We use it for our customers in retail, healthcare, and manufacturing who need analytics. I'm doing use-cases like this a lot.
CEO at Bi Solutions S.A
An interactive data visualization software with an important visual analytics feature
Pros and Cons
- "The most important feature in Tableau is visual analytics."
- "The price could be better."
What is our primary use case?
How has it helped my organization?
We have a customer who is an automation company, and we use Tableau for optimizing the inventory in the warehouses.
What is most valuable?
Tableau's easy to use, and easy to deploy. It has a good user interface. The most important feature in Tableau is visual analytics. The maps and geographical analytics are important for implementation. It's also easy to develop and work with historical data. It also makes it easy to create a culture within the organization.
What needs improvement?
The price could be better. The overall scalability can also be improved. I would like to see more machine learning components to do predictive analytics. It should be simple for our customers to use. Tableau should include an automated machine learning feature in the next release.
Buyer's Guide
Tableau
June 2025

Learn what your peers think about Tableau. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: June 2025.
860,168 professionals have used our research since 2012.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using Tableau for about nine years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability is good.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Tableau is scalable, but the overall scalability can be improved to accommodate large volumes of data.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was easy. The time it takes to deploy depends on the company size. For example, one day, four days, or maybe even two weeks. It depends on the company and the data they have. It takes about three people to implement and maintain this product.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Pricing could be better. I believe they should offer better pricing for deployment in small to mid-sized companies. Tableau needs to change the pricing model and offer a monthly option. This is the principal benefit their competitors offer. If companies can pay month-to-month, it would provide more opportunities for them.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Our customers often evaluate competitors like Microsoft BI and Qlik Sense. These products are deployed everywhere, in the cloud and on-premise. Tableau loses to the competition because of price.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend Tableau to new users. This is a great tool.
On a scale from one to ten, I would give Tableau a ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Reseller

Research & Development Expert at a energy/utilities company with 11-50 employees
Stable with a quick initial setup and good for managing data sets
Pros and Cons
- "The initial setup is quick and easy and you don't need special outside assistance to set everything up."
- "The integration with other program languages, like Python, needs to be better."
What is our primary use case?
I primarily use the solution in order to utilize the graphs. It offers a good diversity of graphs and I can manage different data sets together with Excel. I can publish it for my manager, if, in the future, I'm going to use it at work.
What is most valuable?
The solution offers good capabilities in terms of responding to my requirements. My dataset is so small and I don't need any complex graphs. It makes it very simple.
The solution is very stable.
The initial setup is quick and easy and you don't need special outside assistance to set everything up.
What needs improvement?
The integration with other program languages, like Python, needs to be better. I know the capability is there, however, there needs to be better integration. There needs to be integration for machine learning and AI. That would help data analysts and data scientists quite a bit.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've only been using the solution for a few weeks at this point. I'm working on gaining some experience and familiarity with the product.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I've found the solution to be quite stable and reliable so far. I haven't used it long, however, I can't recall it crashing or freezing. I haven't experienced bugs or glitches. Its performance is good.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
There might be about 20 people in our organization that use the solution.
I'm not sure if we will continue to use the product. Currently, I've only used it for a few weeks, and I'm learning it. However, our organization seems to like to work with Oracle. I'm not sure if we will focus on that or not in the future.
How are customer service and technical support?
I've never used Oracle's technical support in the past. I can't speak to how well they help users with issues or how fast they respond.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I've worked a bit more with Power BI.
Our organization also works with Oracle's Analytics.
How was the initial setup?
The installation was very, very easy. I didn't have any issues at all. It wasn't complex.
The deployment took less than 15 minutes. It was very fast and seamless.
What about the implementation team?
I handled the implementation myself. I only had to download it onto my own PC.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Our company hasn't yet made a decision on the product in terms of long-term usage. I'm not sure what the licensing status is at this point.
What other advice do I have?
We're just potential customers and end-users of the product. We don't have a business relationship with Tableau. I'm very new to the product and still really just testing it out to see how I could potentially work with it in the future.
I'm working with the latest version of the solution.
Overall, in my short time using the product, I've been largely happy with the results. I'd rate the product at an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Buyer's Guide
Tableau
June 2025

Learn what your peers think about Tableau. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: June 2025.
860,168 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Lead Data Scientist at a financial services firm with 11-50 employees
Poor response time from technical support, expensive, and not stable, but it has a good aggregation functionality
Pros and Cons
- "The most valuable feature is the aggregation function."
- "It will be good if the server, could be more stable, and I would like to have the technical service to be more reliable."
What is our primary use case?
The primary use case of this solution is for the BI daily usage and all of the KPI for analysis.
It does many things.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature is the aggregation function.
What needs improvement?
It will be good if the server could be more stable, and I would like to have the technical service to be more reliable.
I would like a better response time without having to wait for a week just to get feedback.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Tableau since 2016.
