Tableau Enterprise Reviews

I use it for sales tracking, incident management, and monitoring proactive tickets from different tools and systems. These are my three major use cases.

The biggest benefit is significant time savings in creating reports and dashboards. We now spend less time creating dashboards and reports. It's also very user-friendly and easy to work with.

The dashboards are amazing, with different report types and stunning visuals. Most importantly, Tableau's AI with machine learning automatically predicts features and reports based on historical data. These are the three most valuable features for me.

Firstly, the high cost of Tableau licenses makes it inaccessible for many mid-scale clients. Secondly, the server requires at least 128GB of RAM, which can be impractical for some systems. We need a dedicated system to use Tableau. 

These are the two major challenges I see, especially for smaller organizations. Perhaps introducing lighter options or scaling solutions could be helpful.

Tableau offers some of the best features in the market. Enhancements are always ongoing, and it's already one of the strongest BI tools available.

I've been working with Tableau for over five years.

Everything seems fine. They provide good materials and articles for updates, so it's not cumbersome. It's quite good, actually.

It definitely scales well. It's one of the best in the market for that. We have over 300 users in my organization using it.

I use various BI solutions. Primarily, I work with Power BI. We use two services: the server to upload reports and the Power BI Service. 

We also use Tableau for one client for reporting, dashboards, and reservations. Additionally, I use SAP Business Objects for reporting purposes.

One of Tableau's big objectives is reporting. It is superior compared to other tools. 

For on-premises Power BI, the biggest challenge is it's not fully integrated. We need separate applications and deployments on different machines. That's cumbersome. 

With the Tableau server, everyone can share reports on one server, which is much more efficient. Reporting with Tableau is amazing compared to Power BI Desktop. 

As for cons, the application size is quite high, and 128 GB of RAM is needed for the Tableau Server so if we need a lighter version of Tableau.

The initial setup was not cumbersome, it was straightforward for me. It is like a default application in my system, I was not part of the infra team. 

As a user, I haven't encountered much maintenance myself. Infrastructure management manages it.

The value for money is definitely there. Tableau is a bit higher side as compared to Power BI services because Microsoft is offering really, very amazing prices. At the organization level, Microsoft provides PowerBI service as a package, and they are offering more than 30% to 60% of their end customer. 

But, Tableau is on the same side, cost-wise,  Tableau is a bit high.

I would like to recommend Tableau because of the dashboarding, reporting and the features they are providing to end customers. So it is very commendable.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

My team is working with Tableau to give presentations, create dashboards, and fetch reports from the system.

Tableau is a fantastic tool that provides impressive dashboards and customized reports.

The solution’s pricing could be improved.

My team has been using Tableau for the last eight to nine months.

Earlier, we were using only Power BI, which had certain limitations. We could not go beyond the maximum output we had expected. We observed multiple facilities or benefits after buying Tableau. The dashboards are getting more presentable, and we are getting customized reports. Things are in place after getting Tableau into our systems. We are getting appropriate dashboards and reporting with the solution.

Tools like Tableau are not cloud-native services of the cloud and the cloud environment. So, it is very difficult to secure things, move to the cloud, and deploy things onto the cloud. Setting up Tableau on the cloud requires a different skill set because the cloud is a different environment altogether, and data center technologies are something else. Although it's more or less the same, people are unfamiliar with the cloud these days.

Once the environment was set up, it hardly took a week to configure everything in the cloud environment. The team concerned worked with system integrators, who successfully set up everything. We are working seamlessly, and there are no problems as of now.

Tableau is an expensive solution compared to Power BI. We have paid the upfront cost for Tableau, which is 40% more expensive than Power BI.

We realized the benefits of Tableau within a month or so. We got the appropriate skill set to work on the solution directly and got fantastic outputs after deploying it in our systems.

We are working with the government directly. The government has observed that the tool is fantastic. The tool has multiple features, and they are getting the desired output. We are still exploring how many other features and functionalities of Tableau we can use.

We are still trying to integrate Tableau with other platforms to exploit the maximum potential of the portals, services, or software. We are still exploring those opportunities. We have integrated the solution with different schemes and applications, and it works seamlessly.

