Tableau Enterprise Reviews

If you want the most beautiful dashboards, Tableau is the answer. If you want to shift your dashboarding/analysis development to your users, Tableau seems to be the best choice, as for the most part it’s quite easy to use.

It offers beautiful visualizations on the fly. New users will catch on to it quite fast for doing simple analysis. Creating complex objects can sometimes get quite tricky, but most of the things can be done very simply and quite faster compared to QlikView.

Tableau is moving fast. In fact, we see it as a leader in the data visualization market. We would like to see improvements in its enterprise capabilities.

It offers the Tableau server for deploying apps that can be shared and used by multiple users, but it needs further improvement to be able to support a large set of users in a big organization.

If you are planning to implement self-service BI in your organization, I see Tableau as the best fit, but you will need to find a good tool for ETL.

Also, if you are required to develop financial reports etc., Tableau might not help you much.

Nonetheless, you can run a Tableau solution without needing a lot of IT involvement.

Tableau needs some improvement in its organization-wide deployment capabilities.

Qlik Sense (a new tool by Qlik) tries to be like Tableau, but if you want something like Tableau, you better go for Tableau.

For visual data analysis, discovery analysis and usability, it is the best product on the market.

For data cleaning, it can be very helpful in showing you where there are holes or mistakes in your data.

In our Project Management office, it has provided us better insight into the breadth of our work and made it much easier to see which projects are at risk. Once we retire our old reporting system (Word docs/PowerPoint), we will be saving about 20 people four hours per week. You can do the math on the annual impact.

Getting buy-in from all of the department leaders has been the toughest part. They are tentative about letting go of the old systems, we have to really prove that our Tableau dashboards fully meet their needs.

This is tough to answer. The company puts more $$ into R&D than any other in the industry and I don't even use all of its current abilities. They put out releases regularly, so at this point this is more about keeping up with the changes and understanding how they are useful to us.

The tool was not created for data structuring, but does provide some functionality.

I have been using it for about 15 months, off and on, at times more than others. I use it on any piece of analysis I can.

We were unable to use LDAP or Active Directory, so all server users have to be created locally. Stability and scalability are not issues; we are just trying to grow adoption. Of course, we have experienced some growing pains but that is normal with any new technology.

Customer support always gets back to me within 24 hours. However, they are not always able to help me resolve my issue.

We have the EBI tool, Oracle OBIEE. Although I never used it personally, our department has experience with several of the top competitors of this product. Despite owning licenses to those tools and using them, the decision was made that Tableau offers self-serve BI better than any of the others. (I was not a part of this decision process, but was moved over from another team to manage the product once the decision was made.)

Initial setup was straightforward. One thing Tableau excels at is documentation that is user friendly. We did bring in a consultant to help this go smoothly but honestly I think he did more harm than good. Could have just followed the playbook.

Implementation was done by a vendor team and in-house. Our middleware team did the heavy lifting and we brought in a vendor team with experience to help us.

ROI has yet to be determined as the implementation is less than a year old. Adoption has been slower than expected but gaining momentum lately. I attribute the slower adoption to the fact that using Tableau is a shift in thinking for those wanting to use it and therefore involves some growing pains that some are hesitant to embrace. However, those that have embraced it are beginning to reap the benefits.

The pricing is a little steep. However, if used correctly, the improvements in productivity will more than outweigh the cost.

It does require you to think about your data in a slightly different way as this is totally different than Excel, so take a little extra time when starting out.

Tableau helps people see and understand their data, answering valuable business questions and giving insight into mountains of information collected over time.

The best feature of Tableau is its simple GUI with drag-and-drop feature. It helps even a rookie create a great visualization. But for experts, it also provides flexibility of writing queries to fetch data. It’s easy-to-integrate feature - with almost all the databases - makes it a great value.

We have used Tableau for creating dashboards for our clients to help them visualize their data for developing business strategies. They can easily use the dashboard for targeting strengths and improving the areas of weakness.

