Tableau Enterprise Reviews

Various features are valuable. It is intuitive; Tableau have been investing and releasing regularly. A tech-savvy business person can run with Tableau if they have a decent DWH and engineer supporting it. Access rights can quickly get out of hand, but with Tableau's UI and a tech-savvy business person committed to using the product, they can take charge and not have to rely on the tech team.

It is helping to make Makerbot a data-driven company.

A simple mode for new/occasional users might be helpful. Occasional users will always have trouble coping with such a feature-rich product. Unless you are using it every day, and it is crucial for at least part of your job, the learning curve never flattens out. A simpler "mode" which removes many of the more complex features or just hides them in tool "ribbons" might present a less-daunting interface to aid adoption by the vast majority of users.

I have used it for four years (released ~5-10 years ago).

I have not encountered any deployment issues.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer service is good.

Technical support is good.

Domo: inflexible due to lack of expertise and confusing with blurred demarcation between DWH, ETL and BI layers.

Initial setup was straightforward.

I implemented it myself.

We achieved ROI in <1 year.

Don't buy licenses until there is actual demand - buy a couple of full desktops and a couple of cloud licenses and grow from there ONLY when you have tables/reports/dashboards for users.

We also evaluated Domo and QlikView.

Start ASAP with a tiny cohort of hungry users; let them drive it.

• Ease of use
• Efficiency
• Integration with sources
• Amazing way to view your data

Data visualization and analysis used to take much longer; we were able to shorten the delivery of the projects by 60%.

I would like to see improvement in licensing. It is expensive to provide licenses beyond the 10 we already have.

I have been using it for four years.

Our deployment issues are related to cost.

No, very stable product

Yes. licensing costs are an issue

Technical support is 9/10.

We didn’t have a data vis solution beyond Excel and MSRS before. I used Spotfire in my business school work.

Initial setup was straightforward. I created a data mart, plugged in Tableau and started creating dashboards.

A vendor team implemented it. Implementation was pretty straightforward – but our data was cleaned and well thought through. I would say, 80% of time should be spent on designing your data mart (if that’s the route you are taking) with clean data and valid data sources.

We haven’t calculated ROI, but we know that we shortened the delivery timeline by 60%.

Make sure you plan it into the 5 year plan - how many licenses you will need, etc.

When time came to select a tool for my work, I did thorough research. I downloaded trial versions of both products and selected Tableau based on my user experience and the ratings (Gartner quadrant).

Beware of licensing costs, but it shouldn’t deter anyone from using this product. Even if you just use Tableau desktop to provide static data vis’s, it’s worth it.

You can publish dashboards with Tableau Desktop and share them throughout the organization.

Mapping really is a very beautiful feature.

Now all managers can interact with the dashboards in real time. This will help them become aware of each KPI in the dashboards.

I would like to see them add new charts, especially gauges, which are unfortunately not currently available in Tableau.

I have been using it for more than two years.

I have not really encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues. It’s a great product.

Customer service and technical support are very good.

I also evaluated MS Power BI, but Tableau is more user-friendly, not as complicated and not buggy like MS Power BI.

Initial setup is straightforward. Just two or three clicks, and the product will be available. :)

Implementation was done in-house.

Really, it’s a great product, and very interesting. You will love the data you see when you use the product.

• Ease of creating visually appealing charts and dashboards
• Large user community

It is easier to communicate ideas to people in marketing who are more visual in their thinking.

It over-uses custom calculations to do simple format and other changes. This is time consuming, compared to the actual chart making and holds up the enjoyable process of data discovery.

I have been using it for 18 months.

Obviously, it is not very scalable with large data sets. Hence, it becomes slow and clunky when large data sets are introduced.

7 out of 10. They are helpful but SLAs can be better.

I rate the level of customer service and technical support 7/10.

Qliktech. We switched because the licensing strategy they used was not useful. It was a per dashboard license which means that if we develop several different dasbhoards the solution was becoming too expensive.

Set up is intuitive and instructions on using it are adequate.

