Tableau Enterprise Reviews

Ease of use (including frequently used calculations), drag and drop and interactive data visualization are the most valuable features of the product to me.

• Helped organization to identify the best time to roll out the campaign for summer cruise booking.
• Measured health plan product performance to identify health plan product(s) where organization is losing or making money.
• Source-to-destination mapping for health plan members to determine how far members travel to their primary care physician’s office from their residence to identify opportunities for service quality improvements.

We need a Tableau connector to connect to other BI tools like SAP BusinessObjects.

I have been using this product for over three years.

So far, I have never encountered any issues with deployment or stability. I do feel slowness rarely when I try to get data directly by connecting to Teradata database using SQL Query.

Technical support is excellent.

I did a POC with Tableau for my current organization and compared this tool with other BI tools.

I recommended Tableau for the following reasons: truly mature product, price-performance balance, ease of use, lot of flexibilities in regrouping the data on the fly, most of the frequently used calculations are built-in and very easy to use - unlike some other BI tools, which are quite clumsy - and for best interactive data visualization capabilities. Most importantly, a non-IT person can develop a simple dashboard without any IT help.

Initial setup was very straightforward.

I installed the Tableau desktop on my computer. Tableau servers are installed by our internal admins. It’s an easy installation and doesn’t need the vendor’s help.

Sometimes admin gets overwhelmed after Tableau is rolled out in the organization as users get up to the speed in a very short period of time, because of how easy it is to use the tool. Therefore, system access and resource planning should be done and properly planned ahead of time.

People should be aware of the fact that Tableau doesn’t have a semantic layer. It takes a good amount of time to prepare the dataset / data structure. Once the dataset is ready, the data visualization part doesn’t take much time, even for a fairly complex dashboard, because the tool is very intuitive and easy to use.

It provides access to many kinds of data sources. For example: big data/SAP BW.

The second-most valuable feature is the wonderful usage experience. You cannot find this on any other vendor’s solution such as Microsoft or SAP. Even though Qlik’s QlikView is similar.

We use it for a very complex dashboard design showing our raw material trend analysis. Even though there is huge amount of data and information in these dashboards, Tableau easily provides high-quality UI presentations, along with quick response and design times.

Its server lacks traditional BI solution capabilities such as job scheduling, HA and etc. If you want to roll out it as an enterprise-wide application, you must consider many usage scenarios and operation-level items. Tableau has a robust design UI and presentation layer, but lacks many of the capabilities of an enterprise BI solution. We have been using the SAP BO BI solution for many years. We feel Tableau Server still has a long way to go.

I have used this solution for nearly one year.

I have had poor experiences using its mobile app when I demo some dashboards to high-level executives. Sometimes, it does not respond with results very quickly. But, the web UI is OK. I don’t know why there is a discrepancy.

Technical support has been good so far.

We have used SAP BO BI for many years. We liked the WebI /BO dashboard. We also evaluated Microsoft PowerBI and QlikView. Finally, our IT and project team chose Tableau because its UI/user experience is the best.

Its initial setup is simple, but server installation took some time to finish. We use Desktop and Server on our Windows platforms.

We have a local partner to support us. But, we also try each product by ourselves. A vendor partner provides some technical support or Q&A.

ROI has been good so far.

They must understand their real business goal and user’s needs or behavior for using the dashboard design. That impacts your tool’s usage and design approach. Try using Tableau Desktop anyway. Pay more attention to the Tableau community’s sharing or other experts’ design sharing on the website. It will give you many ideas or best design practices and reference.

Desktop – primarily ease of use, TTM, for ad-hoc and reusable analyses and visualizations.

Primarily TTM. The product is used by a number of different groups throughout the company – marketing, services, product engineering...

Server scalability and pricing. Tableau was considered but rejected for a large scale in-house analysis and reporting solution. Even with a large-scale implementation (eight-plus cores), it was decided that Tableau probably wouldn’t scale to the level needed and at that level, was costly.

Desktop was brought into the company five or six years back. Server instances soon followed to support smaller groups.

Desktop installation is easy and straightforward. Out-of-the-box usable.

We have a central IT group that handled server deployments and now handles corporate-wide desktop license maintenance and support with the vendor.