The feature I would like to have is publication of a live dashboard on a webpage, so that dashboards can be incorporated in webpages. We can do this currently on Tableau public but because of data security, we need the dashboards to be private. But in private dashboards, we cannot publish it on webpages. Sisense provides this feature.

I have been using Tableau for the last two years, with the first year being for college assignments. I have exclusively used Tableau for creating dashboards for hotel clients.

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

I rate the level of customer service and technical support 8/10.

I have used QlikView, but I have always found Tableau simpler to use.

Initial setup was simple. I just had to install Tableau Desktop on my system.

An in-house team did the implementation. It’s easy to set up.

Pricing is steep.

If you have the budget, go for it. It’s the best money can get you.
I have loved working with Tableau for its simplicity and ability to handle large volumes of data. However, it’s a bit too expensive.

Actually, the whole product is very valuable for me.

Actually, I am still testing the product before I ask my team to use it, but it’s most likely going to be one of our tools.

I would really like to import data from any online website to make it dynamic.

I would like them to also extend the trial version to 30 days to encourage more people to use it and understand it more. Like an addiction, when you use something for a long time, it becomes a habit. :)

I've used this solution for only one month, and it has been a great experience.

It’s a little bit slow on my system. I don’t know why, but I am looking forward to them developing a lighter version.

Customer service is not bad.

I liked the way when I created an account, they followed up with a call.

Setup is very easy, like any other program.

I've tested a lot of products. I researched which tool is the best for visualization, and I found that Tableau is one of the best for it.

I would say Tableau is a good product to use for data visualization. I recommend it for that and for data analysis.

• Simplicity
• User friendly

This tool helps in understanding data in a visually better form and generate insights quickly.

Add calculated columns in the edit text box like in Spotfire.

I have been using it for two years.

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

Customer service and technical support are excellent.

I have used Spotfire. The two main reasons to use Tableau over Spotfire are the ease of working with it and the availability of an in-depth knowledge database.

It is very straightforward, like installing any other application.

An in-house team implemented it.

This tool has provided savings in terms of man hours.

License cost is average.

Contact a Tableau technical team to understand exactly which product you need.

The most valuable feature is the ease of generating management reports on demand, and ease of generating incremental extracts live or work very quickly.

The integration with R for more complex algorithms in analytical data is also nice.

We use it to generate intelligence reports core business of insurance we develop. It is also part of the business intelligence tools we recommend.

Part graphical gauges compliance does not include the Balance Score Card style, however you can develop these graphics, another shortcoming in not having mondrian engines.

2 years

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no issues with stability.

We've had no issues with scalability.

I really like the design of the charts. The rapidness of the development is impressive. Its full set of options helps you reach the specific chart that you need and you can add any kind of additional data source (Excel, flat file, databases) at any time.

In comparison to others, this product gives you the power to make any chart that you can imagine with your data, getting insights with the results and leveraging the need of a “metadata” model behind it.

With the rapidness of the development, the business user only needs 1/5 or maybe 1/10 of the time required to perform analysis and achieve results; they can just use drag & drop.

The most important and valuable feature is the ability to merge any kind of data with your data set, even cloud data (web services). It gives the business user the power to analyze something new with his own datasources.

My company is a Tableau partner, and we are located in Lima, Peru. We used it to perform a geo-spatial analysis of prospects, and we created a distribution of them with a drill-down analysis for future clients, so we can segment the appointments and the demo presentations.

Tableau lacks a lot of ETL capabilities. Of course, it’s not the core of the product but it is the best tool for data discovery and really needs an ETL or data quality module inside of the suite. Enterprises have to use another tool (such as Alteryx, IBM DataStage or Talend Studio) in order to support some business needs. But this entails additional cost, maintenance, resources, etc.

Tableau will add a lot of capabilities for data blending, joins between different data source, etc., in its next version, Tableau 10.

I have been using Tableau Desktop for three years. I began with version 7.0.

Tableau is easy to deploy.

Stability is great.

Scalability lacks some features. For example: governance, better clustering, dual authentication, detailed options of security, events manager, etc. That is why I only see Tableau as a data discovery and dashboarding tool (for senior management).

