Wonjae BAE - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Managing Director at dfocus
Reseller
Top 5Leaderboard
Helps in KPI management and monitoring
Pros and Cons
  • "The solution helps users create dashboards and analyze data without relying on IT or product teams."
  • "The tool's OpenAI integration was announced last year. However, it is late. Tableau is a good solution for end customers. However, there are some concerns regarding the stability and performance of its server architecture, including SaaS services. The server side appears unstable, and performance issues are noticeable, often accompanied by unclear error messages."

What is our primary use case?

We use the solution for the client's management of KPIs; it involves monitoring various aspects. If they are a manufacturing company, key performance indicators revolve around production and other relevant factors.

What is most valuable?

The solution helps users create dashboards and analyze data without relying on IT or product teams. 

What needs improvement?

The tool's OpenAI integration was announced last year. However, it is late. Tableau is a good solution for end customers. However, there are some concerns regarding the stability and performance of its server architecture, including SaaS services. The server side appears unstable, and performance issues are noticeable, often accompanied by unclear error messages.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been working with the product for seven years. 

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February 2024
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I rate Tableau's stability a nine out of ten. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Our experience spans around 70 customers, covering manufacturing, pharmacy, trading, construction, universities, and the public sector. I rate the product's scalability a seven out of ten. 

How are customer service and support?

The tech support takes too much time to respond.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

How was the initial setup?

I rate the tool's setup a ten out of ten. While setting Tableau servers for customers, we often encounter challenges that vary based on their network configuration and operating systems, such as Windows or Linux.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

In Korea, the tool's pricing depends on the scale of usage. For instance, it's reasonable for a department with fewer than 50 users to adopt Tableau, like sales. However, the pricing becomes an issue when considering an enterprise solution for a larger user base, say 10,000 people.

What other advice do I have?

Tableau is integrating OpenAI's GPT feature. It will help to create automatic dashboards with natural language. Only ten percent of our customers use Tableau in the cloud since they prioritize their data. They don't want to import their data to the cloud. It is as per their policies and security advice. Traditional companies don't like exporting customer data outside the organizational network. 

Japanese data centers often support Korea. However, the challenge arises from the absence of a federal cloud data center in Korea. Consequently, utilizing Tableau Cloud may result in data being exported outside the country. This is not allowed legally for financial entities such as banks. 

However, the government does not regulate smaller companies like startups. Hence, they are more open to the cloud. This is not the case for public entities. They should install the software in the government's cloud. 

Our clients for Tableau are mainly enterprise businesses. I rate it a nine out of ten. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer:
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DorianS - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Author at SFApps.info
User
Top 10
Easy integration with interactive storytelling capabilities but needs to improve data preparation features
Pros and Cons
  • "Tableau has greatly enhanced our organization's data-driven decision-making processes by enabling us to create visually compelling reports and dashboards."
  • "Navigating through activities like cleansing, reshaping, and wrangling extensive or complicated datasets could prove challenging within the Tableau environment."

What is our primary use case?

My primary use case of Tableau was in conjunction with Salesforce to enhance my data visualization and analysis capabilities. 

Tableau empowers users to delve into their data deeply, effortlessly unlocking valuable insights and critical information. It's got a user-friendly interface and extensive visualization capabilities that allow me to create compelling reports and dashboards that help me make better decisions. 

How has it helped my organization?

Tableau has greatly enhanced our organization's data-driven decision-making processes by enabling us to create visually compelling reports and dashboards.

This capability has led to better communication between teams. Despite some limitations associated with custom data connectors, Tableau has proven to be an invaluable tool for aggregating data from multiple sources, offering us a complete view of our operations. 

This comprehensive perspective has allowed us to identify trends, make informed decisions, and optimize our strategies, ultimately leading to increased efficiency and competitiveness in our industry.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable features of Tableau for our organization have been the interactive storytelling capabilities and easy integration with Salesforce. We can create visual descriptions of data, making complex information accessible and interesting to all sides. This feature enables us to effectively communicate data-driven insights. 

