Tableau Reviews

The most valuable feature of this product is that business people with no technical background can autonomously design and implement their visual reports, relieving the IT staff from this burden. On the other hand, despite its ease of use, the tool does not support highly complex visualization and filtering mechanisms.

The adoption of this platform has improved the interaction between the IT and the business departments, through an increased awareness and more effective involvement of business users in the definition of business requirements and reporting needs. Now, the IT people can mainly focus on the setup and administration of suitable data sources published on the server that business users can directly connect to and explore with Tableau's visual tools.

I would give it a perfect rating if it weren't for a few flaws and limits that make it slip off from perfection.

There are some weaknesses in the desktop tool that could be greatly improved, concerning the dashboard layout management and the initialization of parameters.

There are also some frustrating limitations in its data engine that sometimes make it hard to handle filtering and combining data from multiple data sources in the same dashboard. Hopefully such limitations are expected to be solved in the next upcoming release, version 10.

We have been using this product for more than two years.

We have never encountered relevant issues with our deployments. Only once, and for a limited time, we encountered a JavaScript incompatibility with Google Chrome browsers.

The technical support is very responsive, as well as customer service. They easily escalate to the developers if a bug or a performance issue arises.

Previously, we had been using the SAP BusinessObjects suite for BI reporting. There were too many issues regarding the complexity in development, the deployment of reports and, mostly, the performance and stability of dashboards.

After the bad experience with SAP BusinessObjects, we evaluated and adopted Tableau for its amazing straightforwardness in the representation of geo-referenced data on maps, which was a strict requirement from our sales & marketing department.

This is probably one of the major strengths of Tableau: It enables organizations to set up and run a collaborative BI reporting platform in just a few days, with a smooth learning curve.

Of course, fine tuning of operating parameters - when it comes to optimizing performance - requires some more care, but really the administration of the system is easy compared to other equivalent platforms.

We first started alone with in-house activities. Then, at a later time, we got some support from a local consulting company that was a Tableau partner.

In my opinion, a medium-sized company could adopt the platform without any significant support from outside.

I’m not in a position to make a reliable evaluation of ROI. However, I can firmly say that the cost of licenses is pretty fair and surely more convenient compared to other competitors.

The best way to have a clear perception of the potential of this product is just downloading a trial version of the desktop application and play with it a few days. In my case, that experience was clearly decisive in making the decision to buy.

Its desktop application is a beautifully designed tool - very powerful and intuitive. It allows a business user, with no knowledge of databases and query languages, to build in a matter of minutes complex and compelling visual dashboards that enable users to detect and highlight interesting patterns in data. The dashboards created can be published and shared through Tableau Server, a powerful web platform where dashboards are rendered efficiently in HTML5. A cloud version and a free public version are also available.

The drag and drop feature that provides self-service analytics with absolutely no coding is the most important feature. It’s pretty strong in geo-spatial analysis as well.

We are a services vendor for this product and our team have grown over 300% in just one year just providing support for this product, among others.

While they continue to make a lot of changes for every version, in the current BI landscape, they need to be more device agnostic, especially to compete with other similar products in the market.

I have been using this product for more than three years now. I started with version 8.0. I have been through 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 and then to 9.0, 9.1, 9.2 and 9.3.

With data exploding exponentially, handling huge data that runs into billions of records is still a concern at an enterprise level. Organizations will also have to understand the right use cases, but then affordability would come into picture, where organizations do not want to invest on different tools. They try to make best use of the available tools.

The customer service has been great from Tableau. They also have different categories defined for premium service.

The installation and configuration of Tableau consists of just a few clicks. I don't think it can get better than that.

The implementation has been done in-house. In fact, as service providers we implement for others. Once the requirement is frozen and architecture has been decided, implementation is fairly easy and straightforward.

The ROI is immediate.

The price-war has already begun among competing tools. However, I still believe Tableau is fairly priced and there are multiple options.

The team I am part of works on different tools, not just Tableau. The tools are chosen based on the use case. Tableau is not the best choice for traditional reporting, which are still in demand.

