Tableau Reviews

We use Tableau for the dashboard features. It helps us with the global planning of our business.

The product has the best features for analytical views and filters. Its integration with Jira helps us prepare intuitive dashboards with filters to share different details of broad-scale planning for a quarter or a year of our business.

The product’s router could be better in terms of readability. When we put more information on a single screen, it gets compressed and superimposed in many places while scrolling. It could be improved.

We are using the beta version of Tableau.

I rate the product’s stability seven or eight out of ten. I have never seen it crash.

The product’s scalability is good; I rate it a seven or eight out of ten. I have seen many people concurrently using it.

The product is deployed on the cloud. I rate its initial setup process a five or six out of ten. It is difficult because it has complex documentation, and I am still learning it. A team is involved in the implementation. It takes three hours to complete the process.

I advise others to opt for a POC and proceed with the product. I rate it a seven out of ten.

Our company uses dashboards to understand how much we can improve the situation, track performance in real-time and help managers react faster to non-obvious things.

For our clients, we carry out system integration, and pilot projects, develop first dashboard layouts, provide system support during integration and post-sales service, and provide training to our clients. The main goal of customers is to understand whether they will get profits in the future or not and be able to influence the situation right now.

Tableau helps the company to see insights. It will allow profit or loss to be predicted, but very flexible to react to changes.

Tableau's dashboard allows teams to see what's going on at a high level. Our company sells software licenses and it's very important for us to be able to track license expiration dates that may expire in the near future and to be able to contact customers and ask them to renegotiate contracts or to warn customers in time about possible license renewals or additional purchases of new licenses.

Instead of going deep into the CRM in detail, we can do it directly from the dashboards generated by Tableau, saving ourselves time and increasing our productivity.

Other customers can use the solution to check the duration of certain transactions. They can see how quickly they are completing transactions in a call center, for example. They can look at targets and get alerts to help them improve results.

Users don't have to wait for monthly reports, Tableau allows users to view numbers to make real-time decisions. It is easy and intuitive to use and has quick access to analytics, high performance even for very big data, and a built-in ETL tool to clean and prepare data.

Both web and mobile versions are supported. Updates take place at least once every three months. We always get the latest version with the latest features.

There is a huge community of Tableau users - 99.9% of questions are answered.

The solution integrates well with Python and R. The solution scales well and it is very stable.

The setup is quite easy and the technical support has been responsive.

Despite the number of available interface languages, I would like to see as many languages as possible represented in Tableau. So many companies really want to use this program and it suits them better than any other similar programs, but due to the lack of understanding of English, it is difficult for them to decide to integrate this particular product.

In addition to the existing set of common data types, Tableau Desktop has such a wonderful thing as a union of data on the principle of relationships for Multi-table. This type of union is very easy to work with the data source itself and does not overload the system.

At the moment, this type of union only exists for connections from databases. It would be nice if Tableau added this type of merging for data sources that are on the Tableau Server/Tableau Cloud.

Every three months, Tableau adds new features. There are always new features coming up.

I've used the solution for two years. 

It's stable. It's reliable and has a good security program. 

The solution is very easy to scale. The Blueprint methodology shows how large companies can successfully implement and develop it.

We are a small company. Right now we have about eight users of the solution. Part of them prepare analytics and manage the solution on the server side as the analysts, architects, and solution engineers, and the rest are people who use the solution as users, viewers, and explorers.

We have full technical support for our clients. When we get a new client, we provide full support and handle pilot projects. We can also provide dashboards. We have a community for clients that are new to the solution.

Our company would like to improve the culture of data in our country. We're working to provide learning resources and free YouTube lessons to help new users understand the product. 

As a company, we provide Tableau support for our clients. If our company cannot find any solution ourselves, we contact the brand's technical support, and they respond very quickly. Depending on the complexity of the problem, a solution can be delivered within two to three days up to a week.

In the past, I have also used Excel and some Power BI.

In our company we like to say that there is no perfect BI, only the tool that suits you and your goals. Therefore, most companies choose to work with a different set of tools, sometimes combining several different ones. The main thing is that they all work towards your main goal and the achievement of your results.

Despite the fact that the company sells both Tableau and Power BI, we mainly use Tableau.

The initial setup is very easy. That said, it's best to prepare your system. You need to understand how your system will be able to integrate with it. You also have to understand your data.

It can be set up by one person if it is a small company and he is well versed in the product and in his system. However, if the company is large and the process is complex, then of course a team of several people may be needed to share the integration process between working with server setup, analytics department, and working with clients.