We are still discovering how many other platforms can be integrated with Tableau. As of now, we haven't faced any issues. We may face some challenges because we are currently trying to integrate it with the SAP environment.

I strongly recommend Tableau to other users because it is a fantastic tool that provides impressive dashboards and customized reports.

Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.

We are majorly using it for our procurement business area. We have created almost 50 to 60 dashboards for the entire procurement cycle. We have used it for procure-to-pay, and we have also used it for our retail business. We have a lot of petrol bunks, and we get a lot of data from them regarding sales and other things. So, procure-to-pay and retail business are the main use cases.

We've been using its latest update. It is on-premise. All our solutions are on-prem because we are in the Oil and Gas sector, and data is very critical for us. We have not yet migrated anything to the cloud.

It is very easy to build charts and drag and drop the fields that are there. It automatically identifies the dimensions and measures and makes our life easier when we need to build any dashboard. It is pretty user-friendly.

Its visualizations are good, and its features make the development process a little less time-consuming. It has an in-memory extract feature that allows us to extract data and keep it on the server, and then our users can use it quickly.

When it comes to visualizations, Tableau has a limitation as compared to Power BI. It has a limited set of visualizations. Power BI has the entire marketplace, so you can connect and import many visualizations and use them, whereas Tableau has only 10 or 15 visualizations. There should be more visualizations, and there should also be data integration with more cloud providers.

Tableau has recently launched a paid version for the documentation. So, documentation has become a little bit challenging when it comes to Tableau development because we do not have any tool to export the data out of it. It is a license-based feature that you need to purchase to prepare documentation. So, on the documentation front, for preparing clear documentation for any dashboard, it would help if we get an embedded option, rather than buying a license for each user for the documentation. To document anything, if I have to connect to each workbook and see what has been written as a formula and then document in the Word document, it is pretty time-consuming.

We have the Microsoft stack, and we are currently evaluating Power BI because Tableau has a limitation of 50 columns for a drill-down report. If we want more than 50 columns, we have found a hack, but there is no ready-made option for doing it. So, we have to use another tool in case we need a drilled report with more than 50 columns. There are many instances where users need 80 or 90 columns for their analysis, and switching between two technologies becomes a challenge. It is not a cost-effective approach for us.

Their support should be improved. We are not happy with their support. Whenever we raised queries, we were pointed to a few blogs, and we didn't get a proper solution from them.

Their licensing should also be improved. They want us to purchase a Tableau Creator license for business users, whereas Power BI Desktop is free for business users. They should come up with a basic license with one or two connectors that our business users can use for preparing their visualizations. Tableau also charges us per user for users who want the data only through email.

Tableau has been in our organization for more than four years.

Its performance and stability are good. Because we are not on the cloud, and it is on our internal servers, it is performing well.

I have a team of three people who are Tableau developers, and they have been working with me. We have one Tableau senior developer who does the server administration, as well as major Tableau development. Two members are supporting him on small dashboard developments.

When we were given the first project, we had hired a consulting company called PWC. They had implemented Tableau for us for procure-to-pay. They had deployed one project manager, one Tableau developer, and one MSBI because the data is on SQL. After that, for our support, we hired one senior Tableau resource, and then we internally trained two people. They have been using Tableau and supporting us.

We were not happy with their support. We did not get many solutions. Whenever we raised queries, we were diverted to a few blogs here and there. 

Even for the production issue, they didn't give proper support to us. There was a lack of clarity about how to resolve the issue. They work in shifts. So, one person hands over the ticket to another person, and we again have to explain. We had also approached our sales representatives, but unfortunately, because of Tableau being acquired by Salesforce, the team had changed. We had lost all points of contact because of which it was a little chaotic to get support when we needed it the most. 

Now, the first step we take is to go and search on Google about the issue and also on Tableau blogs and forums. That's because whenever we first approach Tableau support, we anyways get pointed to those blogs. So, we first try to search on our own. If we are still struggling, only then we approach Tableau support.

The initial setup of Tableau was not much complicated for us because we had hired a partner for its implementation.

