Tableau Reviews

Fluent expressions are beautiful. It provides many alternatives to present and understand business.

I have been in many project manager roles in BI system development, and I have experience with most BI tools during the last 20 years. In most cases, I had to use web development to cover areas the BI tools couldn't handle. But Tableau can solve most of my customers' requests with fluent alternatives.

All area where business insight is needed. Also, I would like to see improvement in server capacities.

Two years.

No.

No.

Excellent. When I or my customers had questions, Tableau customer support addressed the issues quickly, and in the local Korean language.

I have experience with other BI solutions, but all of them had many limitations with respect to all my customers' requests. But Tableau is able to handle them.

Very simple and easy.

Tableau is very good as a starting point for a BI system and environment with relatively low cost. But it's not easy to expand to enterprise level because there is no discount pricing strategy.

Some customers choose Tableau for small systems, but they choose other solutions for enterprise requirements, to reduce costs, even though they know Tableau is a better product.

No.

It's very easy and an excellent solution. Even though this solution is, in my opinion, the best BI solution in the world, they are continuously developing their product, improving with every upgrade (and even with the minor upgrades).

Operations Perspective:

The most valuable aspect of this product is the ease of deployment from the Tableau Desktop to the server, providing the ability to either connect live to a data source or create a cached dataset that can be published and updated separately. The deployment of a Tableau Workbook can even be packaged up and sent to someone with a Tableau Reader installed. This makes the solution very agile and scalable.

The ability to deploy is the added ability to centralise the Tableau repository for all Tableau Developers. We have initiated a central shared directory for each Tableau platform, Dev, UAT, and PROD with each containing subdirectories for each Tableau Site and Project. Being a financial institution we must provide data segregation to comply with legislation and Data Governance policies enforced by brand segregation.

Development Perspective:

Ease of use is the most common call out from the developers. There is a thriving user group online that provides any number of ways to build reports quickly and easily, but the most important ability is to allow the Developer to storyboard the information in a dashboard. Tableau provides the developer a means to provide captions and business information on the dashboard to tell the story of each Workbook. This ability to break down a complex Workbook into an easy to digest narrative provides the business stakeholder a way to really understand and discover the story behind the data giving them the necessary insights and metrics.

Tableau has provided the organisation a means to allow business people to explore their data at their pace. They can either review the reports online, or on their Tableau Reader or they can download it into other formats for use in data analysis. The key insights and graphic representations through the dashboards has also provided them a quick and painless overview of their current status, whatever that may be.

At this stage, we haven’t had any suggestions since moving to Tableau 10.3, so there may be improvements requested further down the line.

Six years.

We did have issues with Tableau 10.1 server with the brokers failing on heavy load but since moving to 10.2, then to 10.3, this issue seems to have been resolved and the environment is now quite stable.

This is no longer an issue in Tableau 10.3.

A nine out of 10. With all first line support, sometimes these support people need to read the question a couple of times before responding, but this is typical of any first line support for any vendor.

We are still using another solution. However, this will be shutdown next year due to the decline in development on this platform. The development cycle on this legacy platform has been too slow for any type of turnkey solution and the end result did not provide a proficient self-service capability that satisfied the customer. Performance has been another factor in this platforms decline.

The initial setup of Tableau had been developed with a DevOps lens. I wanted to build a platform that had rigor and a platform with a level of governance of aspects which could guarantee report certification and certainty for the business stakeholder. These processes were carefully thought out even before the product was installed.

Once the process was developed and tested, we rolled out the solution to the business with a migration form for developers to fill out as we needed to meet audit policy guidelines and brand segment legal requirements. We allocated several business people to be software advocates whom were familiar with the migration requirements and liaised with the business to guide them in their approach to using the Tableau solution.

After six years, we can confidently say that any report in production is guaranteed to be correct (within limits) and the data source has been certified for provisioning.

At the time, this did have pushback from the vendor, but we’ve seen the chaos caused in other organisations that we mitigated right at the start.

Buy 50 at a time. Project your use base every three months, and project your requirements forward, so you can meet demand for licenses by having them available.

We have also added the vendor into our internal order system for ad hoc requests that we meet the needs of those that want a license on their own terms.

Actually no. This was a spontaneous purchase by an executive and we basically ran with it.

I’d strongly advise going to the forums, attending the Tableau conferences, and ask questions about governance, report certification, and capacity. These questions and the corresponding answers should guide you on how you would best implement your own solution. We did not want to be dictated to by Tableau to install it as a free for all. We wanted to future proof the product and provide certainty around the reports being developed and deployed to the business.

Visualization and user friendly. Visualization: How you sell your ideas or your message, for example, integrate D3.js graphs.

Traditionally bars or line graphs are useful, but they make a difference when presenting your important ideas. The vision of Business Intelligence creates a rupture between old-school (like IBM, Oracle, etc) and new guys (Tableau, TIBCO, and SAP Lumira) and new forms to work with: structured and unstructured data.

Interaction between information/data and final user.

Preparation and consolidation of data. Many organizations needs prepare data, changes formats or consolidate sources. ETL jobs waste a lot time and sometimes is unproductive.

Two years in my company.

No.

No.

An eight out of 10.

Excel.

Straightforward, because of the quality and consistency of data.

It's transparent; no hidden costs.

Yes, IBM Cognos, BusinessObjects, SAS, TIBCO, and Qlik.

Make your decision based on your own culture, quality of data, and champion for the project.

Data connectivity, data transformation, and web editing, because being able to connect to a variety of data sources and bring them together, and store that dataset in an environment where others can also access it, consistently, drives a lot of self-service within the organization without a lot of fear of dispersion of truth. The Web Editing capabilities allow us to grant end users enough capabilities for them to do self-serve discovery without the added cost of needing to get everyone desktop licenses.

