Tableau Enterprise Reviews

Right now I use Tableau for learning purposes, such as open data sources, trying to learn the various visualizations that can be done on it.

I liked the representation of the geospatial map. It was really cool to have that visual and be able to create hierarchies using the geolocation cities, states, just wording those names into appropriate provisions on the map. So that's really something nice. I feel the visualizations come out very pretty.

The price is definitely a point that can be improved because smaller firms, like my bank firm, don't use Tableau because it's an expensive tool. If there were an option that catered toward smaller firms, that would be great because Tableau does in fact help with a lot of different kinds of data sources. For instance, it lets you upload CSV on Excel. However, other tools that we currently use, such as Looker, do not let you upload Excel files for ad hoc analysis. So, definitely, this is something price-wise that can be catered toward smaller firms.

Creating variables, creating new fields in Tableau during analysis, actually adds columns to the data. That's something that could potentially give us an option. Do you want it as a column added to the data set or do you want it ad hoc in the visualization sheet? So if you create a measurement or a dimension, that creates a new column, but if you try to create a new filter directly on the visualization, it doesn't let you rename it. Basically what you see is just the calculation that you put in there. If you wanted to create something without making it an extra column in the data set, you can't just rename it to a more user-friendly short name. An improvement would be adding the ability to rename ad hoc creations if you do create a mark or a filter on the visualization. That doesn't really get added to the actual data fields.

I've been using Tableau for a few months now as a learning, research activity rather than a day-to-day activity at work. So I primarily was going to a Tableau Public Learning.

As of now, I haven't had any issues with the stability of the solution. Not any glitches.

Given that it's Tableau Public, I don't feel I could give the right answer to that. However, given that you could share your visualizations on a server without sending a file to people, scalability seems like a good option here.

I have not used their tech support, but I did refer to a textbook to learn how to use Tableau.

Tableau has resources for learning using videos as well.

My company currently uses Looker, not Tableau. I've been working on Tableau on my own time outside of work, trying to learn their free application, Tableau Public.

The setup was pretty straightforward. It doesn't take much to get it all set up.

Tableau is an expensive tool for smaller firms.

Do take time to learn the solution, because Tableau has a lot of features, a lot of complex visualization features that can make the visualization pretty powerful. I would advise people to learn it completely so they can use Tableau to its full extent rather than just ad hoc simple visualizations.

I would rate Tableau right at 8.5, leaning toward 9.

You can create many different types of visualizations and charts, ranging from simple to highly advanced. And if you're doing advanced analytics, you can leverage Tableau by integrating it with other solutions. You can also do a lot of automation in Tableau, and collaboration is quite good too. 

They currently don't have a great Workday connector. Right now, Tableau can connect to more than 80 different types of databases or data sources, but it's challenging to connect with a few types, like Workday. So if they can come up with a better version or a connector for Workday, it will solve a lot of problems.

I've been using Tableau for around five years.

I can say Tableau is highly scalable. Now that they've introduced Hyper, you can create an extract of more than 5 million rows in minutes and then do your analysis. So that's a very optimized way to analyze a lot of data. That's why many other companies like Amazon use Tableau to create their visualization, reports, and charts, considering that their data volume is very high. 

Tableau technical support is quite good. The Tableau community is also helpful. 

Tableau's pricing structure is unusual. So let's consider all the other competitors in the market. For example, we have products like Tableau, Power BI, Cognos, and QlikView in the data visualization segment. Compared to those, Tableau is quite costly. Their desktop version is expensive, and if you're using their servers, it's even pricier. Of course, they give discounts to bigger organizations. For example, we are premium customers to them, so we are getting it at a different cost, but for an individual, it's costly.

I rate Tableau nine out of 10. I would recommend this to anyone who is coming into the data analytics space. 

We use Tableau to make dashboards and valuable information and insights available for management. We are creating some solutions and a dashboard, and people are using it to see the information. We use it globally across 118 countries.

It is basically the manufacturing clients we have all across the globe. They want to measure the production level, how we are getting the product delivered to the customer, and where they are lacking. They want answers to questions like "why are we not getting it up? Where do we need to improve?" They are preparing and analyzing which steps are taking too much time to get that delivered.

Tableau has helped improve our organization by enabling layman people to use it.

I like the calculation feature. I would not say it's such a good feature in Tableau, but if you have the knowledge, you can make that feature visible to everyone. It's not a feature that we can drag and drop and get the information. But whatever the data, whatever the calculation, I'm able to do. It's basically the knowledge base. Whatever knowledge I have, I can make that information public and publish it for management.