Use this tool with the right use cases. Use your creativity to build dashboards. It’s a great tool for data discovery.

• Highly interactive and intuitive data discovery: helps people see and explore their data.
• Ease and breadth of connectivity to so many different data sources.
• The interface to make joins between tables is greatly appreciated.

Management is simply getting more insights from visual representations of their data, and we’re becoming a more data-driven decision-making organization.

I’d like more data integration across data sources.

I have used it for almost 2.5 years.

I have not encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues with Tableau Desktop.

I didn’t need much technical support, and I find the on-demand online video library for training new and experienced users is a great asset.

I used IBM Cognos 8 with a previous employer, and I found that tool to be slow and clunky.

The initial setup was done by our company’s Tableau Server team, which I am not a part of.

The Tableau Desktop install was easy.

Tableau has an extensive network of Alliance Partners with expertise in its implementations, so you shouldn’t have any problem in getting adequate support for such a popular product.

I really like the design of the charts. The rapidness of the development is impressive. Its full set of options helps you reach the specific chart that you need and you can add any kind of additional data source (Excel, flat file, databases) at any time.

In comparison to others, this product gives you the power to make any chart that you can imagine with your data, getting insights with the results and leveraging the need of a “metadata” model behind it.

With the rapidness of the development, the business user only needs 1/5 or maybe 1/10 of the time required to perform analysis and achieve results; they can just use drag & drop.

The most important and valuable feature is the ability to merge any kind of data with your data set, even cloud data (web services). It gives the business user the power to analyze something new with his own datasources.

My company is a Tableau partner, and we are located in Lima, Peru. We used it to perform a geo-spatial analysis of prospects, and we created a distribution of them with a drill-down analysis for future clients, so we can segment the appointments and the demo presentations.

Tableau lacks a lot of ETL capabilities. Of course, it’s not the core of the product but it is the best tool for data discovery and really needs an ETL or data quality module inside of the suite. Enterprises have to use another tool (such as Alteryx, IBM DataStage or Talend Studio) in order to support some business needs. But this entails additional cost, maintenance, resources, etc.

Tableau will add a lot of capabilities for data blending, joins between different data source, etc., in its next version, Tableau 10.

I have been using Tableau Desktop for three years. I began with version 7.0.

Tableau is easy to deploy.

Stability is great.

Scalability lacks some features. For example: governance, better clustering, dual authentication, detailed options of security, events manager, etc. That is why I only see Tableau as a data discovery and dashboarding tool (for senior management).

Support and customer service is good, not excellent. 8/10

I was using SAP BusinessObjects for four years, then I met Tableau and I realized how discontinued the SAP product was. Of course, all the BI platforms think that way, they were discontinued with the monolithic vision of data warehousing.

Then, all of the data-discovery tools appeared and all of us were amused.
I chose Tableau because it can give you answers very fast without the intervention of IT (most of the cases).

As we can see in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms, Tableau is the leader among all the data-discovery tools, Tableau defined the BI trend, and now the rest of the BI platforms are incorporating these functionalities and improving them.

Initial setup was easy, the commercial department of my company adopted the tool right away and start creating its dashboards.

We implemented this with an in-house team. We used the product portal in order to learn about its development and we used some classrooms in the region for Sales, Tableau Desktop and Server.

Tableau offers a rapid ROI in comparison to other tools. It’s a very cheap tool, but it has some barriers in big enterprises.

They should read about compatibility. Before implementing Tableau, they should meet with the business users and ask:

• What are your needs in business intelligence?
• Do you have some information silos?
• Is the generation of information a manual process?

The BI area should perform a self-assessment of a business intelligence roadmap in order to plan the development of the product, the areas involved in the pilot, the information needed to achieve the business goals and define the final architecture for the BI deployment in the near future.

Actions, Story Dashboard, Parameters, maps

Self service tool and ease of implementation

Dashboard Version Control, Report Bursting, More capabilities on maps.

I'm currently using Tableau Desktop and Server 8.2. I've been using Tableau for 7 years.