The service can be set up completely automatically. This will depend on the server the company uses and whether additional add-ons for working with Tableau are enabled. Automation makes it easy to check data flows and dashboards, simplifies server operations and monitors errors that occur, and sends alerts or warnings if they occur.

The price is still quite high for many Tableau customers. That said, the company understands the value the solution provides. That, and the integration process is so much easier with Tableau. Even with the licensing being so high, it is worth it due to the simplicity and finally, they see the financial return of using the product.

I'm an analytics lead. I'm an integrator of the product.

We work with Tableau Cloud and with the Tableau Server.

Make sure you are really ready to integrate with Tableau. That will make the deployment go much more smoothly. Users that are fully prepared will be able to get the most out of it. If they are not prepared, they will not use it to the fullest extent possible. Sometimes you have to change not just the tool; you have to change the entire company's process. The product implementation needs to be considered at all steps, both within the company and for all stakeholders.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We use the most recent version. 

We use the solution to engage the field teams and we integrate that with the data warehouse data and build the dashboards for them.

It is helpful that the solution provides access to one's own data. It allows a person to get insights out of the data provided by his tool, based upon the KPIs that the person wishes to look at. It all depends upon different use cases. We have dashboards for marketing people, field teams and executives. It all depends upon which insights a person wants, in which case he can prep the data accordingly. This is good. 

The most valuable features are the visualizations, the way they show the combination charts. This allows a person to jointly put in different measures in different axes and greatly facilitates the user in understanding the data better.

There should be a focus on memory data, which is the concept of Tableau. This is where they squeeze the data into their memory. Because of that, we see performance issues on the dashboards. The architecture should be improved in such a way that the data can be better handled, like we see in the market tools, such as Domo, in which everything is cloud-based. We did a POC in which we compared Tableau with Domo and performance-wise the latter is much better.  

As such, the architecture should be improved to better handle the data.

We are seeing a shift from Tableau to Power BI, towards which most users are gravitating. This owes itself to the ease of use and their mindset of making use of Excel. Power BI offers greater ease of use. 

For the most part, when comparing all the BI tools, one sees that they work in the same format. But, if a single one must be chosen, one sees that his data can be integrated at a better place. Take real time data, for example. I know that they have the live connection, but, still, they can improve that data modeling space better.

We have been working with Tableau for almost seven years.

The solution has pretty good stability. It's a robust tool, even though it has a steep learning curve. But, still, I feel that from the stability perspective, it's a leading BI tool in the market. It's pretty stable.

I personally don't like any BI tool to have that scalability. What we usually do is integrate scalability into our warehouse layer. We know how to scale up and down and we handle it there. We don't rely much on the BI tools to do that.

I am talking about the scalability of a program in general, be it in its relation with users or as it concerns dashboards. 

We recently started working with Tableau online and that particular solution is scalable. It ingests the hardware, the server capacity by itself. So, if users go from, let's say... 100 to 500, we don't see a dip in performance. It still behaves the same. Because of this new integration technology with the cloud, they are scalable in that regard.

We are in contact with technical support. One service we have is Tableau online. If we see a dip in performance, we raise a ticket to the Tableau support team, work with them and make certain they address our issues. I would rate my experience with them as three out of five. 

We used Tableau from the get go. 

While I was not directly involved in the setup, I know that it's not that easy. There is a need for a proper administrator who has experience in that field.

We used an integrator from Tableau when implementing.

Our experience was good and we were assisted with our implementation requirements. They were able to make notes to match our use case and answer all of our questions, including those concerning the number of users we have and how to set up the server.

I'm not part of the administrative group which handles the setup. I am mostly a consumer and responsible for building the desktop. I use the desktop version to build the dashboards and am not responsible for the server health check or maintenance. As such, I am not in a position to provide information about the staff required for maintenance, updates and checkups. There are a couple of people who are responsible for this, one from the customer side and another from our team. Both parties are in sync when undertaking these activities. 

I have no knowledge concerning the licensing costs of Tableau. 

The solution is mostly deployed on-premises, although we have also done cloud-based deployment. 

We have around 500-plus users making use of the solution and mostly 90 percent are viewers. We have very few creators or explorers. Creators comprise seven percent and explorers three percent. 