It was implemented almost four years ago, and it probably took 10 to 15 days because it also involved getting the server, configuring it, and then doing proper configuration of the rights, etc. It is on-prem. So, we had to take care of a lot of security factors, such as opening the ports, etc. The vendor had to develop and establish proper architecture based on our security policies, and that is the reason it took more time. For simpler infrastructure, the deployment would take less time.

In terms of maintenance, Tableau does require maintenance from our end. We need to ensure that the servers are basically up and running. Sometimes, the upgrades come, and they have to be done properly. We had one instance where we rebooted without stopping the Tableau services and our entire server got corrupted. Luckily, with support from Tableau, we found the solution, and we could get back our project. So, it requires monitoring and server administration in terms of closing the services, giving the user access, and ensuring that the database size is proper because they use PostgreSQL as a backend for Tableau. These things are required to be maintained and overseen, and the licenses also need to be monitored. So, it requires a lot of administration activity and server maintenance because we are not on the cloud.

A partner had implemented it for us. We didn't find its installation much of a hassle.

Tableau is a little cheaper as compared to Power BI and other technologies that we have used in the past. However, if the business users in our organization want to make presentations, Tableau has been asking us to purchase a Tableau Creator license, and $35 per month is expensive for business users.

Power BI is giving a free desktop version for business users to connect to any data source and build their own dashboards. That's why we have proposed to use Power BI for most of the business users in our organization. We wanted them to be able to create charts and presentations for the management, and we didn't want to spend $35 per month on a Tableau Creator license. We tried to give them a Tableau Explorer license. We had purchased 15 licenses, but the Tableau Explorer license had a limitation where it did not allow business users to connect to their own data source. So, they had to come to IT to connect to the data source, which didn't work well for us. That's why we told them to use Power BI Desktop. This is where Power BI wins over Tableau. 

In 2011, we had purchased perpetual licenses for Tableau, and at that time, they were selling its perpetual license at $1,500. We had purchased these licenses for our business users, and they were making a lot of visualizations for presentations, but about a year or two ago, Tableau stopped issuing that license. Tableau can come up with a basic license for connecting with Excel because most of the business users only connect to Excel for preparing their visualization. They can provide one or two connectors at a cheaper rate than the Creator license. It would help them in promoting it to more business users and increase users across the organization.

Most of our users are on the field, and because we are not on the cloud, one of the challenges with Tableau was about giving access to them. They didn't want to log in to Tableau Mobile, and they wanted the data in email. We have around 400 territory sales managers who want to see the data in email. When we have to publish that, Tableau charges us per user, even if they're not going to the dashboard to view it. For sending an email, they charge you per user. So, if I have to send an email to 400 users who don't even use dashboards, it becomes expensive. That's why we moved to MSBI, which is free for us. We have bought a perpetual core-based license, and we can send an email to unlimited users. We no longer use Tableau in this use case.

We are currently using two tools, and we are considering moving to Power BI. We are evaluating whether we want to move to the cloud or not. If we are moving to the cloud, we may completely move to Power BI in the future. If we move to the cloud, we mostly would move to Azure, and integrating Azure and Tableau doesn't make sense. We are also considering the pricing point.

First, I would advise evaluating the data stack or database that you have, and based on that, you should make the decision of going ahead with Tableau or another technology. If you are on Azure, going for Tableau doesn't make sense. If you are on AWS or Google cloud, they have their own visualizations. So, the integration becomes a little challenging. You also need to see whether connectors are readily available for your database stack. For example, Tableau has a connector for SAP HANA, but it doesn't have a connector for SAP ECC, which is the older version. My organization is still on ECC, so we had to buy another connector to pull the data into our SQL, which increased the total cost of ownership for the company. Therefore, you need to first understand your database architecture and the kind of data you have been using and then move to visualizations.

Second, while implementing Tableau, you should not keep developing dashboards after dashboards. That's because they would require maintenance as you grow. The maintenance cost increases as you grow. Therefore, you should first evaluate the scope and then go ahead and build dashboards. 

Third, there are many selling partners, and they loop you in with a minimum purchase, such as 5 Creator licenses, 15 Explorer licenses, and 100 user licenses for two to three years, which is binding. You should evaluate licensing options properly because when you are starting a journey, you don't want to spend so much at an initial stage. One Creator license, one or two Explorer licenses, and 20 to 30 user licenses are generally fine. You should negotiate on the number. Otherwise, your licenses are underutilized. This is where we could have saved money while purchasing Tableau. We are now juggling between two technologies for drill-down reports.