No issues with deployment.

Sometimes have issues with stability which are dependent on network bandwidth, latency and user logon from multiple browsers

No issues with scalability.

Customer Service:

3.5 (1-5 5 Being highest)

Technical Support:

3.5 (1-5 5 Being highest)

Business Objects. I switched to Tableau because of self service capabilities and quick turnaround on dashboard development.

In house (I installed and configured server set up)

4 (1-5 5 being highest) Financials can’t be disclosed.

$60K

Best Visualization and analytics tool

The ability to quickly connect to all of our datasources, whether its a Oracle or MySQL database, and excel sheet of a csv file and produce a rich interactive visualisation that can then be shared amongst everyone on site is fantastic. The ease of the interface makes it a joy to use.

Previously all reporting was very static. Each report would answer one specific question and if someone needed more information they would typically have to ask for another report to be made. Tableau allows us to create interactive reports with filtering, parameters and drill downs allowing the viewers to investigate their own data and find their own answers without having to go through a reporting team.

It would like to see autosaving, embedded fonts and other options to improve the ease of dashboard layout.

I first started using Tableau in June 2011

None, the install seemed very straight forward and we successfully rolled out Tableau Server to all the users on site.

No

No

Customer Service: Superb on the very few occasions I have had to make use of it. I have had a timely response and my issues have been fixed.Technical Support: Again, I haven't had the need to use this very often but when I did it was excellent. The support forums and technical documentation is second to none.

We used a combination of custom webpages written in perl and the Jaspersoft reporting webapp.

After getting the requirements for Tableau server the actual set-up and deployment seemed to go very smoothly.

We used The Information Lab to assist with some of the initial set-up. They were excellent and would recommend them to anyone.

Unknown as I am a power user and not a site admin nor involved in anything to do with license costs.

We were introduced to Tableau by a collaborator and went on their recommendation as they had already looked at other vendors.

Download the free demo, connect to some data and play with it. See for yourself how easy and quick it is to produce something that previously took you days to to. Look on public.tableausoftware.com to see what other people have made it with.

It was for dashboards. The key use case was for creating visibility to performance metrics for the leadership team. It was the most recent version, and it was deployed on-prem. 

The key use case that we were going after very specifically created visibility to performance metrics for the leadership team. So, it allowed us to give that common view of performance metrics and drive business conversations based on the common shared set of facts. We were able to expose data and relationships that we otherwise couldn't do in our enterprise system silos. From that perspective, we were incredibly successful in really driving performance. When you combine that with some real championing in the business and with some leadership to push it down, the fact that it was Tableau wasn't as relevant as the fact that we had the championing pushing the process and pushing it down.

The number one thing was just the ease of getting something up quickly. The other thing that was good about it was that it was fairly fast for decent-sized data sets in terms of performance and run time.

From a downside perspective, some of the more advanced modeling techniques are actually fairly difficult to do. In addition, I just fundamentally disagree with the way you have to implement them because you can get incorrect answers in some cases.

One of the key challenges is that you never know whether it is how your developers developed it or whether it was the tool. We did find that once we got into more complex models, the ability to keep objects that should tally the same way but didn't became more and more difficult. That was probably the big thing for me. I don't know enough about how the tool was developed to know whether that was because they didn't follow a recommended practice. That was probably the number one thing that I found frustrating with it.

When we started to try and get into some very granular data sets that had some complex relationships in them, the performance on it degraded pretty quickly. It did degrade to such an extent that we couldn't use it. We had to change what we were trying to do and manage its scope so that we could get what we wanted out of it or reduce the scope of what we needed out of it. It doesn't have a database behind it, per se. So, while doing some of the more complicated things that you might otherwise do on a database, we started hitting some pretty significant challenges.

I used it for about three years.

Tableau worked fairly well for straightforward data sets, but it struggled when we got into the more complicated data sets and larger data sets. 