In addition, our integration with Salesforce provides access to critical sales data in real-time, which facilitates quick decision-making and improves customer relationship management. Together, these features enable us to get the most out of our information assets, which helps us to develop informed actions and strategies.

What needs improvement?

Tableau is excellent at visualizing data, however, I think improving the data preparation features would be a great addition. Navigating through activities like cleansing, reshaping, and wrangling extensive or complicated datasets could prove challenging within the Tableau environment. 

Also, the settings for working with complex datasets also need to be changed. In the next version, it would be good to add user-friendly resources for beginners, such as interactive tutorials and templates, to make Tableau even more accessible to a wider audience.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used the solution for more than three months.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I used a range of solutions to find the best one. I haven't switched; I'm using them at the same time.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I evaluated QlikView.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Other
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Tableau
February 2024
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Gerardo Prado - PeerSpot reviewer
General Manager at Performma Ltda.
Real User
Offers great features together with several tools to visualize data and build dashboards
Pros and Cons
  • "Tableau Prep tool for data preparation is a most valuable tool."
  • "The solution could use more features in data analytics."

What is our primary use case?

We are consultants and implement this solution for many of our clients. We had a project for a telecommunications company, where we extracted the transaction data and helped them to find some trends and improve analytics. They were able to gain knowledge from the data and to see some KPI indicators and build some dashboards for commercial, risk and financial purposes. We help clients connect their raw data, prepare and clean, and generally carry out the cycle. We then help them to extract insights, trends and work on forecasting so they can visualize their indicators in dashboards or in some ad hoc analysis. I'm the general manager and we are partners with Tableau.

What is most valuable?

The solution has several platforms or tools to visualize data and to build dashboards. The Tableau Prep tool is great for data preparation and this is the most valuable tool for preparing data, cleaning and building data models or data warehouses. The main issue, and most companies have the same problem, is updating data, which they can do with Tableau Server, where you can synchronize data to automatically refresh daily, weekly or monthly. It means your dashboards and KPIs will be updated. Most people know Tableau because you can build beautiful dashboards, but the main beneficial features are behind the scenes.

What needs improvement?

The product could be improved with more features in data analytics. Tableau is not currently a good database for handling built-in models for data science in order to test, train and run the models. It's not currently an AI tool or a tool for machine learning. Right now it's more for non-expert users. If they could improve their analytical capabilities for data science tasks, it would be a better product. In order to carry out data science tasks now, we have to use Vertica for big data projects to discover and run machine learning models. It would be very good if they had their own machine learning capabilities built in. I'd like to see more features in data analytics, AI and machine learning capabilities.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using this solution for the past 12 years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is good, we haven't had many bugs. They provide many updates every week and we don't have problems with Tableau in general.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution is scalable, we have around 15% of our clients that are large scale businesses with the majority being small companies. We provide support for our customers.

How are customer service and technical support?

Two or three years ago, technical support was very good. I think that now there are many more users of Tableau, the technical support is not as good as it used to be, particularly in terms of the depth of analysis. It's more general these days. You can buy their professional services in order to get better support.

How was the initial setup?

Most companies find it very easy to implement Tableau and to make an impact with their data because it's very easy to install, to learn and to start using. For larger companies we combine Tableau with other solutions, such as Vertica or Alteryx or Hadoop or Python. That's a big project but most companies first need to solve their self-service BI. They need to find insights into their business and with Tableau it's very easy to do that. In minutes, you can gain many insights and discover knowledge without being an expert of business intelligence, let's say. Deployment takes an average of two months, it depends on the size of the company.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We are always evaluating this solution in relation to Microsoft Power BI and QlikView. Power BI requires knowledge of numerous other Microsoft products in order to get results from your implementation. You need an expert DBA that can handle it in cloud and many specialists to implement the Microsoft solution. People think that buying or using Power BI is all that they need to do, but that's not the case, Power BI is just the last step of the implementation. A lot needs to be done before implementation. It's the same when it comes to automatizing the data refresh. Tableau has just three products and you don't need much time to learn and to finish a project and be up and running. QlikView has less tools and less features for data preparation. Vertica is another database that handles built-in models for data science and for the data scientist, this is a good choice in order to run, test and train the models.