My advice to others would vary depending on their use cases, what they're looking for and the level of competency they have within their organization to use it. Tableau has a steep learning curve. So, it depends upon one's use case, the reason the person is going with that specific BI tool. The procurement department would need to evaluate the use cases very carefully, because there are so many BI tools available in the market. One's focus should be more on a centralized tool when bringing a new one to his organization. It should address all the answers to one's users, like what they're looking for. Definitely Tableau is good in the data discovery part and it can handle large data sets. So, all of these things should matter when one is trying to evaluate a tool.

I rate Tableau as a seven out of ten. This is because we are using it and it has a steep learning curve. It's not user-friendly. One must build a competency in creating the visualization and then support it. All of these things matter when one is evaluating a tool. That's why a shift is going towards Power BI.

We use the product to build diverse dashboards for a revenue authority. It helps us analyze taxpayer behavior to understand payment patterns and identify areas for improvement in compliance.

The platform's most important feature is predictive analysis. We can map taxpayers' locations with data and connectivity to databases and sources. We can forecast future trends using the visualization feature. These are a few features that make it unique.

The product's features for cloud integration need improvement. They should revise licensing and pricing models to cater to smaller enterprises. Users must be able to customize and write their code similarly to one of its competitors. Many companies have in-house data science models for Twitter or Facebook based on predictive analysis. There is a possibility of integrating these models seamlessly into Tableau.

We have been using Tableau for a year and a half.

It is a very stable tool. I rate the stability a ten out of ten.

We have 10 Tableau users in our organization. We plan to increase software usage.

The technical support team is very supportive.

We also work with Power BI and an open-source solution. In comparison, Tableau has a sharp learning curve. It is intuitive and easy to use. It has less deployment time and impressive visualization features. We can connect different data sources, including SQL, Oracle, etc.

The initial setup process is easy. It takes less than an hour to complete. I rate the process a nine out of ten.

The product's price is relatively inexpensive and manageable for enterprise-level companies. However, they could reduce the cost or offer discounts for smaller companies.

I rate Tableau a nine out of ten. It is a stable and powerful tool compared to Microsoft BI.

I have used Tableau in the past with other clients for enterprise-level data visualization for financial and manufacturing industries. I have also used it for documents dashboard and different kinds of KPI visualizations. I'm currently using it for academic purposes. In my current organization, we are not using Tableau. We are using Power BI.

Tableau is very flexible and easy to learn. It has drag-and-drop function analytics, and its design is very good. It is a very good tool, and it basically brings life into data with good design. We have been creating a lot of interactive visualizations and dashboards.

It has a public version. There are public communities from where you can get a lot of examples for practice.

Its price should be improved. Its price is much higher than Power BI and QlikView.

Programming is not easy on Tableau. For programming, you have to have a separate model. They should include programming directly on the web portion of the Tableau desktop so that people can write Python or JavaScript code for customizations instead of using a different model. Currently, Tableau Data Prep is a separate application that you have to purchase. It would be helpful if they can include Tableau Data Prep and programming languages such as R, Python in the next version.

Tableau Public, which is a community version, doesn't allow you to save your work on your desktop. They should allow it. Currently, you can only upload it in the community.

I've been using Tableau for almost eight or nine years.

It is very stable. 

It is scalable. They have a cloud version, and you can implement it on the cloud.

Their technical support is good. Our own IT can also manage it, and I can also get support from Tableau.

We also use Dimension, Power BI, and QlikView. Domo is also there, but Domo is a little bit more expensive. Microstrategy is also a little bit more expensive, and it has different media storage.

Its installation is straightforward. It is a one-click installation. 

I installed it myself on my laptop.

Its price is higher than Power BI and QlikView. Tableau costs around $70 per user per month, whereas Power BI is around $8 to $9. QlikView is around $30. 

Tableau has various prices for various models such as Creator, Designer. 

I would recommend this solution if you do not have budget constraints. It is a very good solution with excellent visualizations. I plan to keep using it for academic purposes.

I would rate Tableau a nine out of ten.

On-premises

The primary use case is for household survey and population, and housing census analysis. I have also been using it for monitoring and evaluation of projects.

I provided Data Visualization skills to selected staff of The Gambia Bureau of Statistics (GBoS) in 2018 using Tableau. Previously, SPSS was used to analyze the data but after I introduced them to Tableau, the team was so happy that together we decided to look at the Census 2013 dataset and analyze it using Tableau.

I have also used it to develop a key indicator list based on the Living Standards Measurement Survey.

GBoS, with the help of the European Union, bought Tableau and have since been using it to analyze household surveys instead of SPSS or Stata, as they were doing before.

