Tableau Reviews

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.

The feature we've found most valuable is Data Extract, which extracts a local copy of all required data in a columnar format store. It does in-memory processing which is lightening fast.

It placed the power of dashboards and scorecard development in the hands of business people, so there's less dependency on developers.

They need to make it more flexible for enterprise administration, e.g, more job scheduling flexibility, more robust permission control, and more comprehensive mapping service that is native and not dependent on a third party like Mapbox. They also need to develop more comprehensive DR and HA solutions.

I've been using it for over three years.

It's excellent for deployments and upgrades.

We have had no issues with its stability.

We have had no problems scaling it for our needs.

They have good customer service support, although they do not always solve the issues. Also, sometimes support takes too long to find the root cause or a solution to an issue.

We previously used Cognos, and Microsoft BI. We chose this due to user-friendly structure. There aren't too many components to manage and understand like in Cognos or Microsoft BI, etc.

The initial setup was straightforward -- very easy installation and upgrades cycle.

In-house - very easy to implement in-house, just follow the installation and upgrade guide check-lists and first try on test environment before doing a production installation or upgrade.

ROI for Tableau when compared to other BI tools we have is excellent.

Tableau has both core-based licencing (for higher number of consumers scenario) and subscription based licences (for limited users scenario) - chose appropriate licencing based on your estimate of number of users.

It's very user friendly and its self-service approach helps business users to develop dashboards in no time. The learning curve is very short - lot of learning resources available.

Still need to do some catch-up on enterprise administration and Mobile friendly reporting e.g Android App is not yet available - expected to be released 10.0.

Tableau releases frequent major releases three to four versions per year, and monthly patch fix releases, so plan a strategy that you want to follow. We are generally one to two releases behind so we can keep up with them, and at the same time leveraging all new exciting features the release.

Geo Spatial maps and Time Series animation with Storyboarding. The easy to use interface has really accelerated adoption. 

It lets power users like engineers create visuals on their data without waiting on a longer IT project timeline. The downside is you really need some SQL skills to take full advantage of it.

For Tableau, R is just a script interface. It is missing the R-style Plot area the data scientists want to use. They really want to overlay pieces on the plot and derive new graphs.

They need to provide a Folder hierarchy for organizing content and setting security. Creating 900 sites takes way too much work and limiting. As a result, we have hundreds of Worksheets in one long list—not good.

We had no issues with the deployment.

Performance has issues when you get too many users. The latest upgrade made it worse and had to be backed off.

The above issues brings into question how scalable it really is.

I am most familiar with SAP Business Objects Web Intelligence, but have been to classes on Tableau, Power BI, and Qlikview as part of our internal efforts to help the business choose which is right for their needs.

R and SAS are under our heading of Advanced Analytic tools in the BI space and will be evaluated in phase 2.

Plan how you need to organize and secure content up front. It’s too much work later when it becomes popular. Be sure to plan and budget for more client license bundle purchases as user growth approaches critical mass. Otherwise, you’ll be putting them on a wait list and waiting for management to approve more spending. Managing a lack of licenses is not fun.

Once you are comfortable with the product, building visualizations and dashboards is extremely quick.  I also have not seen a better geospatial drag and drop visualization tool out there yet.

It’s an excellent tool to quickly build visualizations supporting QA and data validation activities.

• Governed data discovery
• Collaboration
• Other enterprise features

We've used it for over two years.

We had no issues deploying it.

There have been no issues with the stability.

Older versions had trouble with performance when looking at larger datasets but it does not seem to be as much an issue now.

Sales support when we were first engaged with them was minimal.

There was no other solution in place.

It’s excellent for desktop analysis but make sure to include other tools in your evaluation if you are looking for enterprise support features.