What other advice do I have?

It's important to understand your needs because if you only need to build dashboards, Tableau is not essential. But if you need a deeper business intelligence project, and you have higher expectations, Tableau would be the solution. If you only need to build some dashboards, you can use Power BI, it's a very good tool and it's cheaper. If your project is more ambitious then go for Tableau. Tableau has a lot of experience and can solve all the typical problems. I rate this solution a nine out of 10.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Hybrid Cloud
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
it_user1192905 - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief SAP - ICT (Digital & IT) at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Great for following KPIs, good performance and good for presentations
Pros and Cons
  • "The solution makes for very productive and really informative decision making. It can lead the whole business and build a strategy across whole working departments."
  • "The cost of owning the solutions from Tableau is much higher compared to any other analytical solutions."

What is our primary use case?

We have been using Tableau for all sorts of analytical tasks. When I was having an ERP SAP practice, we used SAP analytical tools and IBM Cognos plus Tableau for dynamic display session purposes. Tableau ended up being the best solution. That is why we moved over to Tableau. We predominantly implement and use Tableau. 

How has it helped my organization?

It's a pure data platform. Everyone relies on Tableau. Our departmental meetings and reports for monthly meetings and reviews happen live on Tableau. We can prepare all of our KPIs on it. In fact, all of our KPIs can be placed onto one single screen and divided into nine tiles that can be further divided.

We can easily review and define all of our KPIs. The data is perfectly validated. It allows us to run corporate and board presentations purely on Tableau's visualization center.

What is most valuable?

It's an extremely good product with respect to performance and analytics. 

All the transactions that are happening are happening in SAP and some of the solutions are in Oracle as well. The combination, the data extraction which is filtered into authenticated, validated financial data, sales data, material data, etc, into Tableau platform is very useful for us.   

The solution makes for very productive and really informative decision making. It can lead the whole business and build a strategy across whole working departments.

What needs improvement?

The licensing costs of Tableau are on the higher side and probably if you wanted more adaptability in usage across business divisions you need to have more reasonable pricing of licenses of Tableau. Tableau is a standalone product. That is a disadvantage.

Due to the fact that it is a standalone product, it has to extract the data from other ERP systems or other bespoke systems and other data systems, etc. If you have big data systems and you have got other informed decision-making tools and the data is being extracted into Tableau it is dependent on many other platforms.

In contrast, if you use SAP vertical data systems and you have SAP's Data Hub, etc., then everything is vertically integrated. The whole data pipeline is vertically integrated and there is a visualization screen right there as well. Therefore, you don't normally have to go for a separate integration process altogether or need a data extraction solution.

In the end, Tableau has got two or three disadvantages in the sense that it is not a seamlessly integrated platform, end-to-end platform. It's purely a standalone reporting tool. On top of that, the licensing cost is extremely on the higher side. Thirdly, IT divisions probably are a little bit hesitant to use Tableau due to the fact that separate training is required, and separate skill sets are needed to develop everything. 

The cost of owning the solutions from Tableau is much higher compared to any other analytical solutions.

For how long have I used the solution?

We've used Tableau for the past two and a half years or so.

How are customer service and technical support?

Technical support is okay. It depends on the countries. I was in Australia for some time and there the support is much better than in India. This is probably due to the fact that a number of users are struggling with it and you get delayed support here. It's better to use Tableau proactively and develop a center of excellence in our organization. That is what I did and it helped us out a lot. I don't have any complaints about technical support per se.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Tableau is undisputedly the number one analytical product in the world. I have given a long presentation to management and the CEO about what differentiates Tableau over other products such as Cognos and Hyperion, SAP, etc. Lumira also is a strong contender, however, Tableau is way ahead because of the dynamic reporting that is possible and the whole virtualization that is very easy to produce, or reproduce. The business users themselves enjoy working on Tableau much better than other solutions like SAP, Cognos, Hyperion, etc.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The pricing of the solution is a bit high.

