Tableau Reviews

We have used this solution for enterprise reporting, ad hoc data exploration, and visualization.

While using this solution I have found the valuable features to be ease of use and the visualization. It is a complete solution.

The data preparation could integrate better with Tableau.

I have been using this solution for approximately eight years.

When it comes to stability this solution is very good.

I have found this solution to be highly scalable, we have approximately 800 people in my organization using it and plan to increase usage.

The technical support responsiveness was good. However, we had some tough questions that they could not help us with.

I previously used another solution and switched because Tableau is easy to use, support is good, lower price, and for their community.

The installation is very straightforward for both desktop and server solutions. The desktop only takes a few minutes and the server takes half an hour.

We used consultants for the implementation. We have a team of six that does the maintenance, which includes, server, application, and content administrators.  

This solution is a bit expensive.

The pricing options have become more difficult over the years. I think they are bordering on pricing themselves out of the market. They need different pricing options for various-sized businesses. Where my organization is a large organization, we are happy to pay a higher price because we can leverage the products very extensively. For smaller enterprises, different pricing options would be good.

I would recommend this solution to others to start using it.

I rate Tableau a nine out of ten.

Tableau is good for data analysis.

The most valuable feature is the geographic data analysis.

It provides functionality for sending email alerts.

The performance is good compared to some other products.

It should offer better features for customization. It would be nice to have features such as border design.

I have been working with Tableau for three years.

This is a stable product.

The technical support is good.

I have worked with Pentaho and Microsoft BI. I found that the performance of these products didn't compare with that of Tableau.

The price of Tableau is high, although there are different types of licenses available.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use this solution for enterprise reporting, dashboarding, and insight.

We have an eight-core server. There are up to seven hundred unique consumers weekly, and twelve hundred monthly. There are twenty-five power users that publish to the server on a regular basis.

This solution has transformed us from an Excel reporting environment to one of visual exploration. We don't just look at the numbers, we can easily explore why a number is what it is.

The most valuable feature is the "drag and drop" environment. We also appreciate the ease of use for adoption with "row-level" internal customers.

I would like Tableau to handle geospatial data better in terms of multiple layers and shapefiles.

Easily visualize data.

I'm able to prototype charts/dashboards in hours vs days or weeks with other tools (mainly Excel). Doesn't require me to think about the level of aggregation that I'm going to need as it deals with large data sets. Blends disparate datasets together which is awesome for plan vs actual reports where the data is a two different levels of granularity.

Needs a metadata solution plus some enhanced ETL functionality.

Edit: v9 introduced some light metadata solutions that are helpful from Excel.

4 years

None.

Initially used Tableau at a large electric utility where we were largely using Excel. Utility had bought into SAP BusinessObjects but IT had locked down these tools so much that all we had was Excel. Used to work at BOBJ myself but I haven't used their tools in while. We're going with Tableau right now because it works for our dept and we could get it working quickly and without an enormously long and expensive project to get IT involvement.

Now I work for a small start-up but one of the first things I did was to get a copy of Tableau. 

Very easy to build with a rudimentary understanding of databases and data.

So far we're just using the Tableau Desktop, so just the licenses for that. The Reader is free to deploy. We've just started to pilot Server.

Everyone is always impressed with the charts that Tableau can produce. As well as the ability quickly modify them.

Tableau excels at data visualization and exploration. Terminologies such as a "sheet" are similar to the concept of a worksheet in Excel. Connection to most databases are supported out of the box. These factors keeps the learning curve short for business users. Charts in Tableau are rendered using visualization grammar called VizQL. This enables creating unique and out-of-box charts such as lollipop, sankey, sunburst, etc. The charts you can build in Tableau is only limited by your creativity. In addition, it is relatively to easy build interactivity and pass parameters in your dashboards so you can drill in and progressively reveal more details as the user interacts with data.

Tableau has empowered the business users to get answers to their data questions without relying on IT teams. Rather than following build, wait, and iterate cycle, business teams are able to analyze the data much more quickly and identify opportunities for efficiency and revenue generation. Prior to the adoption of Tableau, data was present in multiple spreadsheet; thus, there was a lack of "single source of truth". This problem was resolved by using "Published Data Sources" residing on Tableau Server.

Many areas for improvement are in Enterprise features. Some of which are:

1. A private folder on the server for a user to store his/her files.

2. A built-in tool for deployment and migration between multiple Tableau Server environments.

3. Ability to share a "database connection" between multiple Tableau data sources so that one change to connection information will be reflected in multiple data sources which share that connection.

4. Email distribution: Delivering analytics via emails on enterprise scale is difficult.

Areas for improvement in Visual Analytics:

1. Blending improvements: Slow performance when two sources are blended together on a high cardinality dimension. Blending does not support full outer join and does not allow using non-additive measures ( e.g. count distinct, average) from secondary data sources.

Update for Tableau 10.1: Some of the above are getting addressed in version or in future version as per Tableau road-map declared at Tableau Conference 2016 in Austin, TX. Specifically, there may be features for private folder in future. Tableau migration pains are somewhat alleviated with TabMigrate, their open source tool ( no support) and email distribution is getting better with conditional subscriptions ( 10.1).

Four years. Eleven years in BI.

In my experiences, Tableau deployment has been straightforward when deploying self contained dashboards (called packaged workbooks). However, you need to follow multiple steps to deploy a dashboard to your production server from your development environments.

Tableau (both Desktop + Server) is one of most stable software I have worked with.

Scalability in Tableau depends on many factors such as server configuration, networking, and workbook design. In my experience, the single biggest factor that affects scalability is the dashboard design. Excessive use of quick filters, multiple data sources blended together, long conditional expressions impact scalability. Reading "Designing efficient workbooks" whitepaper is extremely helpful. If your dashboards follow the best practices, it is possible to accomplish near-linear scalability by scaling your Tableau Server horizontally or vertically for large number of concurrent users.

