Tableau Enterprise Reviews

As a BI system integrator. we design performance solutions for different industries. We do use different tools in our solutions, and Tableau software is one of the our partners. One of the solutions we developed for a telecom client was a performance management tool. The solution used reporting dashboards based on network performance KPIs.

Using Tableau, it has made the reporting stage simple and enabled us to focus mainly on the ETL part.

The most important feature is the tool is very easy to use. This makes it simple to introduce it to CxOs. After a rapid demo, they are usual impressed by the results shown, because it has such a rare simplicity. 

• Needs more ETL capabilities, to be able to address the end-to-end BI need. 
• The ability to use it on MAC machines. As far as I know, this is not possible.

Business Intelligence for operational and executive dashboards. It is used to create real-time operational insights which start at the line-level staff person who manages their own productivity and performance indicators. This gets rolled up to middle and upper management and provides a full sense of operations and targeted goal achievement.

Excellent product: Great visualizers and it is easy to use. 

Allows insights into business performance issues, providing supporting data for critical policy and operational changes.

It is easy to adapt visualizers to have interactive conversations among decision-makers. Powerful aggregating and drill-downs are critical for effective insight discovery.

Deployment of dashboards to viewers and unit supervisors can be prohibitively expensive.

The cost is high.

I use Tableau Desktop and Server 10.4 for data visualization to measure business targets and performance, it helps the business identify strategies and solutions to meet objectives.

Our clients are so happy with the new visualisation tools. It has answered most of their questions on how to measure and improve their business performance. 

It gives us a new dimension to the way that we analyse our data.

• Parameters
• Calculations
• Dynamic filters
• LOD
• The ability to use multiple data sources. 

The use of a storyboard helps the flow of the data visualisation.

If they could add global filters in the stories, more chart types, and default colours, it would help.    

As a consultant and solutions developer for an integrator company, I use Tableau for the construction of Control Dashboards and BI applications.  

• Enhanced application development
• Less time spent with end users
• Better interaction with end users
• Better application quality

• Easy of use
• Easy to learn
• Gradual scalability from simple to complex situations
• Wide integration with BI industry

Provide additional enhancements in any business process: Operations, Marketing and Sales, Finance, Human Resources, Logistics, etc.

Tableau works for a diverse range of industries and use cases. I have work with Tableau for big organizations and big governmental entities as well.

Tableau has comprehensive, insightful charts, which allow you to build stunning dashboards and enrich your support decision-making.

• Ease of use
• Maps
• Filters
• Drag and drop functionality
• Dates
• Undo button
• Wide-range of data connectors

• Scripting just as loops would be great. 
• Forecasting on table calculation fields.

• Easier to use

• Consultant engagement
• Margin analysis 
• Project break-even point (analysis of the project)
• SLE of projects

Tableau's very stable.

So far, so good.

There are two faces of Tableau. One face is Tableau partners. They are very few, and Tableau was only a subsidiary with no support and no representative in Brazil. Now they are represented. 

Really, there aren't many problems with Tableau.

ClickView. ClickView seemed easy to use, very simple, but it could not support the whole company. It couldn't be scaled.

We looked at Oracle BI. It seems that it's very easy to use, very competitive against Tableau, and it's a little bit cheaper. It seems that we have a competitive advantage going with Oracle. 

Oracle in the past had OBIEE that was hard to use, very expensive, and modeling was hard. Changing the modeling was difficult. We decided not to go with Oracle at that time. Now it's cloud-based, the TCO is very cheap. But we had already gone with Tableau.

We only it for the financial side of the company. We don't use it on other projects, for example, the production side, the IT of the company. Only for financial. I would say that the result is we have a lack of users, it's only part of company; we don't have a whole view of the business.

The most valuable features are:

• Ease of setup
• Ability to create visualizations
• Level of interaction.

The users required no training after visualizations have been presented to them.

There are some areas where finding answers required asking specific individuals and searching through many emails. Tableau has allowed us to combine and visualize data from many entry points and provide users with a single source of consistent and reliable information.

While noted that the product is specifically designed for visualization, it would be the perfect tool if it had more ETL features.

My company has been researching a BI tool for the past year. We came across Tableau and have been using the public version for approximately six months.

There have not been any areas of instability, thus far. The identified areas were a result of a lack of knowledge.

Based on the analysis currently being done, the public version is sufficiently meeting our needs.

Technical support has been awesome. We met a partner based in Trinidad and they have been providing us with assistance as we need it.

This is our first visualization solution being used. Attempts were made on another platform, but setup and use of tool were a huge challenge for the team.

The initial setup was very straightforward. The team was able to follow the videos posted on the Tableau website and required no technical assistance from the Tableau team.