What other advice do I have?

We're only customers. We don't have a business relationship with the company.

We have not moved to the cloud so far with this product. Only SAP Ariba is on the cloud. The rest of our solutions, all analytical solutions, are on-premise solutions only.

Businesses should know what exactly they can do with Tableau. It's not just a visualization center or dashboard. You can contact a lot of assets that are in use - such as institutional analytics, predictive analytics, and prescriptive analytics. It can integrate with any artificial intelligence learning solutions and analytic solutions. That is where big data analytics play an important role. Modern business is more focused on all sorts of big database analytical solutions, especially for retail and other larger CRM business.

A company needs to decide answers to questions such as "how do you extract data?" or "Which department wants what data?". They would definitely need to have an initial, extremely focused approach of implementing it, with the full participation of the business teams. That is how a successful Tableau implementation needs to happen. However, it doesn't end there. You also need to educate business users or corporates on the solution as well.

Tableau is an extremely good product. I'd advise other users to use all aspects of and take advantage of its capabilities. Tableau has many licensing products available and a whole analytical model should be under one platform rather than going for bits and pieces from Oracle, IBM, SAP, Microsoft, etc.  Tableau is undisputedly the leader of the whole analytical solution and it should remain so only because it should have a larger use phase.

The training of Tableau is good, however, users should be aware that the consultants' availability across various countries is limited. I'm from Bangalore and if I need a Tableau consultant it's very difficult to locate one. You can, however, often find freelancing consultants. They can also get the job done.

Overall, I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

There are so many solutions on the market. Primavera solution is a project management software. There is no product that can beat Primavera in the project management functions so you have many such project management products, SAP Project Manager, Product and Portfolio management is there, Microsoft Project is there. There are other Oracle project management solutions out there and then Primavera is there. 

When Oracle purchased this solution, the popularity of Primavera died out. I've personally stopped recommending that particular product. There are others that cost less, so why use that one?

Tableau should learn from Primavera, and ensure it builds its user base and market its abilities so that corporates understand the depth and breadth of its usage. Many only use 10-20% of its capabilities. It's the duty of Tableau to ensure potential use cases are advertised and more information is disseminated to corporates to help them understand how it can benefit them and why that should adopt it.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Senior Team Lead at Peristent Systems
Real User
Very interactive with great dashboards and good virtualization
Pros and Cons
  • "The action feature which Tableau has is very useful for us. If we click on one visualization, it will pass the value to another visualization. That interactivity within different visualizations is the most valuable feature of Tableau."
  • "The pricing is a bit higher than the competition. They'll need to lower it to stay competitive."

What is our primary use case?

We primarily use the solution for HR and energy dashboards. We have made and a few other dashboards for opportunities and accounts. 

What is most valuable?

Tableau has really good and interactive visualization and interactivity. 

The action feature which Tableau has is very useful for us. If we click on one visualization, it will pass the value to another visualization. That interactivity within different visualizations is the most valuable feature of Tableau.

What needs improvement?

Tableau would be really good if we could have predefined templates. I was doing a POC another newer tool, Einstein Analytics. They have predefined templates already set up. These predefined templates do the heavy lifting for the initial dashboards. We don't have to build them from scratch. Our dashboards look really good and 20 to 30% of the look and feel of the dashboard completes with the predefined templates. If Tableau works on the predefined templates, that would be so helpful to a lot of companies. It would save time for the developers.

The pricing is a bit higher than the competition. They'll need to lower it to stay competitive.