Many things have to be improved in Tableau. Right now, we make the calculation, and then we get that information. It would be better if business users could do that. I would ask the people at Tableau to provide that option to business users to get that information in one click.

It would be better if they automated some calculations. There should be more automation in Tableau. However, there are many things in automation mode, but it is very limited at the moment. We need automation for people who do not know much about Tableau. It would also be better if there were good community support like in Alteryx.

I have been using Tableau for the last three years.

Tableau has been stable for us.

Scalability depends on your data and how you make calculations. That becomes your scalability. About 20% of all our organizational users are currently using Tableau.

The technical support for Tableau is just online, and they don't have an option where I can call support.

We used OBIEE Oracle before, but it was very limited. We were moved on to a different solution because we saw it as a better option. Tableau is a better option when compared to OBIEE, and we have been using it for six or seven years. 

The initial setup is straightforward for people who are using it at a basic level. The advanced level is highly complex. The implementation strategy depends on the requirements we are getting from the people and the stakeholder. I would say that management is talking to us, and they are asking us to build the solution they want to have in place. They do not know whether it is technically feasible or not, but they know that this is the requirement. 

We implemented this solution on our own.

In Indian Rupees, Tableau costs about 30,000 to 40,000 per year. 

I would tell potential users that many things are not available in Tableau. Even Power BI is better than Tableau because there are many things that are good for the business. Effective visualization is not there in a Tableau. If I know of a better solution than Tableau, I would surely go for that other solution.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Tableau a four.

I had a case in the dairy industry, and they had about 200 sales agents on the field. They needed some daily reports as well as some dashboards with the standard presentation of their goals and targets. So we prepared some dashboards and Kafka presentations of data collected daily and presented them to the field sales team. We drafted up some information for them about how to proceed with their daily targets. Tableau could visualize the salespeople's progress toward the targets. For example, it can use different colors to signify if the sales team is over or under its target. They can use this graphic to find what they need in their final reports. So if they are under a monthly benchmark, they can break down the graphic presentation, do final reports on a daily level, and find information on each day in the month.

Tableau's visualization features let you present information insights quickly and practically. So it's something which I prefer with Tableau. In terms of reporting, I have to point out the sheer quality and function of the Tableau server, but the first impression is that it's a great visualization tool.

If you mainly need a tool for BI reporting, it's not the best option. Tableau needs better abilities to generate simple reports, integrate, create databases, and work with data lakes. 

I can't recall ever having an issue with Tableau's stability. And also, I'm not sure how often our clients have had to update software or install patches, but I think it's pretty stable. I would consider it moderately to highly stable.

We've used local technical consultants and support in Serbia, so it was pretty good. I can't remember having any problem solving issues during the implementation. And later, during the exportation of this tool, support solved all our issues and incidents in a reasonable time.

Tableau also has a broad user community that's helpful and powerful. When you're using Tableau, you get a knowledge base with a lot of interesting and valuable information. So it's not hard to find some solution that's already prepared for simple presentations, like templates for visualizing reports in a novel way. 

I've used two editions of Tableau. The free edition was very easy to use and set up. The enterprise requires a desktop and the Tableau server, and it's not too complicated. However, it's necessary to have experience and some documentation. So setting up the enterprise version isn't easy for someone who has no experience, but it isn't too complicated overall, either. We had the support of a local company here in Serbia who rebuilt it. They are consultants who specialize in Tableau databases and everything necessary to implement this tool. So I can't remember any problems with the setup. It was relatively easy. They also had to set up the desktops, the Tableau server, and a couple of professional licenses to prepare basic reporting and visualization segments. Lastly, they just have to set up the end-user with everything they need to read the reports and see presentation and visualization.

Tableau's prices are relatively high for our market. I am from Serbia, so many companies in this market don't have the ability to pay for expensive software. My clients are quite satisfied with a lot of Tableau's qualities except for the prices.

I rate Tableau eight out of 10. I would recommend it for companies that have a specific need for a solution with strong visualization capabilities. 

I use it for management control and for balance sheet analysis. As corporale finance consultant, the core of my job is financial analysis/modeling. I added Tableau to my workflow to improve the decision making process of my clients make decisions but I found it very useful also to produce reporting for Financial Istitutions, Investment Fund, etc.

Tableau has improved the way our clients “read” what’s happening in their company, 

I think one of the best feature is usability: understanding  dragging & dropping Measures & Dimension is so simple that you can easily learn the software.

Tableau is very intuitive, it has not a deep learning curve so you can build your dashboards in short time.

The forecast instrument. I still use my primary software (that is Quantrix Modeler) to build my financial models. 