Fourth, if you want to send an email to your team on the field, you need to understand and ask about how many users would subscribe to emails. If most of the users are going to just subscribe to emails and not use Tableau as a dashboarding tool, it is a waste of money. In most organizations, senior management doesn't like to go to the mobile app. They want to get information through email, and if you are buying a license just to send an email, it is a waste of money for the organization. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. Two-point reduction is mainly because of the support quality, visualization limit, and lack of documentation capability.

I handle the development and administration of dashboards. I primarily use it for HR and finance. Assurant Financials specifically.

I find it to be the best BI tool for visualization. 

We use most of the features from the analytics menu, like getting trends and forecasts. 

We also love creating stories by combining sheets together, which is a really nice feature. 

We frequently utilize visualizations using maps and different objects, all with rich coloring options. And tooltips are absolutely essential for us. 

Tooltips, like the pop-up descriptions when you hover over some object or graph.

Those tooltips in Tableau are great features. Tableau even lets you call another dashboard from within the tooltip itself, which is truly amazing.

I've been following Tableau, and they're definitely making great progress. For instance, they added some generative AI features which I haven't used yet.

More integration with Python or something related to machine learning would be a good improvement.

I have been using it for eight months now. 

It's been very stable for us. I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. 

Based on my understanding, it's a highly scalable solution. However, I haven't personally tested it with Tableau, which is used for integration. But for the features I've used, I'd rate the scalability an eight out of ten. 

There are only around 30 key users. But they're very satisfied with it, even though we're still in the initial stages and changing our data culture.

So, we plan to expand the usage further. 

The customer service and support are very responsive and supportive. 

Positive

I briefly explored Oracle Analytics, specifically a development tool called Oracle APEX. It includes some visualization features, but they're not as advanced as Tableau's.

In terms of visualization, Tableau is the best.

The initial setup was very easy, especially on the cloud. So, I would rate my experience with the initial setup a nine out of ten, with ten being very easy. 

The deployment is very quick. Installation takes just a few minutes, definitely less than an hour.

We're still in the early stages of our project, so we're using the cloud. But I've also used Tableau Desktop, which is the client software installed on a PC. That was smooth as well.

It's too early to calculate ROI definitively, but we're seeing progress.

Pricing might be slightly more expensive than some competitors, but for our organization, the cost hasn't been an issue.

I highly recommend exploring Tableau's cloud-based demos and templates. You can learn a lot without purchasing the software. Also, tap into the Tableau community to gain knowledge and expertise. By doing this, your initial setup and learning curve will be much faster.

Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten. I really like it.

There are many use cases and many projects. I have done level cost-based analysis and forecasting. I have also created one dashboard for their risk measurement.

The most valuable feature is the analytics part. You can use simple reporting by using the analytics by businesses and stakeholders, giving insight into that particular information. It also has data cleaning. It saved a lot of time for the application.

Every time, they create a new version of Tableau. We need to update that version and create a new EXE file. Any visualization tool should have one particular application that only needs to be updated rather than creating version one, like 2024.1.2. You can see many versions in Tableau. We are using this number of versions only because of the latest update. Having the latest update in the same application rather than creating multiple versions would be good.

Some features are not enabled in Tableau. We can use the measure or Python to use that. Every company or every person has its own requirement in Tableau. Suppose I am using an in-date format. I'm extracting data from my data source in some other format. At the same time, businesses want to view this information in different formats. I have to customize the data format. If possible, you and your team can work on the date format in the world. There are multiple data formats or data get views available in the report. You can also accommodate in the gate feature.

I have been using Tableau for almost five to six years.

Tableau is scalable software. Almost 500 people within my department are using this solution.

During COVID-19, I had a few issues. Our support team didn't support it. We requested to the Tableau team, and that person helped us. Sometimes, they have a good way. They have excellent knowledge, but sometimes, when you provide your source to a third party, they don't support us technically. 

