Tableau Reviews

• 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.

Very good.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

1. Data Blending - the ability to blend data from multiple data sources to create the report that is needed.

2. Quick and meaningful visualizations - Tableau's drag and drop features provide on the fly reports that often don't take more than a minute to create.

3. Tableau Server Subscriptions - Gives end users the ability to quickly subscribe to a dashboard.

4. Awesome support! - The Tableau help-desk and server support teams are out of this world. Have a question, shoot them an email and get a response quickly. They also have a phenomonal website (tableausoftware.com) with traning videos, a knowldge base, and plently of Tableau experts to help work through calculations and dashboard building.

We no longer need to rely on certified report creators to create reports and dashboards. Just connect to data and start building. Plently of free training availble online at tableausoftware.com for first-time users. Allows for independancy from IT.

The tool is not perfect, but with each release issues are getting resolved and performance is getting better. There is an awesome "Ideas" page on their website that allows users to submit ideas for improvement and vote on ideas that they would like to see added into any of the Tableau products. Tableau does a great job of moving these ideas from conception to reality.

3 years

No

No

No

Outstanding!

Outstanding!

Our company used Cognos Planner and a few other BI solutions before. Tableau is less expensive and easier to use. An easy choice to make the switch.

Pretty straightforward. Tableau gives great instructions. My only complaint is that they make assumptions on how your company handles security ceritifcates when using SAML. It took us some time to work though SAML configuration, but once we passed this hurdle, everything else was easy to put in place.

The intial server setup was done with an in-house team. When we expended our environment, we brought a vendor in to make sure we were implementing everything occurding to our business needs. The vendor, recommmended by Tableau, was professional and we were able to get the job done quickly.

Without a doubt the best aspect of Tableau is the data flexibility. I work with Tableau within the confines of a healthcare organization- which is constantly expanding the metrics, datasets and sources we have to draw from in order to meet the needs of the US government, our physicians and most importantly our patients. With Tableau we have the ability to create a dashboard that displays all of the aforementioned data sources in a way that appears uniform.

Before we built a data platform using Tableau we were unable to align our employees around their data. We had a few dozen data sources representing important areas of focus for our operations teams. It was unreasonable to expect our operational leaders to consistently monitor the results of these different reports. Our hope was to build a platform everyone could access, that would be a one stop shop for reliable answers to important business questions; Tableau gave us that ability and made it affordable.

While Tableau is flexible it doesn't deal well with data that comes in a predetermined organization- i.e. data cubes. Our team has repeatedly had trouble trying to import raw data if it had any predetermined structure.

Two years.

No, it was pretty seamless.

The issues we have encountered have been largely due to our own server structure, not Tableau itself.

On the contrary, Tableau gave us the ability to manage larger volumes of data.

7/10.

7/10.

No, not for this purpose.

Very straightforward- we were live with access in a few days, though it took a few months to build our more polished dashboards.

Our decision support team handed deployment, in house.

You will need a team comprised of programmers, developers, user experience specialists and customer service representatives.

Ease of use, In-Memory data storage, native connectors for different DB’s and many more

We're a service based company and we most of the times get adhoc requests for implementing reporting. Since Tableau helps us create rich and meaningful visualizations in a short time frame, it’s helping us improve our business.

ETL functionality to be incorporated and Server to be improved in terms of including more features in Web Authoring, Quick steps in replacing data source connection credentials etc.

I’ve been using Tableau for 2.5 years.

• Tableau Desktop: No
• Tableau Server: Not meeting the hardware requirements
• Otherwise, deployment is smooth.

No. Just that hardware requirements need to be met.

Excellent

Excellent

I’ve used OBIEE. When compared to Tableau, visualizations are not visually appealing and I also had performance issues.

Straight Forward in both Tableau Desktop and Server.

In-house team

I cannot say a specific number, but lots of projects are using Tableau for their reporting solutions.

We’d bought 10 licenses initially and cost was discounted by $100 per license. No day-to-day cost but, we’ll need to pay maintenance of $500 per year.

Qlikview, Pentaho.

People should use Tableau because it is fast and visualizations will be rich.They can reduce the resource cost as reports can be done by a small team and does not require too much technical expertise.

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.

3.5 (1-5 5 Being highest)

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