Tableau Reviews

Data visualization: Simpler and cleaner charts, easier for users to perform self-service, not so steep learning curve for non-technical users; good integration to big data Hadoop and predictive analysis, well integrated with other ETL tools. Less-technical maintenance cost compared to QlikView, which requires the developer to do more scripting.

It is easier for users to do self-servicing; simpler, cleaner and story-telling charts; and requires less lead-time to develop charts/dashboard integration with predictive analytics and big data platform Hadoop.

Enhance standard reporting like QlikView (scheduled reports, notifications etc.); for MNCs, the server version license is not cheap; and row-level security: every user needs a DB account, which can give a hacker more opportunity to attack via more DB accounts.

I have used Tableau for two years.

I had a deployment issue: No version control means you can't roll back to earlier versions once overwritten/published.

I rate technical support 8/10.

Initial setup was straightforward.

An in-house team implemented Tableau.

Tableau seems to have easier user acceptance than QlikView because of the simpler charts and big data integration, increasing the possibility of helping an organization transform from reactive analysis to predictive analysis.

Server versions are not cheap and pretty similar for both Tableau and QlikView in terms of price. I don't see a big difference; it really depends on your organization's need.

I also evaluated MS BI and QlikView. Compared with MS BI, I find Tableau and QlikView have stronger visualization; intuitive data insights; less development lead time - MS BI requires creating OLAP cubes, which takes more time; clearer and simpler charts; and intuitive data mapping/insights.

If you have more developers/technical people and want to do more standard reporting without Hadoop, go for QlikView; if you have more business users with some SQL knowledge and would like to do predictive analytics, and integration with big data platform Hadoop, go for Tableau.

• It's easy to connect to, and supports, a variety of datasources
• It supports multiple languages well, which is very convenient for me. When I develop a dashboard in English or Japanese, it can display time differently based on the language you choose. For example, EN: 2010/01/01, JP: 2010年01月01日.
• Stunning graphs, easy to drag & drop dimensions into your dashboard.
• Compresses data well.

We use it to develop dashboards for our customers; they will use these to analyze their business using BI knowledge.

There are many things that users want Tableau to improve:

• Multiple choice for filter selection. This is a very big shortcoming.
• Dynamic parameters.
• Currently, it cannot aggregate further on a measure that has been aggregated already
• A button function for dashboards. Sometimes, we need a button to link to another dashboard.
• Display/hide an object based on a parameter as a real function, not using tricks. You can do it using tricks, but it looks so ugly.

I have used it for about two years.

As I mentioned above, sometimes we need to use tricks to develop dashboards, and it has stability issues.

I rate the level of customer service and technical support 8/10.

Initial setup was very easy; just "agree", "next" and "finish".

Our IT support team did it.

No complaints. Reasonable price for professional version.

I have used a variety of BI-related products:

• QlikView: not worth trying. Not good for support (Qlik Japan); ugly charts; limited functions. It’s one strength is that it's free.
• IBM Cognos: very scalable. You can do anything with your dashboard/report using HTML; good at all functions. However, it's only suitable for big companies, hard to maintain, and very expensive.
• Oracle PBCS/Essbase: good for medium-sized or big enterprises with big/multi-dimensional data; supports Excel. Difficult to set up, and browser-based PBCS is so bad, you may lose your work at any time because of its corrupt JavaScript.
• Tableau is good for small-sized companies; reasonable price. But you get what you pay for: limited functions. It's a data visualization tool, not a BI tool.

• Flexibility producing visualizations
• Scalability

Anything and everything becomes fact-driven; we don't do a lot by gut feeling.

ETL functionality is limited, which is both a strength & weakness. It would be nice to have Alteryx & Tableau as a package, but I believe Tableau have deliberately stayed out of the "deep" ETL capabilities to "stick to the knitting", which they have done very well.

I have been using it for eight years.

Any issues we have encountered have been related to data preparation rather than the tool itself.

Technical support is excellent.

I have historically developed using SAP BusinessObjects and IBM Cognos for visualization and various tools for ETL. I have trialed Qlik and Power BI, but this has a much higher level of maturity at this stage.

Initial setup was significantly easier than other products I have used.

An in-house team implemented it. Your investment needs to be in data preparation, then the implementation of any of these analytics tools is much easier. Typically, I spend between 70 & 90% of project effort on data not the tool. If data is well prepared, the Tableau development is very quick and best handled by the business analysts, rather than any tech personnel.

To get the best from Tableau you need:

• Data preparation suitable for analytics applications. (This is not Tableau specific, the same is required for pretty much all analytics apps.)
• People bouncing off each other to get the creative process going. Consider internal show & tells and take advantage of local user groups
• Subscribe to "Viz of the Day” to get exposure to as many viz's as possible
• Tableau is (I believe) the best tool for data visualization. Equally consider investing n the best tools for data preparation, such as Alteryx. The combination of best data prep with best analytics capabilities is MUCH more powerful than either without the other.

• Rich graphics
• Dashboard

• Trends
• Opportunities
• Automated reporting

• Faster implementation
• Processing speed

I've used it for six months.

Not really.

No issues encountered.

It felt a bit slow.

Customer Service:

Very good.

Technical Support:

I haven't needed to call them.

We used Cognos BI which was fast but a bit complex.

We implemented it in-house.

It's taken us six months to get an ROI.

It cost us US$3,000 for the initial setup.

We evaluated it alongside QlikSense, which we also use, and Cognos BI.

