Tableau Reviews

Tableau works for a diverse range of industries and use cases. I have work with Tableau for big organizations and big governmental entities as well.

Tableau has comprehensive, insightful charts, which allow you to build stunning dashboards and enrich your support decision-making.

• Ease of use
• Maps
• Filters
• Drag and drop functionality
• Dates
• Undo button
• Wide-range of data connectors

• Scripting just as loops would be great. 
• Forecasting on table calculation fields.

• Easier to use

• Consultant engagement
• Margin analysis 
• Project break-even point (analysis of the project)
• SLE of projects

Tableau's very stable.

So far, so good.

There are two faces of Tableau. One face is Tableau partners. They are very few, and Tableau was only a subsidiary with no support and no representative in Brazil. Now they are represented. 

Really, there aren't many problems with Tableau.

ClickView. ClickView seemed easy to use, very simple, but it could not support the whole company. It couldn't be scaled.

We looked at Oracle BI. It seems that it's very easy to use, very competitive against Tableau, and it's a little bit cheaper. It seems that we have a competitive advantage going with Oracle. 

Oracle in the past had OBIEE that was hard to use, very expensive, and modeling was hard. Changing the modeling was difficult. We decided not to go with Oracle at that time. Now it's cloud-based, the TCO is very cheap. But we had already gone with Tableau.

We only it for the financial side of the company. We don't use it on other projects, for example, the production side, the IT of the company. Only for financial. I would say that the result is we have a lack of users, it's only part of company; we don't have a whole view of the business.

The most valuable features are:

• Ease of setup
• Ability to create visualizations
• Level of interaction.

The users required no training after visualizations have been presented to them.

There are some areas where finding answers required asking specific individuals and searching through many emails. Tableau has allowed us to combine and visualize data from many entry points and provide users with a single source of consistent and reliable information.

While noted that the product is specifically designed for visualization, it would be the perfect tool if it had more ETL features.

My company has been researching a BI tool for the past year. We came across Tableau and have been using the public version for approximately six months.

There have not been any areas of instability, thus far. The identified areas were a result of a lack of knowledge.

Based on the analysis currently being done, the public version is sufficiently meeting our needs.

Technical support has been awesome. We met a partner based in Trinidad and they have been providing us with assistance as we need it.

This is our first visualization solution being used. Attempts were made on another platform, but setup and use of tool were a huge challenge for the team.

The initial setup was very straightforward. The team was able to follow the videos posted on the Tableau website and required no technical assistance from the Tableau team.

I am quite pleased that Tableau has now revised their pricing and licensing. The initial model was quite expensive but the current model allows you to scale up as you need to and it is far more attractive. The ability to license on a per user per month basis is now very affordable.

The team looked at Pentaho, Microsoft Power BI, and IBM Cognos. The members of the team who were exposed to aspects of the evaluation were far more receptive to Tableau than the others.

It is very important to do an evaluation of your users who will be interacting with the tool. Their technical abilities will determine if a cumbersome tool is suitable for them. Secondly, if you do not have the technical expertise to administer a product, then it may not be the solution for you. Some of the other tools require a high dependence on the vendor for administrative purposes.

It’s good for quick visualization and being able to quickly consume unstructured data to play around with. This is good way to show a demonstration/prototypes of dashboards and scenarios for design discussions on reporting requirements or to show what the data is telling us when it comes to features of data integration, OLAP services, data mining and extract, transform, and load (ETL) capabilities.

Good for adhoc visualization of an unstructured dataset which comes from other sources outside of source systems that you can overlay on top of the structured data and you have to get a quick visualization dashboard prototype going. It helps with the Agile design build and can be used in our current operations analytics work to overlay multitude of data sources that we know of. Can always work offline, which is nice. It’s good for organizations with very limited staff to do quick report builds and dashboards that can be put on our SharePoint site for sharing or on reports when responding to data caps. I use it a lot for design discussions so I can communicate the gaps in data sources for data exchanges or to generate a storyboard prototype of how the data is to be used in visualization but where we need to have data exchange/ETLs on.

It is good for its use if ad hoc, offline, or needed for quick turnaround on reports/dashboards. It is not so great when it comes to data exchange/integration, data mining, etc. I rely on what’s available in current versions to see what APIs and plugins that I can use and they have Open Source on GitHub is a plus to share things to re-use.