An in-house team implemented it. I have no special advice.

At the moment, we have not worked out ROI; it is definitely more productive than using Excel.

Tableau is more GUI based and intuitive. I don't like to code and this does away with a lot of what its competitors force you to do.

Tableau is easy to use. It provides us with faster development and deployment. It also produces impressive graphs and charts.

We make heavy use of supply chain analytics to analyze information on orders, bookings, landed costs freight analytics, partner scores, etc.

We would like to see more advanced data science capabilities like predictive analysis and advanced linear regression.

Tableau also lacks native financial functions. Also, we would like to see integration with native Hadoop and some standard reporting capabilities beyond the dashboard.

We have been using Tableau 9.3 for three years, and are currently beta testing 10.0.

We have not experienced any issues with deployment.

We have not experienced any issues with stability.

We have not experienced any issues with scalability.

I rate the technical support as excellent.

We previously used Enterprise standard.

The initial setup is simple and straightforward.

We built the implementation in house.

Pricing is costly when compared to products like Microsoft Power BI. Also, the licensing should be more general.

Go ahead and use Tableau.

Tableau excels at data visualization and exploration. Terminologies such as a "sheet" are similar to the concept of a worksheet in Excel. Connection to most databases are supported out of the box. These factors keeps the learning curve short for business users. Charts in Tableau are rendered using visualization grammar called VizQL. This enables creating unique and out-of-box charts such as lollipop, sankey, sunburst, etc. The charts you can build in Tableau is only limited by your creativity. In addition, it is relatively to easy build interactivity and pass parameters in your dashboards so you can drill in and progressively reveal more details as the user interacts with data.

Tableau has empowered the business users to get answers to their data questions without relying on IT teams. Rather than following build, wait, and iterate cycle, business teams are able to analyze the data much more quickly and identify opportunities for efficiency and revenue generation. Prior to the adoption of Tableau, data was present in multiple spreadsheet; thus, there was a lack of "single source of truth". This problem was resolved by using "Published Data Sources" residing on Tableau Server.

Many areas for improvement are in Enterprise features. Some of which are:

1. A private folder on the server for a user to store his/her files.

2. A built-in tool for deployment and migration between multiple Tableau Server environments.

3. Ability to share a "database connection" between multiple Tableau data sources so that one change to connection information will be reflected in multiple data sources which share that connection.

4. Email distribution: Delivering analytics via emails on enterprise scale is difficult.

Areas for improvement in Visual Analytics:

1. Blending improvements: Slow performance when two sources are blended together on a high cardinality dimension. Blending does not support full outer join and does not allow using non-additive measures ( e.g. count distinct, average) from secondary data sources.

Update for Tableau 10.1: Some of the above are getting addressed in version or in future version as per Tableau road-map declared at Tableau Conference 2016 in Austin, TX. Specifically, there may be features for private folder in future. Tableau migration pains are somewhat alleviated with TabMigrate, their open source tool ( no support) and email distribution is getting better with conditional subscriptions ( 10.1).

Four years. Eleven years in BI.

In my experiences, Tableau deployment has been straightforward when deploying self contained dashboards (called packaged workbooks). However, you need to follow multiple steps to deploy a dashboard to your production server from your development environments.

Tableau (both Desktop + Server) is one of most stable software I have worked with.

Scalability in Tableau depends on many factors such as server configuration, networking, and workbook design. In my experience, the single biggest factor that affects scalability is the dashboard design. Excessive use of quick filters, multiple data sources blended together, long conditional expressions impact scalability. Reading "Designing efficient workbooks" whitepaper is extremely helpful. If your dashboards follow the best practices, it is possible to accomplish near-linear scalability by scaling your Tableau Server horizontally or vertically for large number of concurrent users.

Tableau customer service is very helpful and responsive. Both the customer service and technical support are integrated into their customer portal.

Tableau technical support is very professional and responsive. Many questions are answered in 1-2 business days depending on the severity. However, specific questions such as improving performance fall outside their scope. Thankfully, the Tableau community is one of the most engaged, knowledgeable, and helpful community. If you have a question that is not already answered by the community (very rare), you are guaranteed to receive a response within a few hours.