Another project that I am about to complete using Tableau is the Data Lifecycle Assessment of the Planting for Food and Jobs project in Ghana. I am working on this project with the Ministry of Monitoring and Evaluation and it is being sponsored by the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa.

Already, the staff is so much in love with Tableau that they want me to provide Advanced Training for them so that they can adopt it as their Data Visualization Tool.

The most valuable features are the ability to classify variables into Dimensions and Measures, Ask Data, and Show Me.

The Dimensions and Measures feature solves one of the basic problems most would-be data analysts have, which is to determine which variables to analyze or focus on. Tableau makes this easy by splitting them into Dimensions and Measures and then use Dimensions to dissect or dice and slice the Measures.  

Ask Data enables non-technical personnel to quickly derive insights from data just by knowing which variables are available.

Show Me is a feature to help with knowing which chart is an appropriate one for the selected variables, and it makes helps in creating appropriate visuals.

I cannot end without mentioning the overall seamless flow of how to derive insights from data using Worksheets, Dashboards, and Stories.

I think predictive analytics is the main driver of business decisions and hence Tableau should strengthen the ability to make predictions.

The forecasting feature in Tableau in my view is too limited because it must have dates but I should be able to predict the outcome of an event without having a date as part of the input.

In situations where you are analyzing or using just one measure such as Sales, Tableau does not create the header for you. Furthermore, it is not straightforward as to how to create it.

I would like to have the ability to perform multiple pivots and creating different variables. For example, if I have the regional population for six regions and branch offices, together with the number of clients per branch, all as a record or observation, then I should be able to pivot them separately resulting in the Region, Population, Branch, and Clients.

I have been using Tableau for three years.

The scalability is simply awesome.

The technical support is awesome.

I have worked with Excel, SPSS, and Power BI.

Tableau is easy to use and the support from the community is awesome. Also, I see Tableau as a product for the future due to the commitment from the development team.

The Tableau Development Team listen to suggestions from the users and follow discussions on the community forum and factor that into product upgrades. 

End users want things to be done quickly and intuitively and the only way that any product will survive is by listening to end users 

The deployment was straightforward. I would say that it was a nice and easy, no-brainer setup.

The implementation was done in-house but there was an occasion that I had issues. I contacts support and it was super.

The ability to make insightful decisions quickly is a big benefit to all and therefore reduces cost in terms of manhours spent in cleaning and creating visuals.

It is a bit difficult for some people when they hear $70.00 per month, as some solutions are available for less than $10.00 or for free. What I always tell my trainees is that it is not so much about the cost, but rather, how you can quickly get the insights you have derived into the minds of your audience or stakeholders.

It is important to consider the ease of use. If a product is free but usability is a problem then it is not actually free because it cannot be even used.  

I had already used other tools and also wrote my own program in VBA to analyze data.

Customers need more insights and hence, they should look into Natural Language Processing (NLP). The ability to analyze text data or focus group discussions or radio phone-in programs would be helpful. 

When there is a major upgrade and you install it, it wipes off all of the recently used files and newbies get frustrated. If something can be done about it then that will be very helpful

On-premises

We use Tableau and Tableau Server for data visualization. We have a Global Tableau Server used by five thousand users on a monthly basis, with fifty thousand email notifications and more than five hundred workbooks for sales, marketing, revenue management, and operations analytics.

The solution has improved the organization by allowing quick access to data visualization and data exploration. Also, it helped to have a global server used as a repository to see all of the reports in the same place.

The features that stand out in this solution are:

• Scheduled extract and the multiple connectors are fantastic.
• Tableau Prep is fantastic.
• Tableau mobile on the tablet is also great for operations and the field users.
• "Ask Data" is good.

The performance could be better. At times, it can take up to one minute or more to open a workbook, which is very frustrating for the users.

Three to five years.

Stability is okay, although performance is slow on our side.

Our solution handles five thousand users per month.

Premium customer service and technical support are fantastic. Best in class!

We previously used Cognos and Power BI. We switched because with Tableau, you do not need IT support. Users can create their dashboard really quickly.

The initial setup was a bit complex, more so than expected. I would use a fully managed solution if I had the choice again.

Our in-house IT department implemented this solution.

The initial cost that is set according to CPU cores is expensive. You need to go with at least thirty-two CPU cores for five thousand or more users.

Before choosing this solution we evaluated Qlik, Domo, and Power BI.