Neutral

The initial setup of desktop application is straightforward. We can also creat,e athe  project and tha e end user can also create their own project, and later on, if needed, the support team can help us with that.

It takes ten working days minimum to complete creating dashboard and setup server. We are using dev and production environment. Some are also using a testing environment based on their requirement and discussion with the business.

Multiple team is responsible for their activities. At least five to six people are required  for deployment because someone is creating a dashboard and some person has their knowledge at server level. Also, some person needs to have their permission management.

I was not able to connect Tableau with SharePoint online. Microsoft Power BI can be connected with SharePoint easily online. It has many more facilities than the Tableau application.

The daily reporting or data analysis has seen many improvements with Tableau. We can manage the users accordingly while doing the drag-and-drop interface for that application. I can do Python and use Python Tableau language, which creates a lot of differences.

I have never faced any issues with data integration. Before COVID era, I was using SAP HANA. I could use it very frequently and use the data set accordingly.

I have never faced any such issues. It is a very good application. There are many more application which are also very good and very user friendly, but Tableau is also one of them. We have a direct live collection. Even business users share experience while connecting the live. They feel some hindrance while using this application when they refer us or when they filter the data. You can see the delay response in the page.

Tableau is a good application. I created any dashboard for the business, and business want to view their information. They like that application, and they are able to on this side, what purpose they wanted to develop this dashboard.

I recommend Tableau. There are many BI application. Tableau is one of them, as I I use it.

If the user want to view information, it would be go with their line. It is simple to understand, and take decision based on their information. It would be very good to have on comparison heat map or the pie chart.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine 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.

My primary use case of Tableau was in conjunction with Salesforce to enhance my data visualization and analysis capabilities. 

Tableau empowers users to delve into their data deeply, effortlessly unlocking valuable insights and critical information. It's got a user-friendly interface and extensive visualization capabilities that allow me to create compelling reports and dashboards that help me make better decisions. 

Tableau has greatly enhanced our organization's data-driven decision-making processes by enabling us to create visually compelling reports and dashboards.

This capability has led to better communication between teams. Despite some limitations associated with custom data connectors, Tableau has proven to be an invaluable tool for aggregating data from multiple sources, offering us a complete view of our operations. 

This comprehensive perspective has allowed us to identify trends, make informed decisions, and optimize our strategies, ultimately leading to increased efficiency and competitiveness in our industry.

The most valuable features of Tableau for our organization have been the interactive storytelling capabilities and easy integration with Salesforce. We can create visual descriptions of data, making complex information accessible and interesting to all sides. This feature enables us to effectively communicate data-driven insights. 

In addition, our integration with Salesforce provides access to critical sales data in real-time, which facilitates quick decision-making and improves customer relationship management. Together, these features enable us to get the most out of our information assets, which helps us to develop informed actions and strategies.

Tableau is excellent at visualizing data, however, I think improving the data preparation features would be a great addition. Navigating through activities like cleansing, reshaping, and wrangling extensive or complicated datasets could prove challenging within the Tableau environment. 

Also, the settings for working with complex datasets also need to be changed. In the next version, it would be good to add user-friendly resources for beginners, such as interactive tutorials and templates, to make Tableau even more accessible to a wider audience.

I've used the solution for more than three months.

I used a range of solutions to find the best one. I haven't switched; I'm using them at the same time.

I evaluated QlikView.

We use Tableau for the dashboard features. It helps us with the global planning of our business.

The product has the best features for analytical views and filters. Its integration with Jira helps us prepare intuitive dashboards with filters to share different details of broad-scale planning for a quarter or a year of our business.

The product’s router could be better in terms of readability. When we put more information on a single screen, it gets compressed and superimposed in many places while scrolling. It could be improved.

We are using the beta version of Tableau.

I rate the product’s stability seven or eight out of ten. I have never seen it crash.

The product’s scalability is good; I rate it a seven or eight out of ten. I have seen many people concurrently using it.

The product is deployed on the cloud. I rate its initial setup process a five or six out of ten. It is difficult because it has complex documentation, and I am still learning it. A team is involved in the implementation. It takes three hours to complete the process.

I advise others to opt for a POC and proceed with the product. I rate it a seven out of ten.