to the small quantity of ‘data’ that is present on the chart. What does a speedometer or a dial chart do? It shows you the current state (value) of any system. Therefore, the data shown by the chart is just one number. Let’s come to the ‘ink’ part. Needless to say, there is a lot of ‘ink’ on a speedometer chart – so many numbers all around the dial, the dial itself, a needle that points to the actual number etc. The fundamental principle of data visualization is to communicate information in the simplest way possible, without complicating things. Therefore, best practices in data visualization are aimed at reducing visual clutter because this will ensure that the viewer gets the message – the right message – quickly, without being distracted or confused by unnecessary elements.
2. Make perception difficult: The human brain compares lines better than it does angles – information in a linear structure is perceived more easily and quickly than that in a radial one.Let's say I’m showing multiple gauges on the same screen. What's the purpose of visualizing data? It's to enable the user to derive insights - insights upon which decisions can be taken. The more accurate the insights, the better the decisions. So, its best that the visualization does everything that helps the user understand it in the easiest possible way. Hence, the recommended alternative to a dial chart is a bullet chart
3. Occupy more space: Assume that there are 4 key process indicators (KPIs) that I need to show on screen and the user needs to know whether each KPI is above or below a pre-specified target. If I were to use dial charts I’ll be creating 4 dials – one for each KPI. On the other hand, if I were to use bullets, I’ll be creating just one chart where the 4 KPIs will be listed one below the other and each one in addition to showing its actual and target values, will also show by how much the actual exceeds/falls short of the target in a linear fashion. As real estate on user interfaces is at a premium, believe me, this is definitely better.

Now, let me come to my situation where my client would not accept anything but a speedometer. As I’ve mentioned in the review, Tableau doesn’t provide a speedometer template by default. So when I was going through forums on the Internet I saw that people usually used an image of a speedometer and put their data on top of that image and thereby creating speedometers in Tableau.

This would not have worked in my case because my client wanted to show different bands (red, yellow and green) and the number of bands and bandwidths varied within and between dials. For example, one dial would have 2 red bands (one between 0 and 10 and the other between 90 and 100), 1 yellow band and 1 green band while another would have just one yellow band between 40 and 50 and no red or green bands. Also, these bands and bandwidths would be changed every month and the client needed to be able to do this on their own. Therefore, using a static background image of a dial was out of the question.

So, here’s what I did: I created an Excel spreadsheet (let’s call it data 1; used as one of the 2 data sources for the dial) in which the user would be able to define the bands and bandwidths. The spreadsheet had a list of numbers from one to hundred and against each number, the user could specify the band (red/green/yellow) in which it falls. The other data source (data 2) was an Excel sheet containing the numbers to be indicated on the dials. Then, in Tableau, I created a chart which had 2 pies – one on top of the other. Both the pies had numbers from 1 to 100 along the border, providing the skeleton for the dial. The top pie used data 1 and had the red, yellow and green bands spanning the numbers from 1 to 100. I then created a calculated field having an ‘if’ condition: if the number in data 2 matched the number in data 1, the field would have a value ‘yes’. Otherwise, it would have a value ‘no’. This will produce only 1 ‘yes’ and 99 ‘no’s’ because there will be only 1 true match. I put this calculated field onto the ‘Color’ shelf and chose black for ‘yes’ and white for ‘no’ – this formed the content of the bottom pie. So the bottom pie had 99 white colored slices (which looked like one huge slice) and just 1 black slice (which looked like a needle). I made the top pie containing the red, yellow & green bands more transparent and this gave the appearance of a needle pointing to the KPI value, also indicating into which band the number fell, thereby enabling the client to gauge their performance.

One to three years.

I've not directly contacted the tech support team of Tableau Software myself but whenever any clarification was required regarding the creation of a particular visualization, I've found many discussion forums and blogs, the contents of which have been extremely helpful.

I have also worked with Microsoft's Power BI and I've found Tableau to be far more flexible and user-friendly in terms of the variety of visualizations it allows you to create.

On-premises

This product is for non-technical users who know, or may not know, what they need but would like to automate their processes.

It has been the best tool to work with from a self-service point of view. The explorer capability in Tableau allows analysts to connect to data sources published on the tableau server, build their own product and customize reports.

The extremely intuitive and user-friendly UI helps naive users easily click and connect, drag and drop, and build fantastic visualizations. Of course, the back-end data structure needs to be strong for them to be able to do that, but it saves them a lot of time.

Licensing and pricing options could be made better so that more users would be able to use it. The biggest concern any organization has is its budget when trying to implement a new product. Tableau is an extremely powerful tool and hence expensive, but if there was a way to cut down the cost they would end up attracting more users.

Seven years.

Tableau is one of the most intelligent and dynamic visualization tools I have worked with. It provides dynamic adjustments of measures and dimensions. The reason this is useful is that it gives a business user multiple dimensions of data to look through. From these you can infer interesting business operation data characteristics.

Operational improvements have resulted from the efficient creation of ad hoc data visualizations in a timely manner.

The key feature of Tableau that has room for improvement is its performance with structured and unstructured data. I'm not sure I would suggest that Tableau go for a hardware oriented solution for this. Nevertheless, that would not be a bad approach to enhance the product and align with current marketing trends and its competitors.

Three years.

There were few issues with the stability of the product when there were features such as built-in data processing using TDE (Tableau Data Engine).

Not a lot here. Pretty scalable.

I would rate it as between very good and excellent.

Yes, we used MicroStrategy in the past. One of the reasons for the switch was to have more ad hoc data visualization and a more user-friendly tool for business; one which involved less coding and more GUI work.

The initial setup was not so straightforward. We had minor issues installing it across the enterprise, due to diverse technology in different business units. But none were actual showstoppers.

The pricing and licensing are generally high with Tableau. I thoroughly encourage their recent initiative of going to a “Tableau as a Service” business model, which aligns well with enterprises and also small and medium sized organizations. It even works for individuals who would like to learn Tableau and its core strengths.

We did evaluate QlikView. We actually have both in place, for various reasons.

The key point is if you would like to have faster, ad hoc and quick data visualizations, I would strongly recommend Tableau. But for enterprise-wide deployment and migration across different environments, I would say Tableau has room to improve further.