They need to move more into machine learning AI. Right now, in a POC that I'm doing with Einstein Analytics, they are more into machine learning and AI. Tableau is lagging as of now. If they want to have a long run in the market, they need to integrate machine learning and AI. It has to be very robust.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using the solution for two years now.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I can say that this solution is quite scalable. I'd rate it eight out of ten. It integrates with many solutions. I haven't used our code in everything, however, I have used it for our HR integration and I find the code is quite scalable. 

In the last project I managed, there were 110 regular users of the solution with about 20 suer-users that were able to edit reports and dashboards and tasks of that nature.

How are customer service and technical support?

I'd give technical support a nine out of ten. There were time zone differences. However, I got a timely reply and call from them, so it was very good. The support is very good. It's both responsive and helpful. I'm quite satisfied with them.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I've used BusinessObjects and MicroStrategy as well. I used to use Power BI for a few months.

The main competitor to this product is Power BI, which I also use. This license is a bit costly compared to Power BI. Not more, but a bit costly from what I've seen.

There's not much of a difference between Power BI and Tableau. They have the same kind of interface and the features. The main difference between the BusinessObjects and the others is that its an enterprise tool. The licensing cost of the BusinessObjects is very, very expensive. The visualizations and objects etc., all have separate licensing for dashboarding. On top of that, the chart's not that interactive. If you click on one chart, it will automatically change the data of the several other charts related to that. That is not very interactive compared to Tableau or Power BI.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was not exactly straightforward. It was complex, or, to be fair, had a medium amount of complexity to it. The use cases were complex also and few of them had medium complexity to begin with.

Deployment was basically in the development environment and then we deployed it in the UAT for the users. They had a look at our reports in UAT first and then we deployed it into production. I was also working as a Tableau administrator also and then I learned Tableau administration in order to handle that aspect. I handled Tableau administration with the user and deployed the reports, etc.

The company has different verticals basically. I worked on HR and energy verticals. They also had finance and accounts. I have to maintain that administration part for all of them; not just my dashboards. From a deployment perspective, it was tough for me to maintain all the users and all the rules for the accounts department and for finance, and to be in the group for them, and to assign permissions for them. I did have issues in the servers in terms of gateways. I resolved them myself in the end with the help of Tableau support. 

What about the implementation team?

I handled the implementation myself. I didn't need the assistance of a reseller or consultant.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The company chose to purchase a creator license for me, which was $70. With that license, you can also be an administrator. We also have 20-25 extra licenses and they cost around $20-$35 each. Those are for normal users who will be viewing the dashboards. Those are monthly charges.

There aren't any other costs over and above that.

Apart from that we had database licensing. So because we used Snowflake as a cloud database.

What other advice do I have?

Our company has a partnership with Tableau.

I've used both on-premises and cloud, depending on the requirements.

This particular solution is quite an easy to use product. It's very robust. Even a layman who has previously was not worked with any other BI tools would love to work on this. They will find many things easier to implement. There are a few other tools that are in the market. However, from an implementation point of view, it's very robust. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten overall.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
Fintech Project Manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Good for personal usage and small setups
Pros and Cons
  • "A valuable feature of Tableau is that it is a useful tool for small setups. I shuffle between Tableau and MicroStrategy, so I use Tableau for personal purposes more than enterprise. I like the light version of Tableau for personal usage and doing some use cases on my own. When it comes to something small, I use Tableau for setups, rather than any other tool."
  • "I think Tableau could be improved with cheaper or more flexible licensing, though this is a generic improvement and applies for any product. It would be better if they had more flexible payment and licensing plans so that they could suit small- and mid-sized organizations."

What is our primary use case?

Our primary use case of Tableau is to elaborate and demonstrate output from our big data solution. For example, we use it for finding out the best location for cases, such as fraud cases. Presently, we are using Tableau to find out the original fraud case, the initiator of the fraud process, and the network. Tableau is used with our big data solution, so it's embedded there, before Oracle even. 

Tableau is deployed on-premise. In my organization, we have a very strict environment, so we don't have a policy for having anything on cloud. 

