Tableau Reviews

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.

Our clients from different industries use Tableau for data visualization purposes. 

Tableau's most valuable feature is its ability to connect with various data sources and display real-time data on three different dashboards. It stands out in handling and utilizing data compared to other products like Oracle BI.

There should be stronger data modules for the platform.

We have been using Tableau for the past one and a half years.

The platform is relatively stable. I rate its stability a nine out of ten.

The platform is highly scalable. I have five clients, and the total number of users across all clients is around 300 to 400. I rate its scalability an eight out of ten.

The platform's technical support services require improvement. There should be enough support during the deployment.

Neutral

The platform is deployed on the cloud and on-premises. Its initial setup is straightforward. It took about an hour or two to deploy. I rate the setup process as a nine out of ten.

The pricing of Tableau should be better to remain competitive in the market, especially when compared to alternatives like Power BI. By adjusting the pricing, it can appeal to a broader range of markets and attract more customers.

I rate the platform an eight out of ten.

We use it in our parent company as well as in client companies. A few of our environments are on-premises, and a few are on Tableau Online. We have a mix of both.

The UI part is the best. The end-users can easily get started with Tableau Desktop or Tableau Online because of its user-friendliness.

I also work as an SME on the platform side. Tableau is very nice and jazzy for the end-users, but there are pain points for the admins. Performance is something about which we hear a lot of complaints, such as the dashboard doesn't open in time. It performs well on the desktop but not on the server. I know that there is always a limitation when it comes to a huge amount of data or the complexity of the calculations, but we often hear from end-users about the performance on the server side. It is easy to drag and drop all the columns and do what we want, but if it is not going to load better on the server, users are not going to like it.

Their standard support is not good. They should improve it. I don't know if it has anything to do with the acquisition, but lately, their support has not been great.

Their upgrades have always been an issue. They never work. 

Tableau is a little bit costlier than other tools such as Power BI.

They should make it easy to integrate with tools like SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, etc. Its integration with Office 365 should be improved because most of the users already have tools like Outlook, Teams, and SharePoint, and they want to integrate a reporting tool or a visualization tool with their existing tools. 

It is very easy to integrate scripting in Spotfire. We can do a lot of changes in the UI by writing some scripts. That could be something that Tableau can look into. They can also consider providing APIs, but most of the people who work with Tableau do not really work much on the scripting side. So, I am not sure if it is feasible or required technically.

I have been using this solution for almost eight years.

It is scalable for online and on-premises versions. With the online version, they take care of the load, and we don't have to worry about that. For on-premises, initially, we used to have core-based licensing in which we had a cap on the number of cores we could expand to. We then moved to user-based licensing, which makes it easy to scale.

In our parent company, we have close to 200 users. We also have two clients on this platform. One of the clients has about 400 users. For another client, overall, we support close to 20K customers on this platform. That's one of the biggest environments.

Their premium support is really good, but their standard support is failing. Their standard support is the worst. We recently had an experience where we waited for more than seven days for a ticket to be picked up. It was vacation time, and there were a lot of factors, but their standard support is not good. For a few of our clients, we do have premium support, and they respond to any issue because we include the technical account managers in the communication.

Comparing it with Power BI, the main differences are the cost and the integration with Office 365. It is very easy to integrate Power BI with Teams or SharePoint because they all belong to the same company, whereas with Tableau, I have to integrate it with a third-party vendor. It is a little tough to integrate Tableau with SharePoint or Teams. Nowadays, everyone wants everything in one place; it could either be in SharePoint or in Teams. 

I have been working with Spotfire lately, and it is very easy to integrate scripting in Spotfire.

The Tableau server-side used to be very good initially, but for the last year, we are having issues with the upgrades. Their upgrades never work. We always get stuck while doing the upgrades, and we end up taking a different approach. We take the data and keep it somewhere. After that, we wipe out the entire server and install it again. We then restore the data into that environment. 

In terms of maintaining this solution, I used to belong to level three (L3) support till last month. We were only handling the performance issues and any issues that need RCA. The L3 support used to have close to five people. L2 support, which usually included adding a user, removing a user, adding a new group, and providing usual production support, was taken care of by the Ops team. They used to have more than five people on the team.

Cost is where tools like MicroStrategy, Power BI, or Spotfire come into play. Cost-wise, Tableau is a little bit costlier than other tools such as Power BI.

I have been using Tableau all these years, but about four years ago, Power BI came out at a very low cost. Their desktop version was free from the beginning. Power BI Desktop has always been free, whereas Tableau Desktop is costly. When it comes to cost, people prefer Power BI because it integrates very well with Office 365. You don't have to worry about integration with Teams or SharePoint.