I’m not saying that is a “static” platform at the moment, it’s dynamic due to the fact that you can build parameters, however it's not the same as a spreadsheet in which you can write formulas and algotythms that are more and more complex. 

I have used Tableau since 2018. It's been about three years.

The stability has been good. there are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The solution can scale well. There shouldn't be any issues if a company needs to expand. 

I've dealt with technical support in the past. Two years ago I had a problem, a technical problem. It was a very serious issue with the software in my first installation and I came in contact with the engineer in London. They solved my problem very, very quickly. I've been quite satisfied with them overall.

The initial setup is very simple. It's not overly complex or difficult. A company shouldn't have any issues. 

While I handled the implementation myself, I chose to do a period of learning with the Information Lab a Tableau Partner company.  I took two courses to have a better understanding and to more quickly understand the possibilities I had to work with.

I have a Tableau license. It's very, very cheap. For the use and the capability of the software, it's $70 per month, it’ an awesome price.

Yes I did: MicroStrategy because , it was the first competitor of Tableau. However, there is no comparison. Tableau's the best platform for me and offers the best software.

We are only customers at this time. 

We are focused on producing and using Tableau only for our clients. We bought a number of view licenses and we give them to our client so they can use Tableau via the online version.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten. I've been very pleased with its capabilities. 

I've used it for multiple purposes, for example, for exploratory analysis or just for dashboards for presentations.

I'd say it brings a centralized place to check day-to-day metrics and KPIs. It helps reduce the duplicated reports or sources of information to get the same data or information. Everyone knows that those dashboards are up to date. They know where to find the answers they're looking for.

I really like the interactivity of the dashboards.

I appreciate the fact that you can have filters and parameters so that users can really customize the view to what they want to see.

Truthfully, this solution offers pretty much everything that I need for my everyday tasks.

It seems that power BI is more targeted for report creation while Tableau is more of just a dashboard. If you need to have something report-like, or downloadable to share outside of the dashboard, that's where Tableau is lacking some features. 

Users would like to be able to export an Excel file when they see a table or something like that. That's not an out-of-the-box feature for Tableau.

I've used the solution for a year and a half so far. It hasn't been that long.

I've had a good experience with the stability. There are no bugs or glitches that I have experienced. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

We did have an issue with our server and it took a while for Tableau support to find a solution. However, that was a one-time thing. That's the only time where we've had issues with our server.

The scalability is pretty good. In our case, we did start small and we are now scaling in for our different departments. It's working great.

We are not a big group, however, I would say that we have around 80 to 100 users and that combines creators, explorers, and viewers - a little bit of everything.

We are getting used to it and using it more and more. We are expecting to increase usage in the future.

I've never been in touch with technical support. I cannot speak to how helpful or responsive they are. 

We did not previously use a different solution prior to adopting this product.

I wasn't around for the initial setup. I cannot speak to what the process was like and couldn't say if it is difficult or straightforward. 

We have some server admins that take care of it and work with Tableau to support it whenever needed. It's a group of people, however, I am unsure about the actual number of personnel that handles it directly. It might be three to five people. 

I've looked into Microsoft BI and downloaded some information about it recently.

I'm just an end-user of the product.

I'm likely using the latest version of the solution. 

Everything was implemented when I started, so I wouldn't know if there were any hiccups or best practices, or lessons learned from the process of setting it up. 

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten, from the experience I've had so far. It has helped us tremendously with our everyday reporting and things like that. I can do pretty much everything I want to do and it's been working fine for us.

It is usually used to visualize how the data looks. It is used for drawing charts and different types of visualizations. You can visualize sales, profits, and metrics by geography, product categories, and so on.

I'm using the 2020 version. The latest version came out in 2021. I've not downloaded that one yet. I'm using the last year's version.

It is easy to use, and it can handle a large amount of data.

An advanced type of visualization is a bit tricky to create. It has something called a Calculated field, and that sometimes gets a bit difficult to use when you want to create an advanced type of visualization.

I've been using this solution for five to six years.

It is stable.

It is scalable. We have around 10 users.

I have not contacted their technical support.

It is just a matter of downloading the file from the internet and installing it. That's it.

It is pretty simple to use. We don't require anyone for its deployment and maintenance.

I believe it has a lifelong license, and once you purchase it, you don't have to renew it, but I'm not sure.

I would recommend this solution to others. I would rate Tableau an eight out of 10.

We use this solution to create dashboards, analyze data and create presentation of data to have discussions with clients. We also use it to sort huge amounts of data. 

The solution is very user friendly, particularly in terms of the ease of analyzing data.