I am quite pleased that Tableau has now revised their pricing and licensing. The initial model was quite expensive but the current model allows you to scale up as you need to and it is far more attractive. The ability to license on a per user per month basis is now very affordable.

The team looked at Pentaho, Microsoft Power BI, and IBM Cognos. The members of the team who were exposed to aspects of the evaluation were far more receptive to Tableau than the others.

It is very important to do an evaluation of your users who will be interacting with the tool. Their technical abilities will determine if a cumbersome tool is suitable for them. Secondly, if you do not have the technical expertise to administer a product, then it may not be the solution for you. Some of the other tools require a high dependence on the vendor for administrative purposes.

It’s good for quick visualization and being able to quickly consume unstructured data to play around with. This is good way to show a demonstration/prototypes of dashboards and scenarios for design discussions on reporting requirements or to show what the data is telling us when it comes to features of data integration, OLAP services, data mining and extract, transform, and load (ETL) capabilities.

Good for adhoc visualization of an unstructured dataset which comes from other sources outside of source systems that you can overlay on top of the structured data and you have to get a quick visualization dashboard prototype going. It helps with the Agile design build and can be used in our current operations analytics work to overlay multitude of data sources that we know of. Can always work offline, which is nice. It’s good for organizations with very limited staff to do quick report builds and dashboards that can be put on our SharePoint site for sharing or on reports when responding to data caps. I use it a lot for design discussions so I can communicate the gaps in data sources for data exchanges or to generate a storyboard prototype of how the data is to be used in visualization but where we need to have data exchange/ETLs on.

It is good for its use if ad hoc, offline, or needed for quick turnaround on reports/dashboards. It is not so great when it comes to data exchange/integration, data mining, etc. I rely on what’s available in current versions to see what APIs and plugins that I can use and they have Open Source on GitHub is a plus to share things to re-use.

Room for improvement is more on data integration features that are agnostic to any solution platform but can be plug and play to be able to reuse what was built out Tableau in any other platform of work.

Over five years, and the past three more for integrating the use of a similar family of tools where Tableau is one of a few options in our environment, where these services are considered for quick-hit items as needed, given time, dollars, and analyst skills.

No.

Yes, see other answers. Scalability per user defined elements are okay but not so much for enterprise wide reuse. Per license cost can have some work done to it to make it more affordable on the recurring maintenance end of things. I would like to see more subscription based models.

I don’t have to use it much since I can get much of this through current site materials and social media blogs/videos.

I didn’t switch. It was just a matter of seeing where Tableau makes sense as a service to use in our environment, which is for the simpler, not so complex, but quick turnaround. Worked with other technology stacks that are similar, like Information Builders, SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, SAS, MicroStrategy, IBM, Salesforce, Qlik, etc. I find Tableau the easiest on visualization and its license model straightforward. But when it comes to scaling to other interoperation work, not so great on the wizard template, to do data mining/exchange. It doesn’t have that robust analytics and intelligence self-learning feature that comes with other tools.

It’s straightforward, like any typical software. You have just got to understand what the various versions of API and plugins and what they can do. Though I have noticed that there were situations where it was said it was able to do things, but not until a later version. It needs better communication on that front.

License small scale and run with it to get a business case going on its use. Give the licenses only to those analysts you want to do quick turnaround visualizations and those that know the data sources/data (those that don’t will just have access to tool and that compounds a problem with giving you something nice to look at but no meaning behind it, which I wouldn’t recommend). Look to existing platforms of one’s current BI environment and see if you can have a server license which can reduce the per user licenses.

I wish there was more of a subscription model with the pricing when it comes to Tableau, so you can get all the latest version upgrades/features if you pay monthly/annually, rather than buy straight up licenses that you lock to a baseline version and have to pay for upgrades later on. It limits how many users you can get on the thing, and it's not like you will use it all the time.

Yes, we did an alternatives analysis of all the product line options against our criteria of need in our environment, where recurring cost, time to implement, and other interoperation, security, platform scalability, architecture, etc. factors play a role. The majority were mentioned above.

We always have the latest versions of Tableau (part of the package deal), so we can have the latest in APIs and integration hooks and plugins needed across our platforms of OBIEE, SQL, etc.

Tableau is good for quick visualization once you have the data, but not such a great interoperable tool or getting to multiple sources without a lot of work and know-how. Good for pulling in unstructured data and doing quick reports/prototypes. Does require some stronger business analytical skills rather than your novice user (and technical with regards to use of API and plugins).

If new to the analytics/BI market, use it, as it's good for getting you jumpstarted to understanding your data/data sources and to envision what you can use the data for. It's a good starting tool for that. If more advanced or need it for interoperation, I suggest looking to see how it fits with your current environment and determine where best to use it as it shouldn’t be your only option as the features are not robust enough to scale for everything.