It is easy to use for most business users, but before using it, you should understand the basics of dimensions or measurements. If you directly come to this tool without understanding the concepts of warehousing, dimensions, and fact tables, you would not get what you want. This applies to any reporting tool. You should have a basic understanding of what data warehousing is all about and then get started with the tool.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. Tableau has always been at the top of my list. Because of the technical hold that I have on the tool, I always prefer Tableau. It would always be on top as compared to any other tool.

When we work with CXOs to create dashboards we use Tableau. C-level employees like a CXO, a CEO, a VP, prefer to work with Tableau. It's easier and better for them.

For Tableau, the most valuable feature is the user experience and the quality of the end product.

One thing I would want to change for Tableau is to have a lower-cost model. It's pretty high for enterprise deployment.

In the next release, I would like to have the capability to call machine learning models within Python while I'm building a dashboard. The value calculation should be a machine learning model, which is running somewhere else, on say, Amazon. These tools give good outputs, like calculated fields and all. But today the outputs are not straightforward. In simple terms, I need machine learning on the fly. That is not there.

I have been using the solution for four or five years.

I would say the solution is very stable. We have not had any issues in using the product at all.

The solution does have scalability issues. When the data size increases, the product slows down and doesn't work right. In addition, it's very expensive to scale.

The only other solution we use and have explored is Power BI from Microsoft.

The solution deployment was pretty simple and straightforward.

We deployed the solution with our in-house team.

It's an enterprise solution, and we have all licenses. Tableau has multiple licenses; there is a reader, a developer, and an administrator.

If there are 50 or 100 users wanting to use Tableau, it's pretty expensive. The license is very expensive. We have 20 to 30 users in our company.

Because the solution is a drag and drop tool and what unique features we need or what we want to build, we cannot build using the tool. So we use JavaScript for that. We write our own code and build our own solutions.

My advice would be that all solutions are good, but it depends on your use case. If you are building something for C-level employees, use Tableau or another solution.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

It is usually used to visualize how the data looks. It is used for drawing charts and different types of visualizations. You can visualize sales, profits, and metrics by geography, product categories, and so on.

I'm using the 2020 version. The latest version came out in 2021. I've not downloaded that one yet. I'm using the last year's version.

It is easy to use, and it can handle a large amount of data.

An advanced type of visualization is a bit tricky to create. It has something called a Calculated field, and that sometimes gets a bit difficult to use when you want to create an advanced type of visualization.

I've been using this solution for five to six years.

It is stable.

It is scalable. We have around 10 users.

I have not contacted their technical support.

It is just a matter of downloading the file from the internet and installing it. That's it.

It is pretty simple to use. We don't require anyone for its deployment and maintenance.

I believe it has a lifelong license, and once you purchase it, you don't have to renew it, but I'm not sure.

I would recommend this solution to others. I would rate Tableau an eight out of 10.

We primarily use Tableau for reporting and visualization. Visualizations are important to us.

My role is primarily concerned with financial planning and financial reporting. 

It is very easy to create dashboards, charts, and graphs.

The Hyper Extract functionality is not as strong as that provided by Microsoft SQL.

Tableau is not as strong as Oracle OBIEE in some regards.

We have been using Tableau for six years, since 2014.

Tableau is quite stable.

The scalability of Tableau is very good and I don't have an issue with it.

I have not dealt with technical support personally. We have a specific person that communicates with them.

We also use Microsoft BI and Oracle OBIEE for reporting. I think that Tableau's features are much better than those of OBIEE and although Microsoft BI has better performance, Tableau is still the one that I like the best.

Tableau is much more expensive than Microsoft BI.

The initial setup is not complex. This is one that I can set up on my own, unlike a solution such as EnterprsieOne, which I cannot.

The professional version of Tableau is quite expensive. This is in comparison to some other products, such as Microsoft BI, which is only $110 per year.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I'm collecting some information and some reports from SAP and sending them to users as a graphical report. That's basically how I use the product.

The new pre-built application of Tableau is amazing.

The initial setup is simple.

It's a very stable, reliable solution.

You can scale the solution.

The dashboard has a lot of great options. 

I'd like it to work without the workflow or pushing options from the build, every time you need to do a refresh. We need a workflow for pushing the data to the cloud or to the server when you are using the pre-built application, the new application.

In the cloud sometimes the performance is a little bit slow.

I've been using the solution for two and a half years.

The stability has been good. It's reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

I have found the solution to be scalable.

At my organization, we have about ten to 15 regular users. 

We use it pretty extensively - at least once a week.

I'm not sure if we actually have plans to increase usage at this time. 

So far, I haven't needed any help from them. It's a good application in and of itself. I haven't needed technical support.

I used a little bit of Power BI. I know Tableau better, so I moved to Tableau Arabic.

The initial implementation process was straightforward. We did it without any problems.

Since the solution is on the cloud, you don't need a lot of staff for maintenance tasks.