What is most valuable?

A valuable feature of Tableau is that it is a useful tool for small setups. I shuffle between Tableau and MicroStrategy, so I use Tableau for personal purposes more than enterprise. I like the light version of Tableau for personal usage and doing some use cases on my own. When it comes to something small, I use Tableau for setups, rather than any other tool. 

What needs improvement?

I think Tableau could be improved with cheaper or more flexible licensing, though this is a generic improvement and applies for any product. It would be better if they had more flexible payment and licensing plans so that they could suit small- and mid-sized organizations. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Tableau since 2016. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I haven't had any issues with stability. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Theoretically, Tableau is scalable, but I haven't tried to scale it yet. 

How are customer service and support?

I have never contacted technical support. 

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I shuffle between available tools—I also use MicroStrategy, Microsoft Power BI, and Qlik. 

Before using Tableau, I used Oracle BI, Oracle ODI, and Teradata. 

How was the initial setup?

The installation was an easy process, and I've done it myself twice. I'm a technical guy, so I didn't need a technical team to help with deployment, I did it on my own. 

What about the implementation team?

I implemented this solution myself. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

We pay for the enterprise license for Tableau. The licensing could be cheaper and more flexible. 

What other advice do I have?

I rate Tableau an eight out of ten. I recommend Tableau, and I even recommend it here in my organization. Their plan was to replace it with Qlik, but I did an assessment and advised them not to pay extra costs for other tools when Tableau was already in place in our organization. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Tech Lead at MindTree
Real User
There's no intermediate semantic layer, so the learning curve isn't as steep
Pros and Cons
  • "Tableau is an advanced specialized tool. One of the best features I've seen is the lack of an intermediate semantic layer. I think that's an advantage compared to any other tool like BusinessObjects or Power BI, which are Tableau's biggest competitors."
  • "Tableau support could be improved."

What is our primary use case?

We have Tableau installed in a massive environment. The Tableau sector is on a seven-cluster node, including one with two nodes for high availability. In our initial setup, Tableau was deployed across the entire infrastructure, so that's more than a hundred sites and around 30,000 active users, and each site has several projects, too. We have around 11,000 workbooks in total.

The maintenance of the entire infrastructure is done on-premises, including user management, authentication, authorization, permissions, and publication. We are constantly doing these tasks, including the SSL certificate renewals. 

What is most valuable?

Tableau is an advanced specialized tool. One of the best features I've seen is the lack of an intermediate semantic layer. I think that's an advantage compared to any other tool like BusinessObjects or Power BI, which are Tableau's biggest competitors. All of these have semantic layering, so the learning curve is high. Users have to understand the data model and the relationships, but Tableau has no data model, so you only need to know the relationships of the direct inquiry to build a report. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using Tableau for about six or seven years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Tableau is stable, and I believe stability is essential. Our infrastructure has been set up right. The last two updates have had very few bugs, so stability-wise, it is excellent. However, performance is something we need to investigate further. It's hard to say whether performance problems are on the Tableau side or an issue with the infrastructure or the data sources. If there is a performance issue, we can't identify precisely where the problem is. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability is good. We already have some help from professional services, and we've conducted an analysis showing that the number of users will be increasing every year.

How are customer service and support?

Tableau support could be improved.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I've worked with SAP BusinessObjects. Tableau is a visualization tool built into the infrastructure for doing analysis. That's Tableau's focus. BusinessObjects is for doing analysis of some data and then sharing it on the server. 

BusinessObjects is an enterprise tool that needs an extensive infrastructure. It requires a proper IT team to configure the semantic layer and the universal support and then build the report. And the most significant advantage enterprise tools have is pixel-perfect reporting. You can create a pixel-perfect report and share it as a PDF or Excel file with the same format. Tableau is more or less a self-service analytics tool, so we do not have those kinds of features. There are a good amount of differences between these two.

How was the initial setup?