Tableau would be difficult to implement without training or the in-house technical support we have.

I've been using this solution for three years. 

The stability is very good, especially now that they've joined with Salesforce.

We have support from within the company. 

The initial setup is straightforward because the solution is already set up in the company. It was just a matter of requesting it and downloading.

We have a global package but I'm not involved in licensing and don't know the cost.

I had a look at Qlik but didn't get a chance to really evaluate the benefits from one platform to another, other than what you find on the internet. 

I rate the solution nine out of 10, there's always room for improvement. 

It was for dashboards. The key use case was for creating visibility to performance metrics for the leadership team. It was the most recent version, and it was deployed on-prem. 

The key use case that we were going after very specifically created visibility to performance metrics for the leadership team. So, it allowed us to give that common view of performance metrics and drive business conversations based on the common shared set of facts. We were able to expose data and relationships that we otherwise couldn't do in our enterprise system silos. From that perspective, we were incredibly successful in really driving performance. When you combine that with some real championing in the business and with some leadership to push it down, the fact that it was Tableau wasn't as relevant as the fact that we had the championing pushing the process and pushing it down.

The number one thing was just the ease of getting something up quickly. The other thing that was good about it was that it was fairly fast for decent-sized data sets in terms of performance and run time.

From a downside perspective, some of the more advanced modeling techniques are actually fairly difficult to do. In addition, I just fundamentally disagree with the way you have to implement them because you can get incorrect answers in some cases.

One of the key challenges is that you never know whether it is how your developers developed it or whether it was the tool. We did find that once we got into more complex models, the ability to keep objects that should tally the same way but didn't became more and more difficult. That was probably the big thing for me. I don't know enough about how the tool was developed to know whether that was because they didn't follow a recommended practice. That was probably the number one thing that I found frustrating with it.

When we started to try and get into some very granular data sets that had some complex relationships in them, the performance on it degraded pretty quickly. It did degrade to such an extent that we couldn't use it. We had to change what we were trying to do and manage its scope so that we could get what we wanted out of it or reduce the scope of what we needed out of it. It doesn't have a database behind it, per se. So, while doing some of the more complicated things that you might otherwise do on a database, we started hitting some pretty significant challenges.

I used it for about three years.

Tableau worked fairly well for straightforward data sets, but it struggled when we got into the more complicated data sets and larger data sets. 

We were able to deploy it fairly broadly without a whole bunch of work. From that perspective, it worked fine. I was deploying my stuff to about 200 users across Canada, and I don't think we saw a blip on the server when people logged in. It was fine. If we were to roll out some of the bigger applications broadly, like the ones that we were having performance challenges with, we probably would have crushed the box. We would have had to get more CPU. Most likely, it would have been a memory issue, but we never hit that inflection point.

There were about 200 users of the solution. It went all the way from the equivalent of a senior vice president and all the way down to the equivalent of a line manager. So, we had business unit leaders, vice presidents, and operational managers.

It was being used extensively for a specific use case. There were lots of other use cases that it could be used for, but there needs to be an appetite from leadership to go, drive, and commit resources to go do that.

I didn't have to deal with technical support. Mr. Google is pretty good on the topic.

We had previously used Cognos to do the exact same thing. The only reason why we replaced it was that the business decided to go towards Tableau. Otherwise, there really wasn't any real reason to replace it. It was probably a little bit easier and more interesting for people to learn and to develop applications in the program than in Cognos. The ramp-up time to get to reasonably proficient in Tableau plus the support through Mr. Google made it a lot easier for me to get resources and do development on Tableau as compared to Cognos.

The organization decided to move away from the old platform. So, basically, I was lost when they asked me to shift off so that they could shut it down. I personally prefer the previous platform. I understood it very well. I had used it for years, and it worked just fine. For the most part, the challenges that we had on the old platform were not resolved by Tableau, which just reinforced to me that it wasn't a tool problem. It was a people problem.

It was pretty straightforward. The big thing that confuses people in a project that involves Tableau is that Tableau is a very visible but small component of the overall solution. That's because 80% of the work is data. It is not Tableau. So, Tableau is actually a fairly small component over that overall solution. It took a few days to get it up and going. Almost 80% of the work is actually on the data side, which takes forever, but the actual Tableau component of it was pretty straightforward. It was not that difficult.

You can get a Tableau dashboard up on a weekend. It is not hard to get something up and running. It is pretty trivial. It isn't any more or less difficult than any other tool to get up and going. I've used a number of them, and they're all pretty easy to get up and going. Tableau was the first one out of the gate with this democratized data perspective, where they were going to do departmental BI and up to enterprise BI years ago. Now, they now charge a fairly hefty premium to leverage that product. It is not a cheap product.