Try it alongside QlikSense as depending on user preferences and requirements, either product will do the job.

For both Tableau Public and Desktop, the ability to quickly pull together data sources into a meaningful (visual) display. Also, the intuitive design and ability to work with increasingly large and real-time data sets.

Mostly, I focus on the management and operational reporting aspects, enabling businesses to make better decisions at all levels through improved access to data.

It's hard to say right now but I can see challenges ahead as the market share and common standards become an issue - if the goal is to replace Excel, then it will be a winner-takes-all type of battle. For clients this may make them delay purchase and adoption.

I've used it for around eight months. My hands-on experience is mainly Tableau Public and Desktop trials. Project experience working with people who are expert in Tableau and Alteryx.

Tableau Public crashes on opening on my iMac. So far the web-based tools have worked very well.

Tableau Public crashes on opening on my iMac. So far the web-based tools have worked very well.

Not encountered any so far, but this appears to be one of their big selling points.

Customer Service:

So far, very proactive. They have a lot of good training resources available online and very fast response from sales team.

Technical Support:

It's been very good so far.

At my last company I tried to encourage the IT team to adopt these tools, but they were very focused on developing everything themselves. This turned out to be quite an expensive error and I would encourage companies - even those with their own in-house analyst teams - to consider using these tools as a way to quickly build models. They should only consider building models themselves if they know they have a product and solution that justifies it.

So far it's been very easy but I think a large enterprise would need to consider widespread adoption quite carefully so it aligns to the overall IT road-map.

We used a vendor team. What was useful about this in the examples I’ve seen is their ability to demonstrate "quick wins” to get support for wider deployment, and then to train key staff around the organisation to increase the pace of adoption.

I’d expect it to pay back within a year if the avoided costs of existing IT platform upgrades is included.

We are currently in the evaluation process.

Get some help to evaluate the options and identify the opportunities, find a test case to demonstrate the benefits, engage the IT team early.

• Prototyping
• Visual representation
• Quick for report readers versus tables and numbers in most other similar tools

As a consultant, the organizations I've been at like the ability to see a visual report. This is can be done fairly quick as opposed to numbers.

• Difficulty when moving 'outside of the norm' where 'workarounds' are needed
• Difficult if you want to present reports as numbers and tables
• Free version only available for educational users but not for consultants working in many organizations (and could therefore be introduced to it).

2-3 years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Customer Service:

Good as there are various methods of finding answers and fixes.

Technical Support:

Good again as they have various methods to ascertain answers.

I have used many other solutions as a BI consultant including Discoverer, Brio Query, Impromptu, Bus Objects, etc. Tableau seems to be popular right now as, again, the presentation and data model are quite different than the others

It is a straightforward setup.

In-house and via myself.

As mentioned in previously, many clients choose Tableau due to its data model and presentation layer.

As a consultant, ALL BI tools use phrases like 'it empowers the end user', 'end users can create reports in minutes', etc. However, in the real world, end users can create SOME reports once middle layers are built, training is given, limitations and security is imposed, etc. For a complete system, IT departments and consultants must install, set up, create initial works and then have SOME power end users involved. NO tool bypasses this and gives all to end users - and if it did, security would be lax.

Easy setup and intuitive drag and drop functionality. Easy connection to a range of different data sources. Range of visualisation models, constantly extending with new releases. Dashboards and story-telling.

It has allowed a shift from IT-centric enterprise reporting to business-centered development of ad-hoc and enterprise reporting, in partnership with IT. This brings significant extra agility to the organisation and a model of greater co-operation between business units and IT department.

As with all products there are many areas that can be improved. Tableau actively encourages suggestions from its user community, allowing for voting on what features to include it future releases. http://community.tableausoftware.com/community/idea

3 years, starting with Tableau 6.0.

No significant deployment issues. With a sufficiently resourced infrastructure (CPU/RAM/Storage) the product is easily deployed. Tableau helps with the necessary specifications.

It is a mature and very stable product.

Scalability is very good, especially with release of Tableau 8 which brought 64-bit and multi-threading. Extends to hundreds of users on a single server in my organisation without any issues and has capability to include clusters of servers for larger organisations.

Customer Service: Very good. Very little need to deal with them on an ongoing basis due to the robustness of the product but on the occasional time we need some help they are very responsive.Technical Support: Initially very good with strong technical support easily reached. As the Tableau user-base has grown quickly there are more formalities to reaching support now but still top-quartile. Again little need to lean on them due to the stability of the product and strong online documentation and forum support.

Oracle Discoverer. Switched because we needed to move to a partnership model between IT and Business units. While Discoverer allowed for power users in the business to author reports its metadata layer and underlying database technology required more intensive IT support. Tableau enables the business user while giving more agility to work together to deliver ranges of enterprise solutions.

Straightforward. Get a good server and provision it according to Tableau’s technical advice, install, and you’re away.

Mainly in-house, some support from Tableau themselves and also a local Tableau partner. Expertise of partners not great at the time in Europe but has matured considerably over the last few years.

Commercially sensitive.

Commercially sensitive.

Sas Microsoft SSRS Qliktech Oracle OBIEE Microstrategy

Assess your own strengths and create a preferred architecture. Then see if Tableau fits some of your needs. For anything significant in scale you will need a robust underlying data architecture, it won’t do all of your ETL. While it is possible to create and deploy artifacts very quickly without formal training, it is worth sourcing some to help you leverage the best features of the product.