We were able to deploy it fairly broadly without a whole bunch of work. From that perspective, it worked fine. I was deploying my stuff to about 200 users across Canada, and I don't think we saw a blip on the server when people logged in. It was fine. If we were to roll out some of the bigger applications broadly, like the ones that we were having performance challenges with, we probably would have crushed the box. We would have had to get more CPU. Most likely, it would have been a memory issue, but we never hit that inflection point.

There were about 200 users of the solution. It went all the way from the equivalent of a senior vice president and all the way down to the equivalent of a line manager. So, we had business unit leaders, vice presidents, and operational managers.

It was being used extensively for a specific use case. There were lots of other use cases that it could be used for, but there needs to be an appetite from leadership to go, drive, and commit resources to go do that.

I didn't have to deal with technical support. Mr. Google is pretty good on the topic.

We had previously used Cognos to do the exact same thing. The only reason why we replaced it was that the business decided to go towards Tableau. Otherwise, there really wasn't any real reason to replace it. It was probably a little bit easier and more interesting for people to learn and to develop applications in the program than in Cognos. The ramp-up time to get to reasonably proficient in Tableau plus the support through Mr. Google made it a lot easier for me to get resources and do development on Tableau as compared to Cognos.

The organization decided to move away from the old platform. So, basically, I was lost when they asked me to shift off so that they could shut it down. I personally prefer the previous platform. I understood it very well. I had used it for years, and it worked just fine. For the most part, the challenges that we had on the old platform were not resolved by Tableau, which just reinforced to me that it wasn't a tool problem. It was a people problem.

It was pretty straightforward. The big thing that confuses people in a project that involves Tableau is that Tableau is a very visible but small component of the overall solution. That's because 80% of the work is data. It is not Tableau. So, Tableau is actually a fairly small component over that overall solution. It took a few days to get it up and going. Almost 80% of the work is actually on the data side, which takes forever, but the actual Tableau component of it was pretty straightforward. It was not that difficult.

You can get a Tableau dashboard up on a weekend. It is not hard to get something up and running. It is pretty trivial. It isn't any more or less difficult than any other tool to get up and going. I've used a number of them, and they're all pretty easy to get up and going. Tableau was the first one out of the gate with this democratized data perspective, where they were going to do departmental BI and up to enterprise BI years ago. Now, they now charge a fairly hefty premium to leverage that product. It is not a cheap product.

In terms of maintenance, it can take as much or as little as you want because it just runs. So, technically, you don't have to have anybody to do very much. You just need a very skeleton crew to operate as is. The challenge that you run into with solutions like this is that you need to continue to refresh the information with new and different views because people want to know more, and they want to go deeper into it. It is not a function of the technology. It is a function of the use case. So, you tend to have lots of new requests for new reports and analysis, and that's where you tend to have more challenges.

We didn't get into analysis users who are able to sort of do a little bit more themselves. There were viewer licenses where you are just using preset reports, but there are obviously additional training and things like that, and you have to deal with it if you start getting into more advanced power users.

I was at another company, and we were the integrator.

It is fairly expensive. I have no idea what they paid. We were on an enterprise license, so whatever it is they licensed at the enterprise level is what we paid.

A good chunk of it has got nothing to do with the tool. It has everything to do with your leadership and your governance requiring it. We had our IT team roll up Tableau multiple times and not a single person used it because there just wasn't enough leadership support to use it. There is nothing wrong with the tool, and it worked fine for what it did, but every time I logged into it, I go, "Okay, but what did you want me to actually do with this? I see all this information. I understand it clearly. I'm not sure what I do with it though." So, without that additional guidance from leadership, rolling it out is irrelevant. You need to have that strategic leadership associated with it.

The key piece of advice would be that you got to look beyond your tool. You need to look at how you're going to get this information used in your organization. What kind of leadership support, governance support, and ongoing support are you going to have? It is all based on trusted data. The value of the tool is based on the quality of your data and the leadership's support to use it. So, if you don't have high-quality data and you don't have leadership support to use the data, you don't need any tool because nobody is going to use it.

I would rate Tableau a seven out of 10. It suits the purpose, but in and of itself, I don't think it is significantly better or worse than its key competitors.

On-premises