Setting up Tableau is straightforward, and I don't think it took long. It took maybe a day or two for the installation and migration and all that. However, the planning took some time because we worked with professional services. Planning took maybe 40 hours. Tableau requires a good deal of maintenance. We have a team of about five or six people for the administration.

What about the implementation team?

We had professional services to help us.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

SAP and Tableau have different pricing models. Their code-based license is around $13 to $15 per year. I don't think Tableau has a code-based licensing model at all, so those enterprise tools are on the higher side.But on the other hand, Power BI is on the cheaper side compared to Tableau. Power BI is much more affordable and also good.

What other advice do I have?

I rate Tableau eight out of 10. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
Assistant Manager at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 10
A BI solution with a useful calculation feature, but it would be better if there was more automation
Pros and Cons
  • "I like the calculation feature. I would not say it's such a good feature in Tableau, but if you have the knowledge, you can make that feature visible to everyone. It's not a feature that we can drag and drop and get the information. But whatever the data, whatever the calculation, I'm able to do. It's basically the knowledge base. Whatever knowledge I have, I can make that information public and publish it for management."
  • "Many things have to be improved in Tableau. Right now, we make the calculation, and then we get that information. It would be better if business users could do that. I would ask the people at Tableau to provide that option to business users to get that information in one click. It would be better if they automated some calculations. There should be more automation in Tableau. However, there are many things in automation mode, but it is very limited at the moment. We need automation for people who do not know much about Tableau. It would also be better if there were good community support like in Alteryx."

What is our primary use case?

We use Tableau to make dashboards and valuable information and insights available for management. We are creating some solutions and a dashboard, and people are using it to see the information. We use it globally across 118 countries.

It is basically the manufacturing clients we have all across the globe. They want to measure the production level, how we are getting the product delivered to the customer, and where they are lacking. They want answers to questions like "why are we not getting it up? Where do we need to improve?" They are preparing and analyzing which steps are taking too much time to get that delivered.

How has it helped my organization?

Tableau has helped improve our organization by enabling layman people to use it.

What is most valuable?

I like the calculation feature. I would not say it's such a good feature in Tableau, but if you have the knowledge, you can make that feature visible to everyone. It's not a feature that we can drag and drop and get the information. But whatever the data, whatever the calculation, I'm able to do. It's basically the knowledge base. Whatever knowledge I have, I can make that information public and publish it for management.

What needs improvement?

Many things have to be improved in Tableau. Right now, we make the calculation, and then we get that information. It would be better if business users could do that. I would ask the people at Tableau to provide that option to business users to get that information in one click.

It would be better if they automated some calculations. There should be more automation in Tableau. However, there are many things in automation mode, but it is very limited at the moment. We need automation for people who do not know much about Tableau. It would also be better if there were good community support like in Alteryx.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Tableau for the last three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Tableau has been stable for us.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scalability depends on your data and how you make calculations. That becomes your scalability. About 20% of all our organizational users are currently using Tableau.

How are customer service and support?

The technical support for Tableau is just online, and they don't have an option where I can call support.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We used OBIEE Oracle before, but it was very limited. We were moved on to a different solution because we saw it as a better option. Tableau is a better option when compared to OBIEE, and we have been using it for six or seven years. 

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is straightforward for people who are using it at a basic level. The advanced level is highly complex. The implementation strategy depends on the requirements we are getting from the people and the stakeholder. I would say that management is talking to us, and they are asking us to build the solution they want to have in place. They do not know whether it is technically feasible or not, but they know that this is the requirement. 

What about the implementation team?

We implemented this solution on our own.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

In Indian Rupees, Tableau costs about 30,000 to 40,000 per year. 

What other advice do I have?

I would tell potential users that many things are not available in Tableau. Even Power BI is better than Tableau because there are many things that are good for the business. Effective visualization is not there in a Tableau. If I know of a better solution than Tableau, I would surely go for that other solution.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Tableau a four.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Other
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
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Updated: February 2024
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Tableau Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.