We update often and are using the latest version for both the server and the desktop.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I think currently we are suffering a lot of technical issues.
I am not sure if this is something encountered by other companies, but currently, the Tableau server is not really stable. We have many interruptions in the Big Tree.
It may not be related to the project directly, but because the server itself is not stable, it can impact everything, such as the performance.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have more than 10 users in our company who use this solution on a daily basis.
We allow everyone in our company to use it. We don't really need to scale it. We use it as a platform to share the company's performance. It's not something that is being used by the entire company already.
How are customer service and technical support?
Technical support needs improvement. The response time is very poor.
We have contacted technical support several times, but the response time is really slow. Sometimes, it can take up to one month to solve any issue.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Previously, we had not used another solution.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was not straightforward. It was complex.
It was hosted within our own server. When we set up the Windows server, installed the product, and did the configuration on our end. It was complex, but not extremely complicated.
We implemented this solution in-house within the company, but the maintenance is done by the supplier, which is Tableau. They will update their products from time to time and all that we need to do is install the latest version.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It's an annual fee with everything included but it's quite expensive.
What other advice do I have?
It's hosted on the Tableau server and hosted within our infrastructure and hosted in AWS.
I would recommend this solution to others with the understanding that they will not receive an instant response from Tableau technical support.
Also, because of the pricing, it may not be something suggested for a startup company.
I would rate this solution a five out of ten.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
General Surgeon at a healthcare company with 51-200 employees
Robust features, gives meaning to your data, and easy to install
Pros and Cons
- "It is a complete solution allowing a lot of integrations, different graphics, multiple operations and analyzes our date and gives us meaning from it."
- "They need to improve the icons and the filters, because they look too old, resembling Excel from 1997."
What is our primary use case?
We use the solution to capture all the data from the business, we use it for many things.
What is most valuable?
It is a complete solution allowing a lot of integrations, different graphics, multiple operations and analyzes our date and gives us meaning from it.
What needs improvement?
Some of the functionality of the dashboard can be difficult to operate and the color pallets are limited. They need to improve the icons and the filters, because they look too old, resembling Excel from 1997. It would be helpful if the solution was less difficult to use.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability was good, it worked well.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability is not the best because the software is complicated to learn, this limits the number of people using the product.
How are customer service and technical support?
I did not use the support. However, there are many different platforms out there, such as forums on the internet, that you can get information that you require for assistance.
How was the initial setup?
The setup is really easy but it is hard to use it.
What about the implementation team?
The deployment is easy, it installs like a standard piece of software would.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The solution is very expensive. If you have many users then it is going to cost your company a lot of money.
What other advice do I have?
When purchasing the product, start out by only getting a minimal amount of licenses. This solution is not like Microsoft Office where many people know how to use it and can learn fairly quickly. This solution takes time to learn, buying too many licenses could be a waste of money if you do not have employees that can use it. Additionally, when you are using the solution work closely with stakeholders to make sure what you are processing what they are looking for by using the mock-up feature. If you do not then you could have completed a lot of work that they did not want.
I rate Tableau a nine out of ten.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Service Delivery Manager / Architect at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Flexible and easy to learn but the support and scalability for large amounts of data needs improvement
Pros and Cons
- "It's a very good, flexible product, and it's easy to learn."
- "The interface can be improved, in part because there is no indication that something is running or that it's processing."
What is most valuable?
It's a very good, flexible product, and it's easy to learn.
It's a new technology, so it's easy to get somebody up and running.
What needs improvement?
Scalability for large amounts of data needs improvement, as well as its performance.
From a scheduling perspective, if there is a sync up of the desktop dashboard into the server that we can publish as a web version, in an accessible way, that publishing scales and keeps on executing for hours. This can go on for eight to nine hours, but you have no indicator, you don't even see that it is processing. For example, there is no spinning wheel and all I see is a black screen.
The interface can be improved, in part because there is no indication that something is running or that it's processing. I would like to have some kind of indication that there is something processing on the interface.
Technical support could be faster or if they have any limitations of the product, they should openly communicate it. They could also just tell you that this product is intended for small volumes of data and may even suggest another solution.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been using the latest version of Tableau for several years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
As far as using low volumes of data, it is stable. If the data is too large then it becomes a problem.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
From a data perspective, the problem with scalability is after a point in time, the data becomes very large. For example, there is a way to sync the data and bring it to the desktop, and if the data is going to be seven GB or more, that is a huge amount of data and creates a problem with Tableau.
Based on our customers, we have different licenses. We have approximately 15 different customers.
How are customer service and technical support?
Technical support is fine, but it could be better. When we reached out with the large amounts of data, we were not provided with the correct solution.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We started with Tableau.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was straightforward. There were no issues.
It's a very simple installation, it doesn't take a lot of time to deploy.
What about the implementation team?