Room for improvement is more on data integration features that are agnostic to any solution platform but can be plug and play to be able to reuse what was built out Tableau in any other platform of work.

Over five years, and the past three more for integrating the use of a similar family of tools where Tableau is one of a few options in our environment, where these services are considered for quick-hit items as needed, given time, dollars, and analyst skills.

No.

Yes, see other answers. Scalability per user defined elements are okay but not so much for enterprise wide reuse. Per license cost can have some work done to it to make it more affordable on the recurring maintenance end of things. I would like to see more subscription based models.

I don’t have to use it much since I can get much of this through current site materials and social media blogs/videos.

I didn’t switch. It was just a matter of seeing where Tableau makes sense as a service to use in our environment, which is for the simpler, not so complex, but quick turnaround. Worked with other technology stacks that are similar, like Information Builders, SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, SAS, MicroStrategy, IBM, Salesforce, Qlik, etc. I find Tableau the easiest on visualization and its license model straightforward. But when it comes to scaling to other interoperation work, not so great on the wizard template, to do data mining/exchange. It doesn’t have that robust analytics and intelligence self-learning feature that comes with other tools.

It’s straightforward, like any typical software. You have just got to understand what the various versions of API and plugins and what they can do. Though I have noticed that there were situations where it was said it was able to do things, but not until a later version. It needs better communication on that front.

License small scale and run with it to get a business case going on its use. Give the licenses only to those analysts you want to do quick turnaround visualizations and those that know the data sources/data (those that don’t will just have access to tool and that compounds a problem with giving you something nice to look at but no meaning behind it, which I wouldn’t recommend). Look to existing platforms of one’s current BI environment and see if you can have a server license which can reduce the per user licenses.

I wish there was more of a subscription model with the pricing when it comes to Tableau, so you can get all the latest version upgrades/features if you pay monthly/annually, rather than buy straight up licenses that you lock to a baseline version and have to pay for upgrades later on. It limits how many users you can get on the thing, and it's not like you will use it all the time.

Yes, we did an alternatives analysis of all the product line options against our criteria of need in our environment, where recurring cost, time to implement, and other interoperation, security, platform scalability, architecture, etc. factors play a role. The majority were mentioned above.

We always have the latest versions of Tableau (part of the package deal), so we can have the latest in APIs and integration hooks and plugins needed across our platforms of OBIEE, SQL, etc.

Tableau is good for quick visualization once you have the data, but not such a great interoperable tool or getting to multiple sources without a lot of work and know-how. Good for pulling in unstructured data and doing quick reports/prototypes. Does require some stronger business analytical skills rather than your novice user (and technical with regards to use of API and plugins).

If new to the analytics/BI market, use it, as it's good for getting you jumpstarted to understanding your data/data sources and to envision what you can use the data for. It's a good starting tool for that. If more advanced or need it for interoperation, I suggest looking to see how it fits with your current environment and determine where best to use it as it shouldn’t be your only option as the features are not robust enough to scale for everything.

The following features were why we picked Tableau:

1. Ease of use and integration.
2. Analysis of data without need for coding.
3. Gold standard intuitive, interactive, visualization experience.

Non tech users are able to use the self contained platform, interact with data and share findings.

1. Tableau Online does not have any way of automating the usage reports. You can download them as a PDF but have to do so manually to distribute them. There is no way to schedule these reports for business users who would like to measure users activity.
2. While you can see how many licenses are used, there is no way to see how many licenses are available for use. You have to contact support to get this information.

We have used this solution for six months.

No, we have not experienced any downtime or stability issues as yet with Tableau Online.

No, we have not experienced any scalability issues as yet with Tableau Online.

I would rate the technical support as eight out of 10. There are some inherent issues that are related to versions that they were not able to sort out and tickets remained unresolved.

We used SSRS as our reporting solution. We switched because the deployment was archaic.

We deployed the solution using IFrame via Salesforce.com. We experienced issues while configuring SSO through SAML.

Tableau was not accepting any metadata files that were uploaded whether they were new or ones that have we had worked on in the past. It claimed they were “invalid”. We opened a support ticket to find that this was a known issue. With the help of support, the issue was resolved at the Tableau back end.