Still working to get properly implemented at my current organization. However, it has helped my previous locations be able to get a pre-built visualization that anchors them on the truth, with access to datasets for them to explore and continuously push the envelope on new inquiries. The more questions we ask, and get answers to, the more informed we are to make better decisions, which leads to revenue growth and cost reductions.

At the organizational level, increasing the servers' capabilities to support us as an enterprise tool: data management, semantic layer, and integration with other collaboration tools. At the analyst level: Better connection with Python data frames.

I have used it since 2011.

No.

Yes. In earlier versions, it was tough to scale without a lot of expense. With the addition of Web Editing, you can control your costs better and keep your usage to the things they do the most frequently. Still experiencing challenges in the VM world, but sounds like they are exploring options to address this.

If you are fortunate enough to have a dedicated technical guy, it is great. If you have to work through the common help desk, it is tough. In most cases, analysts have problems they need to solve right away; having them spend hours pouring through KB files to only find something similar, but not exact, and then waiting 5-10 days to get resolution from a help desk agent generates a lot of frustration on the team.

Several companies ago, we were using Cognos and switched to Tableau due to ease of deployment, total cost of ownership. At my last three places, Tableau was already in-house.

Not applicable.

Really work across the organization to understand the user personas of your audience. Who is a builder, who is an audience member? Being able to set up the server licensing right (core vs user seats) is the fastest way to manage your costs. Paying for users you never setup or buying expensive desktop licenses for users who can solve their users with web editing on the server are the two biggest expenses.

Not applicable.

First and foremost, outline the value proposition of BI. Getting a plan on whether you are going to go with a centralized, decentralized, or blended approach will help aid you in how you can maximize the tool. On its own merits, it is a great tool. Most failures come from a mismatch in the organizational needs and the implementation approach.

• Rapid visualization of data
• Interactive views connecting multiple data sources
• Reduces need for IT cycles (hours vs. weeks to create report)
• Ability to analyze problems quickly
• Ability to share reports and analyses quickly

• Ability to focus staff on more analysis versus reporting
• More/Better/Faster analysis by staff

Pace of improvement to product has slowed. Most additions are now just nice to have.

More than eight years.

No.

No.

No.

I haven't really needed customer service. Help from the sales staff is okay at first. The community is amazing. You can google any question and usually find an answer.

I haven't really needed tech support.

Very straightforward. A lot of free training available online.

In-house. Easy!

• Spotfire
• MicroStrategy VI
• Qlik

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.

• Ease of use
• Data visualization
• Predictive analytics and forecasting

We are a consulting company, so we could use it internally. However, this is more for other clients. It does help those clients in analyzing their data.

There are certain things that I would want it to do, but it wouldn't be something that I could easily describe.

I have been using this solution for around three years.

It all depends. You have to make sure that you've designed the data part well. It is doing better at handling scalability. In other words, you can throw more users at it and it shouldn't impact the system performance.

The setup part depends on what Tableau products you're using. For Tableau Desktop Developer, the setup was very straightforward.

Make sure that you have your requirements and your use cases. You need to know what exactly you are trying to solve. You need to know the story that you are trying to tell. The business needs to know.

If you are an IT organization, then you need to understand what the business is trying to do before you just go and start using the product.

Tableau was able to handle the challenges that we've had, in terms of reporting and analytics. It's flexible enough, so that you can bring in other data and be able to quickly marry that data with what you have, report on it, and be able to tell the story that the business wants fairly quickly.

Extraordinary ease of use, easier to use than any competitor product I’ve used in 15 years or so I’ve worked on MI/BI.

Since I originally wrote this, I have found the mapping on Tableau has been extremely useful and easy to use, particularly that it includes very good geocoding for the UK. In terms of the UK, the support and community here is also exceptional and I know that I don't have to trawl through sites endlessly to find solutions, the community is one of the strongest I've seen thus far in BI

Speed of data discovery and accelerated our ability to remodel our data and improve our existing ETL processes.

Expansion of number of visualisations, as well as potential for straight to dashboard function, rather than design individual visualisation – these are, however, genuinely not priority to amend.

Having used another software for a reasonable period of time, I wonder about the chances of incorporating other languages, such as d3.js in future releases (NB I'm still using 8.3)

~3 years

This was a Proof of Concept rather than full roll-out.

No, but important to note it was PoC.

No, but important to note it was PoC.

Excellent.

Exceptional, probably the best user community I’ve ever seen in nearly 15 years of working in MI/BI/Analytical roles.

Currently use an alternative provider, looking to switch to a newer more empowering piece of software, an alternative to Tableau was selected at a Global CIO level.

Extremely simple. Download a package, enter a key post purchase and that’s it. Very easy.

Vendor team – they had (and indeed have) significant knowledge of the product and continue to share best practice tips and knowledge through their e-publications.

Standard software license cost to setup initially and an optional maintenance fee which include version upgrades. On balance, the costs of software balance nicely against the user experience because you probably wouldn’t need to spend a great deal on training as the product is straightforward to use. I continue to use Tableau in my free/personal time but have been using Tibco Spotfire much more frequently in my professional capacity, so will look to update my review of that software as well

Evaluated numerous different BI tools, including but not restricted to Cognos, Jaspersoft, Pentaho, Tibco Spotfire.

Assess the scalability using the Server set up, engage users of the tool independently through the Tableau Community for their ideas and advice on the pro’s and con’s of the tool. Even the biggest evangelists will be honest enough to tell you where it doesn’t meet their expectations.