You do not need an integrator or consultant to assist you in the implementation process. We were able to do it ourselves. 

We have a standard license that we renew yearly.

I'm an end-user.

I'm using the latest version of the solution.

I'd recommend Tableau to others. It offers good performance and the dashboard options are solid. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

SAP BW , TABLEAU Server an TABLEAU desktop, the Info from SAP were downloaded using SAP Data services and ABAPin a very large Steel Makin company in Latin America

Better an accuracy info every morning for decision takers regarding sales production and Customers Financial situation 

They were considered the gold standard for dashboard development. However, many people also have SAP.

The initial setup is very easy.

It's very easy to use and users don't need any IT support to access it as the information is right there. 

There were a lot of dashboards everywhere in the organization, however, when the company wanted to get the operational databases they were not connected.

The solution needs to improve its integration capabilities.

The performance and security could be better.

Many people saw Tableau as a silver bullet and it isn't. It's good for small things, however, not for an institutional way of doing things.

I'd like to see better integration with SAP.

I'd like an integrated ETL or some sort of data preparation capabilities. 

We've used the solution since 2013.

The solution is stable.

In the past, you couldn't do a full query. You could do the right query or the left query but not the full query. They fixed that n 2016. 

Also, there was another problem in that their selling approach was very aggressive and they were selling to sales directors. However, the problem is that after that you need the Tableau server. You need the deployment of the Tableau server and you have your dashboard. You needed IT buy-in. In order that them to be able to be seen in all the organizations, or even outside your organization, you need to get the Tableau server. With that in mind, companies must have IT people or training in the Tableau server, and then the dashboard is just developed in the desktop so you can upload them to the server. With all of that comes a lot of issues around security, modelization, and performance theses issues were not approached or considered in any by the users 

Scalable in the sense of a very good performance in te Tableau Server , nevertheless the info must be prepared or downloaded in a very well defined DataWarehouse

We had a lot of trouble with Tableau at the beginning. There were issues that nobody had dealt with in the past.

There was an issue that was open for about two months. They couldn't reach a resolution. We started the Tableau server in an English version server, however, it was decided to install the Spanish version instead. We defined success criteria for our developments, our systems. In the analysis and the scope of work, we decided that every Tableau dashboard or whatever was going to have an acceptable loading time of six to a maximum of eight seconds. The problem was that it took 30 to 60 seconds. Technicians from Tableau, from Brazil, from the USA, came and looked at it. In the end, it was the Spanish version that was causing performance issues, and therefore we had to install the English version again.

They had the Portuguese, French, or Spanish versions behind in terms of updating all their software. That was the problem. There was a bug in the Spanish version that in the  English version didn't exist.

Positive

I'm also familiar with Power BI, SAP, and QlikView as well as Snowflake. 

The initial setup is easy. You can install it on your computer and you can start to do a lot of dashboards. They have a gateway for many databases and you can get to the information in a very easy way. 

The thing is if you don't provide it with a very good ETL design you have the problem that all the fields are going to be dashboards. That's pretty common. Many organizations have a kind of operational database. With specialized databases. It's updated daily. The information is validated and confirmed and authorized. Whatever you do with Tableau is your problem. They install Tableau in that new server and the users go to that information. 

They make a copy of the transactional databases. They put it there and the users start to work. It's very easy.

In terms of deployment, for the desktop, you can have a visualization of information and you can get copies of the data on your personal computer. That can happen in minutes. It takes minutes or maybe half an hour to get going.

The problem is that you have to have some training. The training is going to take one week or so. In another week or two weeks, although you are not an expert yet, you start to understand Tableau. You don't have to be technical. If you understand Excel well, you will find Tableau pretty straightforward. 

You only need one or maybe two people to deploy the solution. You need a technician mostly for security.

The vendor team were sales especialist, not consultants 

We evaluated in 2013 QLICKVIEW . 

We're consultants. 

We're using the most recent version of the product. What we do is download the on-premises for testing in order to see the new capabilities.

It's a very mature tool with a lot of enhancements in the last two or three years. Our advice is that, if you are going to use it as an end-user, it's a very beautiful tool. If you are going to use it in an institutional way, you have to take good care of your ETLs and you have to design a very good data warehouse. That's what they don't do. That's what many, many, many organizations don't do. I don't know if that's the case with Snowflake or Microsoft Power BI.

You must take care of your warehouse information if you are going to have a very good design, granularity, and time framing after three months to one year of information.

The dashboards and the ETLs must do more work than Tableau. If not, you're going to crash. One of the problems that we had was due to the fact that Tableau said that you could reach the SAP information and that was not true. You need a third-party developer. That's an additional cost and additional training. However, with a solution like QlikView, they have a very beautiful integration with SAP.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.