Yes. I have prior experience with SAP Business Objects, Lumira, Sisense, as well as javascript charting tools such as Highcharts, D3JS, etc. The biggest reason for switching are: ease of use, agility to deliver insightful answers from your data, and large number of chart types.

Initial setup was very straightforward involving running the installer program. I did not run into any issues with multiple versions of Tableau Desktop or Tableau Server.

All of my implementation have been in-house working closely with IT team.

Tableau pricing is competitive with the other options available in the market.

Yes. We evaluated Microstrategy v10, Sisense, SAP Business Objects.

Before committing to Tableau, it is helpful to list the top problems you are trying to resolve. If most of your needs are in operational business intelligence, you might want to evaluate other tools in addition to Tableau. If you want to analyze data, discover insights, communicate your story with data, or impress your customers with great visualizations, Tableau is by far the best tool.

For a successful Tableau adoption it is very important to have strong business user support and understanding the importance of data-driven decisions. Without the business user engagement, Tableau is just another tool.

The most valuable feature in Tableau Desktop developer version is the drag and drop feature of dimensions & measures in the view. Parameters and action filters are also great.

Me and my team work extensively on geo-spatial data, wherein we are supposed to deal with shape files and state/city/pincode boundaries. Tableau also provides a feature to make custom geographic shapes, which helped us in delivering a wide range of solutions. 

I would love to see dynamic parameter values & radial distance recognition on other WMS maps.

I have been using Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server for four years now.

I have not encountered any deployment issues. Deployment is really easy and simple until and unless you get your hands on the Server-Worker Configuration setup. That is a bit tricky.

It is super stable. No issues whatsoever.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

I used QlikView but switched; the UI was not that great.

Initial setup was straightforward.

I implemented Tableau Desktop & Server all by myself in my organisation.

ROI shows when you hear 'Wow' from your clients every time you deliver a dashboard or a report. They always come back with new projects and greater expectations.

The price is perfect, as the ROI is superb.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

The ability to connect multiple data sources, build data extracts, and display said data in an automated, graphical, format is the key driving factor insuring I continue using Tableau. While there are plenty of other tools on the market, such as Report Builder or Crystal Reports, Tableau is the first I have used that allows for such wide spread data integration and presentation in a visibly pleasing format. Moreover, the data extract function of Tableau has hooked me into using their tool over any other. Specifically, the ease of extracting and automating report generation from these extracts.

Tableau has allowed us to build automated weekly dashboards that explain our organisation's pipeline. Moreover, these dashboards have resolved long standing time sinks which have freed up resources to focus on ever larger and more interesting BI projects. Additionally, we have used Tableau to increase the range and width of reports we are able to generate on a weekly basis.

Tableau development has an increasingly large learning curve. It is marketed as an upper management tool that anyone can dive into. However, trying to develop even simple tables within Tableau is an exercise in frustration and patience. The end results cannot be denied, but the path to getting there is not for the lighthearted.

I have used Tableau now for 2 years.

Tableau customer service has been incredible. Not only do they have an active community forum, but their account managers have been very pleasant to work with.

Out of five, I would rate technical support a solid 4.

I have used Report Builder and Crystal Reports. Switching wasn't really my decision, as the other tools used were at different organisations. Since then, I have tried to move back to other reporting tools, but found them lacking in functions I hadn't even realised I had come to rely on!

Setup of Tableau was the easiest of any reporting environment I have used.

We implemented Tableau through a vendor team who were helpful in getting us off the ground. That being said, any reporting tool is dependent upon the data set it connects to. As such, real value has only appeared from Tableau after long usage and learning of how to use its myriad of functions.

Stick with the development process, try a report over and over, and use Google to search out answers to those questions you think have no answer. Take it from me, if you can build it in Excel, then you can build it in Tableau. It just takes time and effort. Also, it may not look EXACTLY the same, but you can get it pretty close. In some cases even better.