In terms of maintenance, it can take as much or as little as you want because it just runs. So, technically, you don't have to have anybody to do very much. You just need a very skeleton crew to operate as is. The challenge that you run into with solutions like this is that you need to continue to refresh the information with new and different views because people want to know more, and they want to go deeper into it. It is not a function of the technology. It is a function of the use case. So, you tend to have lots of new requests for new reports and analysis, and that's where you tend to have more challenges.

We didn't get into analysis users who are able to sort of do a little bit more themselves. There were viewer licenses where you are just using preset reports, but there are obviously additional training and things like that, and you have to deal with it if you start getting into more advanced power users.

I was at another company, and we were the integrator.

It is fairly expensive. I have no idea what they paid. We were on an enterprise license, so whatever it is they licensed at the enterprise level is what we paid.

A good chunk of it has got nothing to do with the tool. It has everything to do with your leadership and your governance requiring it. We had our IT team roll up Tableau multiple times and not a single person used it because there just wasn't enough leadership support to use it. There is nothing wrong with the tool, and it worked fine for what it did, but every time I logged into it, I go, "Okay, but what did you want me to actually do with this? I see all this information. I understand it clearly. I'm not sure what I do with it though." So, without that additional guidance from leadership, rolling it out is irrelevant. You need to have that strategic leadership associated with it.

The key piece of advice would be that you got to look beyond your tool. You need to look at how you're going to get this information used in your organization. What kind of leadership support, governance support, and ongoing support are you going to have? It is all based on trusted data. The value of the tool is based on the quality of your data and the leadership's support to use it. So, if you don't have high-quality data and you don't have leadership support to use the data, you don't need any tool because nobody is going to use it.

I would rate Tableau a seven out of 10. It suits the purpose, but in and of itself, I don't think it is significantly better or worse than its key competitors.

Tableau is pretty intuitive. It has a great interface, and you can get multiple visualizations. The best thing I like about Tableau is that you don't have to go for creating; it is calculated free. Unlike Power BI, Tableau has create a calculated column with dimension.

Tableau is quite fast and provides connectivity to 75 plus data connections, which is great.

Also, installation and configuration are pretty fast and seamless in Tableau.

In Tableau, it's just the concept of creating one calculated column and one create calculated free. So, it's pretty simple, and it's pretty easy to locate and work on it.

I have noticed that Tableau is not very compatible with ClickHouse. There's no direct connection to ClickHouse; you have to set up an ODBC connection.

Tableau's performance takes a hit if you have huge data. The stability and scalability could be improved.

I've been working for almost five plus years on Tableau.

Tableau's performance takes a hit if you have huge data. So in terms of stability, I feel that Cognos would be more stable because you can import all the metadata and store it in the Framework Manager. Tableau has scope for improvement regarding stability.

Tableau needs to be more scalable. The performance takes a hit if you have huge data. Even if you take an extract and you publish the extract and schedule it to refresh, if the report has multiple tabs, it can take quite a while to go from one tab to another.

We are going to scale the Tableau server so that it can accommodate more processes and can be more process inclusive.

We have a Center of Excellence team, and anytime we have an issue, we reach out to them. They then raise an incident or a ticket with Tableau technical support. In the case where we had 1 million rows and the Tableau data was failing to refresh, we shared the log with Tableau Center of Excellence. They came up with the findings that it's more of a database issue and not a Tableau server issue.

Installation and configuration are pretty fast and seamless in Tableau.

In general, if someone is new and wants to learn Tableau, it's around $70 per month.

I have experience working with Cognos and Power BI. Compared to Cognos, Tableau and Power BI are pretty fast. Cognos has the concept of Framework Manager where you can build a framework model. Once you build the model, then you have to release the package, and only then is the subset or the package of data available for reporting. Tableau and Power BI eradicate the dependency on a framework model.

With Cognos, installation and configuration wise the setup takes a bit of time. You have to install and configure and then make the data available. After that, you can do reporting. Unlike that, Tableau is very quick; you can just directly connect to Excel or a file on your desktop.

The connectivity, installation, and configuration are pretty fast and seamless in Tableau and Power BI, unlike those in Cognos.

From a license perspective, I think Cognos is the most expensive, then Tableau, and then Power BI.

If I were to rate these solutions on a scale from one to ten, I would rate Power BI at 7 and Cognos at 8.

You can do a lot in Tableau, and on a scale from one to ten, I would rate it at eight.