The desktop is fairly intuitive and easy to get started with. Training (on the product, data viz/scientist) is needed for deeper analyses.

As with any solution, do your homework. Understand what it is you’re trying to solve. Tableau is just one of many tools/solutions implemented across the company.

The speed with which it is possible to explore data is, for me, the best thing about Tableau. By this, I mean it is extremely easy to drill into data, which in turn shortens the time from having raw data to having useful, actionable insights. The aesthetics of the dashboards and adherence to data visualization best practices by default is also great.

Our organization’s workflows dictate that the front desk staff are supposed to collect demographic data from our customers. However, we knew that this was not happening. Tableau allowed us to very easily monitor which staff members were adhering to these workflows and which weren't. We could then do very targeted re-training of those staff members who needed it.

Two major improvements that I would like to see:
- A better/quicker interface for formatting graphs and dashboards. The current design takes too much time and doesn't really allow for the same formatting to be applied globally across all of the visualization.
- Improved data formatting prior to visualization. I do know that some improvements are coming with the next major release - for instance, the ability to join data across disparate data source types (e.g. joining CSV and SQL Server DB) - but this is currently a major limitation.

I have been using it for 2.5 years.

For the most part, we have not had any real issues here. That said, our "biggest" data is 10 million rows of mostly discrete data, so we aren't pushing the envelope.

Customer service and technical support have been very good for us. It's worth mentioning that the community forums are VERY active and will often provide answers from Tableau Masters faster than actual Tableau support can respond.

In late 2013, we tested QlikView Desktop and Yellowfin Analytics. They did not seem quite as powerful at the time. However, I have not evaluated those products since. In early 2016, I explored Microsoft Power BI and found the interface clunky compared to Tableau. It is, however, much cheaper.

We found setup straightforward with relatively few surprises. We did have to work through some issues with drivers to connect to a SQL Server 2008 database, which customer support did help with.

We had an in-house implementation (4 desktop licenses, 25 server licenses) and found learning Tableau to be relatively easy for our dedicated analysts (the desktop users). The biggest difficulty we found was getting the Tableau Server users to actually log in to look at the dashboards that we had created for them - often providing them with the data they requested. Getting the adoption by the business decision-makers was the hard part (and obviously that is a problem that would apply to any BI tool).

While I don't have specific $$ numbers, I can say that several reports that we were maintaining previously in Excel that took 4-5 hours to be updated manually each month, now can be updated in 20 seconds. I do think that this would probably be true of any of the products similar to Tableau available on the market now.

The video tutorials available on the Tableau site are very helpful. We spent many hours watching both the step-by-step tutorials as well as the broader webinars highlighting an organization Tableau use case for education and ideas on novel dashboards/metrics to develop.

• Ability to read multiple data sources
• Beautiful visualizations#
• Easy to learn and use

Tableau does an excellent job upgrading the software with each release. One thing we have been waiting for is the ability to import an ArcGIS Shapefile into a custom map. There is a workaround using a third-party utility but it is unstable.

I have used it for more than three years.

I have not encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues.

Installation was a cakewalk. Over the last three years, there have been at least eight upgrades and three major releases; all upgraded without incident. Our Tableau Server has been running continuously for over three years. We have had two separate up scales; both were successful.

I rate the level of customer service and technical support 10/10. I’ve been working with vendors for over 25 years. No one else comes close.

While we use several BI tools, this was the first visualizations platform we purchased.

Initial setup was very straightforward.

We implemented it ourselves. It was very easy.

Pricing/licensing comes in two methods; named users and core licensing. We started with named user accounts, buying only what we needed when we needed it. As demand for the platform grew, we upscaled to core licensing. That approach was practical for us.

Prior to purchase, we did evaluate several other vendors. We choose Tableau based on Gartner research, deployments at peer institutions and finally, price.

Start now, start small and grow. This isn’t like your traditional BI platform, where you have to spend years designing the infrastructure before the first report comes out.

The ability to have a question and be able to quickly find the answer without having to reconfigure the data like you would have to using Excel. It also makes it much easier to visualize data in different ways quickly.

Seeing visuals of data makes more of an impact than the numbers alone, as most people are more affected by visuals rather than just numbers. We’ve been able to spur change by using visuals to back up points that we wanted to make more effectively than by just using the numbers alone.