Support and customer service is good, not excellent. 8/10

I was using SAP BusinessObjects for four years, then I met Tableau and I realized how discontinued the SAP product was. Of course, all the BI platforms think that way, they were discontinued with the monolithic vision of data warehousing.

Then, all of the data-discovery tools appeared and all of us were amused.
I chose Tableau because it can give you answers very fast without the intervention of IT (most of the cases).

As we can see in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms, Tableau is the leader among all the data-discovery tools, Tableau defined the BI trend, and now the rest of the BI platforms are incorporating these functionalities and improving them.

Initial setup was easy, the commercial department of my company adopted the tool right away and start creating its dashboards.

We implemented this with an in-house team. We used the product portal in order to learn about its development and we used some classrooms in the region for Sales, Tableau Desktop and Server.

Tableau offers a rapid ROI in comparison to other tools. It’s a very cheap tool, but it has some barriers in big enterprises.

They should read about compatibility. Before implementing Tableau, they should meet with the business users and ask:

• What are your needs in business intelligence?
• Do you have some information silos?
• Is the generation of information a manual process?

The BI area should perform a self-assessment of a business intelligence roadmap in order to plan the development of the product, the areas involved in the pilot, the information needed to achieve the business goals and define the final architecture for the BI deployment in the near future.

• Valuable to use smaller data sets
• Automatic Extract Creation
• Replace on publish data sources
• Online sync client
• Progressive-loading dashboards.
• Parameter to pass an initial SQL dynamically
• Combine multiple sets with union
• Subscribe and schedule the reports to receive email on data snapshot
• Ad-hoc reports and ease of use for the end user
• Reduces development effort
• Easy maintenance
• Security with role-based access and in line with Active Directory and SSO
• Alerts and scheduling
• Heat maps, geographical charts, 3D charts, drill down/drill up, drill through, cascading effects, and multi-dimensional and canned reports all in one tool
• Embedding into Microsoft SharePoint

• The end users need not depend on the regular BI developers for certain quick and ad-hoc reports.
• Generic avoidance of sharing the emails with an embedded Excel etc
• Can be accessed from multiple smart devices
• Snapshot facility to the end user for analysis
• Effective visuals

• Facility to add custom code to the dashboard will be helpful.
• Custom SQL feature is not working as expected from the performance perspective. Irrelevant of the SQL, the engine executes for everything available.
• Archive historical data using extracts
• MeasureName filter can’t be shared across multiple sheets in a dashboard.
• Cascading with relative has restrictions over the worksheets in a dashboard.
• Multiple selection in parameters
• Formatting option for individual filter is not available.
• Using HiveServer2 connector is a big challenge to pull, even with smaller data sets. Not sure if that has been improved with Spark Thrift server connector.
• Not much support for Hadoop / Hive as the backend in the market, connectivity issues not limited to the drivers.
• Few complex report requirements (for dashboards) could not be achieved with better performance (e.g. Dynamic Parameters).
• Reverse engineering from the front end report is not that impressive.
• For massive volumes of data, the performance acutely degrades.
• Permitting external users with no SSO is still a concern.
• Server support on Linux is lacking.
• Caps on report scheduling

I have been using this solution for more than three years.

TDS deployment will not encourage editing after the deployment.
With the TDS deployment, a few of the formats are lost. So far, this is not a serious issue.

Approached from the client side, waiting time is reasonable high.

I previously used MicroStrategy, QlikView, SQL Server Reporting Services, SQL Server Analysis Services, Panorama, SAP BusinessObjects, and in-house Java-based reports.

The reasons I chose this product were: ease of doing things, faster performance, and it is an all-in-one tool.

Comparatively, basic setup is not a hard task.

Our use case is met, but the pricing is still a matter of concern.

It is a nice visual and high performance all-in-one BI tool which is becoming more popular with its ease of use and user-friendly features, effective visuals and apt major functionalities of BI.

However, it depends on one’s requirements and budget to balance the need.

We would recommend using it for mid-size datasets to visualize near real-time data, as there is no control over the execution model.