The solution is very good. Loved it and the employees also love how quickly they can create a workbook and share it. Overall, a great solution and a great team.

We use it for different groups within the bank. They produce the visualizations they need based on their requirements. It's just rolling out. It's mostly for reports or visualizations - different financial applications. There are also HR applications as well.

For the groups that are advanced, they are pretty happy with the results, and the ones that are just starting the process, the journey, our group is ready to help. There are a lot of learning materials out there to get them trained and try different things out.

In the long run, things should be faster to deployment, to production, than they used to be before.

It's the speed of getting results, based on what the user actually requires. Before it was a very strict, follow the FDLC process. There was a lot of documenting and control that you had to follow before it went to production. We have decreased those a little bit so that they can move to production a lot more quickly than they used to. So time to market, or time to production is a lot faster than it used to be, because of self-service.

It's the ease of use, the quick deployment from developing it and then moving it on to our servers. It's much faster than our Cognos deployment.

It is also a self-service tool so it decreases the burden on having centralized IT-type teams or developers. It has now gone out to the different groups within the bank, and we just have to make sure that they follow certain governance rules so that they don't create crazy queries. It's easier for them. Hopefully, in the long run, they will get their visualization much more quickly. They are closer to the team members that are giving the requirements so they get feedback right away.

I think they have just come out with a tool called Prep, which we just heard about today. It was something that was missing, a little data preparation type of tool. I believe it is an ETL tool but it's not, as far as I know, a robust type tool.

The other thing is a data modeling tool, a little bit more advanced modeling. I would like to see functionality like Cognos has in the Framework Manager.

Less than one year.

We are somewhat new at it, so as more and more people onboard to the server, we'll see how that is being managed. Of course, if the performance is slow, we have to find out the reasons, the causes. If it has to do with how they are building certain things, we have to send that information back to them and then they have to correct their models.

We are in the early stages right now. I wouldn't consider ourselves in the middle or advanced stage yet. We're onboarding a number of customers now to our servers.

This is one of the things that we're going to have to address as people start onboarding. It's going to be the challenge, where we have to choose which BI tool to use. Thre is scalability in term of the number of users and in terms of the volume of data. We don't know the volumes of data that we're dealing with. If they're extracting data and putting it onto our server, that all will take up space. Those are things that we're going to discover over time.

Tableau is also improving its product. We're not using the latest version which has some performance improvements. That's because we don't have the hardware to support it. That is something that Tableau will, I'm sure, improve over time as well and catch up with some of the bigger players.

I haven't personally used support but when there is an issue, an internal ticket gets placed and if we can't resolve it ourselves, then we have a platform team. There is a member there who will submit it to Tableau. There have been a few of those.

The switch was driven by the end-user level. We discovered that people were actually getting the self-service tool without us really being aware of it. Once we found out that they were using it, we did some research and looked at the market, saw how popular this tool is and how easy it is to use compared to our existing tool. We said, "Okay, let's not fight the end-users. Let's help the end-users, let's adopt it and help them grow." 

That is how we've moved to this level where we've actually built out of a center practice. We're now a group, not so much of developers, but of people that will help the individual businesses build their own projects.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are support, for sure, and their ability to advance in the technology. We have found with Tableau that there is such a community out there. They have a lot of information that is freely available. Those are the main things, support and that they advance their products, that they don't get stale.

I wasn't the one that did the server setup. Definitely, on the desktop, it's very easy to use. And I suspect that the server is also fairly easy. It's pretty straightforward in terms of deploying projects onto the server and promoting it on to production. I haven't heard of any real hiccups yet.

In our case, people were already using Tableau. There are other groups within our company that are using other types of tools like MicroStrategy, and we already had BusinessObjects and Cognos here. But because of the ease of use and the self-service nature of the product we decided, for products in that category, that Tableau was the best.

My advice would be that you should consider Tableau. Certainly, for visualization-type projects, it would definitely be one of the products to look at, and I would recommend it at this time.

Because we are just starting the process, I would definitely give it an eight out of 10. We are getting a lot of good support from the groups using it, but that can only get better as we get more and more groups adopting it, and they are happy. It's really going to be a matter of how happy our users are in building their projects. As that grows, and if their feedback is good, then that will only increase the product's rating.

Tablo has a good community base and we're trying to recreate that community within the bank as well so that different groups of individuals can help each other. That's what we're promoting, and it's working. We have our own intranet site that people can go onto and ask questions and get answers. We also have training and all sorts of different information that's Tableau related.