We did not use a consultant, we implemented ourselves.
We have a single person team for installation and maintenance.
What other advice do I have?
We plan to continue using this solution and I can recommend it.
It's a good product but large volume data is an issue. Maybe people will have to work around it to make it smaller. It requires splitting up the data into smaller data files or we need to find another way from Tableau itself. They may have another scalable product, that can be used for large amounts of data.
I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Manager at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
User-friendly, makes it easy to visualize data, and is easy to set up
Pros and Cons
- "It's very easy to visualize data with this product. The visualization maps of and frames that we have been able to cross-reference has been excellent."
- "The pricing is high. I'm using a student license, however, I know that even this license is very expensive. I've tried to have this product in our organization, however, it's quite expensive. We don't have the internal budget."
What is our primary use case?
I primarily use the solution for data visualizations. For example, for analysis in my job, you can use a cloud of words and data with zip codes that you can then use to pull up maps. It's very powerful. You can use also use it to create tables and data frames. You can cross-reference a lot of variables.
I just used the product to review data and for data visualization. For example, I was studying the numbers surrounding COVID-19. We were cross-referencing zip codes and data of infection in Brazil, and we are creating an assessment of regions in Sao Paulo state as COVID-19 was growing, so that we could suggest political actions to mitigate the risk of contamination.
What is most valuable?
It's very easy to visualize data with this product. The visualization maps of and frames that we have been able to cross-reference has been excellent.
It's extremely user-friendly. You can cross a lot of variables. It's much easier, for example, than Excel.
What needs improvement?
I'm not sure if the solution needs any improvements. It's the best solution we have here right now.
The pricing is high. I'm using a student license, however, I know that even this license is very expensive. I've tried to have this product in our organization, however, it's quite expensive. We don't have the internal budget.
If you're looking for other kinds of data, for example, non-structured data, they could make it much easier to use this kind of data. Tableau could create other features just for data visualization and non-structured data. It's a beautiful solution when you've got frames and tables. It's structured. However, if you don't have this kind of information on the data, it's quite difficult to use Tableau. I would say that if you have any feature that opens the opportunity to work with non-structured data, it would be excellent. For example, we do end up creating a lot of word clouds. With unstructured data it just doesn't translate quite right.
If you could use non-structured data to count the frequency of important words to find which word is more important, for example, that would be useful. I don't see Tableau doing this - counting the frequency of important words in a specific kind of text.
It would also be great if there was statistical modeling for non-structured data.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using the solution for more than six months. It's been less than a year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I don't work with large amounts of data. I don't have millions of data points. In terms of how I use the product, I've never had issues with stability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It the solution was better with non-structured data, its scalability might be very good.
I just have the student license for myself. There aren't a large number of people in our company that use it.
How are customer service and technical support?
I've never had a reason to contact technical support. Having never dealt with them, I can't speak to their level of knowledge or responsiveness. It's so simple to create my own account and use it, I've never had a reason to reach out.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup isn't too complex. The entire solution is pretty user friendly from beginning to end.
The deployment, in total, took less than three weeks.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The solution is quite expensive.
What other advice do I have?
We're just a customer. We don't have a business relationship with Tableau.
I currently have a student license. I'm not sure which version I currently have. I mostly leverage the solution for personal use.
I would warn those considering the solution to take a look at the price and make sure it is within their company's budget.
Overall, I would rate the product nine out of ten. I've been quite happy with it.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Operations Manager at iWantGreatCare
Good filters for data security, but reports should be downloadable as PDFs
Pros and Cons
- "This solution has improved insights into quantitative data."
- "Reports should be downloadable as PDF files."
What is our primary use case?
I used this solution for providing dashboard analytics from MySQL data.
How has it helped my organization?
This solution has improved insights into quantitative data.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable features are the user filters for data security and subscriptions to distribute images of reports.
What needs improvement?
The cost of the solution should be improved.
Reports should be downloadable as PDF files. Emails containing images of dashboards can be scheduled, but there is still demand for creating printable PDF snapshot views of dashboards. UPDATE - In fairness to Tableau, with the right design, dashboards that are downloadable can be created ad-hoc.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using this solution for three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Good
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Good - by licebnse model can be replaced by an enterprise model solution for large numbers of licenses.
How are customer service and technical support?
Good - customer success program is a great service
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I've looked briefly at Google Data Studios (good basic solution) and Amazon QuickSight which also looks good.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Check that you need the functionality that you pay for - Tableau is not cheap.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
No
What other advice do I have?
None
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Private Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Manager, BI & Analytics at Perceptive Analytics
The visualizations bring out patterns buried under a mountain of data. The tool offers unparalleled flexibility in terms of the types of visualisation that one can create.
What is our primary use case?
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.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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:
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
For how long have I used the solution?
One to three years.
How are customer service and technical support?
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.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
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.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

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