Tableau customer service is very helpful and responsive. Both the customer service and technical support are integrated into their customer portal.

Tableau technical support is very professional and responsive. Many questions are answered in 1-2 business days depending on the severity. However, specific questions such as improving performance fall outside their scope. Thankfully, the Tableau community is one of the most engaged, knowledgeable, and helpful community. If you have a question that is not already answered by the community (very rare), you are guaranteed to receive a response within a few hours.

Yes. I have prior experience with SAP Business Objects, Lumira, Sisense, as well as javascript charting tools such as Highcharts, D3JS, etc. The biggest reason for switching are: ease of use, agility to deliver insightful answers from your data, and large number of chart types.

Initial setup was very straightforward involving running the installer program. I did not run into any issues with multiple versions of Tableau Desktop or Tableau Server.

All of my implementation have been in-house working closely with IT team.

Tableau pricing is competitive with the other options available in the market.

Yes. We evaluated Microstrategy v10, Sisense, SAP Business Objects.

Before committing to Tableau, it is helpful to list the top problems you are trying to resolve. If most of your needs are in operational business intelligence, you might want to evaluate other tools in addition to Tableau. If you want to analyze data, discover insights, communicate your story with data, or impress your customers with great visualizations, Tableau is by far the best tool.

For a successful Tableau adoption it is very important to have strong business user support and understanding the importance of data-driven decisions. Without the business user engagement, Tableau is just another tool.

Visualization and ease of use are the product’s most valuable features. Dependency on the IT team has been reduced. Users feel comfortable creating their own dashboards.

Tableau Provides a set of different visualizations that were not available in OBIEE. The dashboards help narrate a story. As an organization, we were able to bring in more people to use our platform because it was easy to use and helped business teams make quick decisions. In OBIEE, the business was dependent on IT vendors to generate reports. With Tableau, non-technical business users have become familiar with creating dashboards, thus reducing dependency on IT vendors.

We were not able to implement organization-wide security the way it exists in BO or OBIEE. We had to do a workaround to restrict access by transferring roles on the portal using Java and PHP to restrict content.

The second area for improvement is the processing large amount of data using R.

Finally, I’d like to see Tableau have more statistical capability.

I have used it for three years now and am pretty happy. We're going to upgrade on 9.3 in Q3/Q4.

I have not encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues to date.

We are planning to increase our infrastructure to support more complex queries in Tableau. We are still in process of integrating R with Tableau. This is one area where I can see problems as R and Tableau both have issues processing large amount of data.

I rate technical support 8/10.

We were using OBIEE for generating dashboards and wanted to upgrade our system with better visualization tools.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward, except for security. Also, we had to change the entire data model so that we could get in Tableau dashboards similar to those we had in OBIEE.

Technical expertise: in-house. Support: vendor team. I recommend that in-house implementation to bring expertise onto the team.

We were able to see 200% increase in usage of the platform vs usage of OBIEE.

We evaluated Spotfire, QlikView & Sisense. It came down to a tough choice between Spotfire and Tableau. We finally selected Tableau because it is good in providing visualizations, its integration with R, and it has a lot of connectors with various databases that Spotfire does not have. It also looked promising that it would provide more features in future releases.

Do not think twice about it; just go for it to find new insights in your data. There is a great future for this tool. It will help you perform basic statistical analysis. It will give you a different way to look at data structures.

• Easy interaction with data
• Variety of visualizations possible
• Integration with R and Alteryx

We do a lot of work for our clients helping them understand the impact of marketing campaigns on their business results. Tableau helps us tell stories with data.

It helps us shorten the interval between raw data and actionable insight. We used it to standardize basic tracking and optimization functions for our digital media campaigns. We’re also developing a broader analytics practice, diving into the impact of on-line and off-line media combined.

There is a pretty steep learning curve, the product would be better if it were somehow more intuitive to use.

I’ve been using Tableau for about three years.

We have a small number of licenses with one Tableau server; we haven’t had any deployment, stability or scalability issues yet.

Generally, technical support is very good; responsive with generally effective solutions.

We primarily used Excel prior to Tableau. We are aware of some of the others, but for us, it is not worth investing the time re-inventing our process.

Initial setup went well; straightforward to install and get started. Takes a while to master the basics.

Implemented in-house. It would be helpful to have someone with a year of Tableau experience on staff to speed ramp up.

ROI is difficult to estimate as a lot of our use case revolves around streamlining internal processes / analysis. We are now providing analytic solutions to clients where we price on our hours, plus pass through costs for seats on the Tableau Server and a monthly maintenance fee. As we scale this up, we expect to drive profitable revenue through our analytics products.

It makes sense to implement it in tandem with Alteryx. Use Alteryx to clean / prep data, and then visualize in Tableau. Tableau is not the place to try to clean / join data.

It has ease-of-use features that make it a good data discovery tool for use with our clients. Additionally, the ability to rapidly mine data and visualize data issues for clients is valuable.

We can use this tool with our internal data as well as on client sites to rapidly evaluate data sets and gain understanding of patterns rapidly.

The integration of multiple data sources has sometimes been difficult and the size limitations are sometimes an issue.

We have been evaluating this product for approximately six months now.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

We are very early in our project but do not see any major limits yet.

Customer service has been excellent.

Technical support is very good.

No previous solution was in place.

The connections to the SQL data and flat files were straightforward.

Implementation was all done in-house.

Unknown at this time.

• Tableau
• PowerPivot/PowerBI
• Birst
• Sisense

1. Understand your business hierarchies intimately.

2. Create flattened data files for roll-ups.

3. Be prepared to clean and process data prior to use.