Share-ability. If your audience isn’t using Tableau, getting them to see and use the insights can be challenging. Tableau’s approach to communicating information around data is great, but it requires a shift in how you communicate it and they purposefully don’t make it easy to share via traditional methods (e.g. PPT).

I have used it for ~2 years.

Not really applicable to me, but it still is in the process of scaling to the entire company (3,000-plus employees).

Technical support is average. It’s a lot of self-service forums that require you searching through the relevant postings on issues. It’s pretty comprehensive and as long as you are comfortable with a Stack Overflow-like approach to Q&A, it’s fine.

We used QlikView. I’m not 100% sure what drove this selection over QlikView.

N/A for the technical setup. It does require a learning curve as you need to adjust from the way you’ve interacted with data previously, to how it’s set up in Tableau.

As with any software implementation, it's going to require learning, adoption and acceptance, so you want to temper your expectations of immediate success and reinforce the use of Tableau throughout your company.

• Easy to connect to random sources of info. In my case, to MySQL + Google Analytics + an Excel file with Facebook Insights in one case, and another MySQL + PostgreSQL in another case.
• Easy to build with drag & drop even for a rookie like me.
• Fancy graphics in the end result. This is important when I use it during a demo in front of potential customers.
• Interactive filters. A selected option in one widget can filter automatically the other widgets that are used in a dashboard. This is awesome!
• A wide range of customisations.

In less than 3-4 hours, I started from a pure installation on my Mac and succeeded in investigating a trip of a vehicle recorded in our records and had created a visualisation of that trip on a map.

That was used to prove a hypothesis that we can find answers to various questions about our vehicles without needing to wait for developers to handle the custom specific case.

I need to be able to combine in a worksheet from different sources because the insights could be much more powerful. It is possible that the product can do this now, but it was not easily found.

An option to interrupt the process of loading of external data (like from Google Analytics) would be helpful. A few times, I had issues with interruption of the initial data loading process, when it took longer than the expected.

I have been using it for a month.

I did not previously use a different solution. This is my first time with this. I did a lot of research into the final result of my BI work.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward!

It was an in-house implementation. Pretty easy.

If the price was cheaper, then my rating could have been a perfect 10 ;)

If you are looking regularly for answers that are hidden inside your data - like 3-4 times in a week - then it is undoubtedly more valuable to take a shot with a BI solution (even if you don’t use Tableau). The speed; the deadlock dependency on your R&D resources leads to a loss of time. Tableau gave me the freedom to experiment with the hypothesis that I had.

Ease of use, speed to develop and deploy solutions. The ability to quickly develop solutions is invaluable. We are managing an immense amount of data and can more quickly correlate multiple data sources to aid in our decision making. We don’t need a large team of technical staff to develop tactical solutions to support executive decisions makers, while also developing robust work queues to aid staff in prioritizing their work or improving health and outcomes of our patients.

We are much more nimble in our ability to provide tactical data and deploy scalable enterprise dashboards/visualizations to staff within the organization. It has allowed non-technical staff to build solutions to aid us in our decision making or improving clinical care for patients across the enterprise.

- More advanced capabilities to format dashboards
- More advanced data merging from multiple data sources
- More advanced management of data extracts

I have been using it for 5+ years.

I did not encounter any deployment, stability or scalability issues.

I rate the level of technical support at medium. Staff are responsive when there’s a major technical issue, but getting answers to trivial questions are handled via forums and can take time or might not match your environment or configuration.

Qlik and Business Objects were used previously. Tableau was selected based on feedback from staff and other peers that are using the product, as well as all of the success we have experienced within our organization. The benefits and speed to develop were key decision factors. Licensure costs was also a key factor in selecting Tableau.

Initial server setup is very easy and does not take a significant amount of technical expertise.

An in-house team implemented it so we could gain expertise in configuration and how to perform upgrades.

ROI is not easy to quantify at this point, but we have gained efficiency through some initial self-serve data and faster time to discover.

Licensing can be expensive, so it’s best to determine scope and implementation plan.

Utilize the trial version and test out functionality of the product. It’s very easy to get started and as you gain proficiency, you will want to learn more and develop more advanced solutions.