Tableau Reviews

Tableau is easy to use.

Tableau has so many functions, so sometimes it's hard to find the right solution quickly. I have to search multiple menu bars to find the right command.

I started working with Tableau two years ago.

In some projects, Tableau isn't stable. Sometimes it calls automatically.

Tableau is scalable. Right now, 200 to 300 people at my company use it.

Their web-based tech support is okay.

Setting up Tableau is easy.

Tableau's price should be lower so more people can access this application.

I rate Tableau eight out of 10.

We use Tableau to provide analytics and dashboards. We also use it to automate manual work.

You can create attractive dashboards that inform users using Tableau.

They must have a write-back solution. You must have the ability to write back into the database, otherwise, it prevents full automation.

That's one reason why people still need their own Excel sheets and other tools where they can interact with data that's already in the database. You win completely the moment you load that in, in a central way. You could say that you are completely automated.

They need a write-back; that is what is missing. If they get the write back to the database, they will be fully automated, but for the time being, they are not.

I have been using Tableau for two and a half years.

We are using version 2021.3.

It's a fairly stable product.

Tableau is a scalable solution.

Tableau is used by approximately 90 people in our organization.

We do not intend to increase our usage. I've asked for reports on how many users we get on a daily basis, as well as how many people use it and then don't use it for weeks. How long do they stay if they come in, and what are they looking at?

We are attempting to purchase a tool that will provide us with that information. We know which dashboards are popular, which are not, and why the popular ones are popular while the unpopular ones are not. We need to get an add-on that will tell us exactly what makes the dashboard sticky and what keeps people coming back to use it.

We use technical support, but I don't interact with them directly. Our IT support team is the one who helps us. Our IT support team works with Tableau support to resolve issues, opening tickets and tracking them.

Prior to using Tableau, I used Power BI.

We don't do a lot of installation. Once you have a server license, you can literally create it in the server now that you have a server license. There are no issues with installation.

The installation does not require a lot of time.

We have one or two engineers who maintain this solution.

We have a server team to deploy this solution.

We are paying an annual licensing fee.

I believe it is a good tool, and I would recommend it to others.

I would rate Tableau an eight out of ten.

Tableau is good for routine dashboards, and it has integration with Slack, through which it can send you daily updates.

Areas for improvement would be visualization and augmented analytics. In the next release, I would like to see automated insights from the data added to the dashboard.

I've been using this solution for about six years.

Tableau can be a little slow when loading, and it can fail with higher gigs or terabytes of data.

From working with my data analyst, I get the impression that Tableau can't take the load when scaling.

We had embedded technical support from Tableau in our enterprise, who was awesome and kept Tableau updated at all times.

Tableau is pretty good, interface-wise - it's easy to understand and to download data. It also has the most functionalities and capabilities of any tool. However, it doesn't have anything that differentiates it from its competitors, unlike Adobe Analytics' strength in visualization and data capture. If someone is looking for routine dashboards and wants operational dashboards, Tableau is the best solution. However, if they want to drive strategic decisions, they may have to look into a different product. I would rate Tableau as seven out of ten. 

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. 

The solution is primarily used for analysis purposes. I use it quite a lot. 

Overall, the solution is pretty good.

You can do a lot of filtering from the dashboard. 

You are able to see and follow trends.

The scalability of the solution is very good.

There is a lot more that can be done with Tableau than what is actually happening within Juniper. The company is not getting the answers to the questions directly from the Tableau database, for example. Of course, Tableau can be extended to answer those questions. 

What is happening, with so many tools coming up in the market, is that people have to continuously get educated in order to use some of the more advanced features. What's happening with Tableau is that, except for the dashboard view and all the filtering and that's happening from a dashboard perspective, it doesn't seem to be very good in making me understand the trend insights. For example, if I saw that the average sales price for Product A was lower than the average sales price for Product B, I'm not saying that B is inferior to A or anything. I'm just noting what I found and I cannot give more details. It doesn't go deeper into the analysis. I'd like more analysis to better understand what a trend might mean, and not just a report that a trend is happening. Right now, Tableau is not so good at providing that extra bit of insight.

What happens is Tableau data is used very often. From the quarterly business reviews, et cetera, the executives have direct access to the Tableau dashboard. More than anything else, they're able to do all this filtering. They could probably improve the user interface response times. When it comes to slicing and dicing of data viewing the results, it needs to be just easier in general as executives are using it and looking at it, and they are not very technical. 

When executives look at the Tableau dashboard, they want to know why, for example, Product A bringing in less than Product B. Those kinds of key questions, which come from executives for reviewing the Tableau data need to be addressed and in a simple to understand way. I think Tableau has to work a little more in terms of the business insights aspect of it, where it communicates to the user and answers their questions. That intelligence part needs to be developed in Tableau. 

Something great would be, if, for example, like in Google, if you asked a question, it could feed you back potential information. I don't want to compare everything to Google, however, it's so easy to find the answers you need in the way Google is set up. If Tableau could do something similar to showcase answers to questions, that would be ideal. It needs some sort of smart dashboard. 

I've found the scalability to be quite good. If a user needs to expand it, they can do so. 

I also have used Teradata previously. 

The front-end of Teradata is not so well used and therefore I cannot talk about it much, however, the dashboard is pretty good. Much like Google, which uses ML and AI to help answer questions, both solutions could benefit from extracting intelligence to answer questions. 

I'm simply an end-user of the product. I don't have a business relationship with Tableau.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten. I'd like to talk to a Tableau product manager about the solution and describe how I would like the solution to work, especially around deeper analysis.

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. 

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.