The quote is only valid for 15 days. There may be price changes (after 15 days) that might impact your cost and finance budget.

We evaluated eight vendors: Power BI, Tableau, Qlik, SAS, MicroStrategy, Domo, Sisense, and R Shiny. We compared FOSS and COTS options, assessed feature sets, vendors, and support. COTS was preferred, with Tableau edging out Power BI.

Be sure to review all the vendors and features/functionality. There are many products out there in the market today.

Visualization and storytelling.

• Integrity of KPIs and business data with connection to more than one database.
• Clarity in business opportunities (through proper graphics, parameters, filters, etc.).

Sometimes, when the KPIs or metrics are kind of complex, Tableau could slowdown in the timing of the process and respond (clicks).

Six months.

No.

if you don't have specific/professional skills in database architecture, you may face trouble regarding this.

Medium. Some space for improvement.

Yes, QlikView.

Kind of complex, because the amount of data we currently manage in our company is very big. We also work with a DWH that was not properly designed to serve as source of data to a BI platform, so we have to do a lot of arrangements in our DB, tables structure, and connections.

To be careful about the specific functions and capabilities between the different license options (Server, Online, etc.). The price could be very different, so will the functional options, too.

Yes, OBIE.

To be very clear about the expectations of the BI Project, to work in a very deep and detailed way regarding the PMO, and to clearly identify the key users and sponsors.

The feature which I value the most about Tableau is its ability to plot nonstandard charts/graphs, such as coxcomb, streamgraph, chord, sankey, and hexbin charts, etc. The map feature is cool, too. For now, it can integrate with Mapbox and other WMS services. I wish in the future there were more choices.

Unlike most of products which have a limited period for trial use, Tableau Public is free, and because of that, our team is able to hold a regular workshop, in which each team member can have chances to share of what he/she learned from using the tool.

I think dashboard and story can still improve. For example, the placement of sheets on dashboard are quite tedious work, especially when the page is long. The automation of adjusting size of sheets has given us a hard time to place sheets neatly on the dashboard, even though the intention is good. As for story, just wish there could be more templates.

Two to three years.

I think Tableau is quite stable, but it is likely to be an effect from another service, such as Web Map Service. Whenever there’s problem with the WMS, Tableau hangs with it.

Not yet.

Fairly good, since there are lots of forums and tutorials on the web which you can find.

We used IBM Cognos back then, but it’s really not easy to use and since it’s an integration of variety of services, it’s quite confusing sometimes. Plus it required training lessons, which aren’t cheap at all.

The initial setup is straightforward and easy.

I think Tableau could try to have different types of pricing and licensing packages, since there are a variety of users with different needs. For example, some users prefer to buy a license for one time only and use the service without upgrade for a long period of time, but some prefer monthly subscriptions.

Besides Cognos, we also evaluated Power BI, SAP Lumira, Pentaho, OBIEE, BO, Spago, etc., but most of them are either too expensive, lack functionality, have limited usage of charts, are hard to use and unfriendly.

It’s really an A+ product. Other than being a customer, we also suggest to our clients this product.

User interface is designed for ease of use for non-technical users. Users can pick up the product without attending training session. This is a plus.

I have only used it to demonstrate the ease of use to financial type users in the commercial market. It is used in academia as a simply learning aid for data visualization.

Integration with big data platform is a plus for any BI tool. They need to perform ETL/ELT operations with a direct connect to Hadoop ecosystem and RStudio for data quality tasks or offer a similar features.

Two years in academia and briefly with the State of Texas in a three month evaluation project.

No.

The free mapping component needs some enhancement for a better quality of geographic information, but it does connect with a ESRI mapping server for optimal data visualization of geographic information at an additional cost,

Never used it, but the training needs some online learning courses for Tableau administration instead of relying on partner relationships to provide this training.

I did not switch. I use QlikView, SAS Analytics, TIBCO Spotfire, and IBM Watson for college instructor roles.

I only used the desktop version for evaluation of the product, and the student version online in academia. It was simple to install, but I am not sure about the server configuration.

Pricing is fair for small business groups, but it also depends on the scalability that they need with the cartographic integration for better maps.

Great tool.