Tableau vs Zendesk comparison

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Tableau Logo
17,135 views|14,826 comparisons
89% willing to recommend
Zendesk Logo
108 views|87 comparisons
93% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Tableau and Zendesk based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Reporting solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Tableau vs. Zendesk Report (Updated: March 2024).
772,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"Tableau's most valuable feature is its ability to connect with various data sources and display real-time data on three different dashboards.""Tableau has greatly enhanced our organization's data-driven decision-making processes by enabling us to create visually compelling reports and dashboards.""Since Tableau is on the cloud, we haven't faced any challenges around scalability.""This solution has improved insights into quantitative data.""The most important feature in Tableau is visual analytics.""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.""When compared to Power BI, Tableau has more readily available resources.""It's a very good, flexible product, and it's easy to learn."

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"I found the user experience with vendors on Zendesk to be straightforward, especially when it comes to understanding and searching for specific tickets. The search and navigation tools are easy to use, and I haven't encountered any issues with delays or communication gaps in ticket resolutions.""It has good management, the ability to sign tickets based on content, the multi-channel support, the self service portal, the integration with Salesforce, the setup process, and the product features as we are currently using them.""One of the most valuable features is that Zendesk gives you a lot of configurability, and a lot of leeway in terms of customizing the look and theme. Zendesk offers you the facility to design your own landing page, as well as the look and feel of the entire knowledge base. At the same time, they offer themes that you can simply purchase and implement. Either way, it can really be turned into the right look and feel of the knowledge base required by our company, which is very important—if you have a bland-looking page, most of the time, people will lose interest. Zendesk also allows you to test the customizations before you publish it. It gives you a sandbox location where you can test everything new that you're trying to create and publish, which is very interesting.""It's a very stable tool, very powerful.""Its agility and simplicity are the most valuable features. This tool is very user-friendly.""The stability has been very good.""It's very convenient to use.""The initial setup is simple and straightforward."

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Cons
"It needs a little bit more advanced modeling. I would like to see functionality like Cognos has in the Framework Manager.""Tableau's automatic insight could be improved. It has some predefined capabilities to understand the data, but I think they need more. Customers need more insight automatically from data—they don't want to discover them, they want to get the forecast automatically. The data preparation should also be improved because it's not easy. Tableau tries to focus on the business side, but the backend side has not improved much. They also have an ETS solution, but it's limited.""The development part should be better. We are putting a lot of effort in during development, so if we face any struggles, we have to find workaround solutions on the internet.""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.""Tableau's data modeling, mining, and AI library features need improvement.""To be the best in the market, Tableau has to improve its user interface and also look into developing implementing the best machine learning algorithms.""The price could be better.""Small multiples (a.k.a. Trellis charts) are possible only through very hacky means. Update: Still remains a challenge."

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"Zendesk Guide's customization could be improved. I would like it to be easier and maybe open-sourced, so that if you have a developer in your company, you can do it yourself. Right now, that isn't allowed, so you need to have it done via the integrator. Another improvement—this is nit-picking—is that it could be less easy to make changes. Some things are so easy that they sometimes look a little amateur-ish. Most of the templates are built-in so they can be used directly, so they are very simple.""Zendesk Guide could be improved by allowing us to put our assets in one location. What happens now for each article, for example, is we have to upload the images for that article to that location, so the image reuse is still not something that they have perfected. If they could allow us to update all the images in one location, and then pull the image from there, it would be easier when working on Multibrand projects. There are no Multibrand updates available—we have to update each brand manually. For my company, I have come up with an API tool which allows me to push the content to multiple brands together, but if you don't have something like that, you have to manually do it.""They have something called Zendesk Explore, which isn't as good as what they had in place previously.""The solution itself wasn't easy to set up.""It needs to improve in terms of its flexibility, price, and installation.""The support team is time-consuming, and they don't find the answer to our problem.""The solution could integrate better with QR codes from some websites such as Facebook.""There is always a network issue with Zendesk. But we don’t know whether it is managed. The network issue is that when I call, it does not let us."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "For big business, Tableau could be expensive as having a lot of Tableau server users (entering with a browser to reports) could be a bit expensive."
  • "Best advice on pricing is to anticipate the desire for more licenses once the results of this product are acknowledged in other parts of your company."
  • "Paying for users you never setup or buying expensive desktop licenses for users who can solve their users with web editing on the server are the two biggest expenses."
  • "Buy 50 at a time. Project your use base every three months, and project your requirements forward."
  • "Tableau can be costly (but this can be indefinable, such as user experience vs. cheaper etc.)"
  • "I wish there was more of a subscription model with the pricing when it comes to Tableau, so you can get all the latest version upgrades/features if you pay monthly/annually."
  • "The cost is high."
  • "Deployment of dashboards to viewers and unit supervisors can be prohibitively expensive."
  • More Tableau Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "We pay for the solution on a yearly basis and my understanding is that the cost is about $30,000. That's the cost for 24 to 25 agents."
  • "The price is very competitive."
  • "Zendesk's licensing is not cheap. For Enterprise, we are paying $200 per agent. It's a per-month cost, so it's pretty steep. There are some services you need to pay extra for. For example, with Zendesk Guide, we had to buy the most expensive offering in order to get Multibrand and everything. We also had to pay a lot of money for themes."
  • "There are different plans that are offered. We are using the entry-level plan. The overall price of the solution should be reduced. The price is too high."
  • "You have to pay extra for better support. So it's not only the license that you pay for, but you have to pay extra for the support as well."
  • More Zendesk Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Anonymous User
    After a recent presentation, several attendees asked me about the applications of Visual Insights and Tableau. Many companies are investing in both tools and are trying to figure out the right tool for specific applications Tableau has found its sweet-spot as an agile discovery tool that analysts use to create and share insights. It is also the tool of choice for rapid prototyping of dashboards. Tableau is very flexible with its data import. Tableau's data blending capability is very intuitive. This capability is useful when you have data spread across several different sources that has not gone through ETL processes. This is a problem analysts deal with routinely. They are unable to wait for the data warehouse team to develop ETL processes to provide the physical models they need to build an analysis. The Tableau interface is Excel-like and has a low barrier to entry for analysts that are used to working in Excel. Building a dashboard by mashing up visualizations in a Tableau worksheet is extremely simple. Users are able to build good presentation-quality dashboards in a very short amount time. Tableau's annotations capabilities and its time and geographical intelligence are key differentiators. Tableau has overcome limitations in data sharing with the introduction of a Data Server in Tableau 7.0. The Data server allows Data sources and extracts to be shared securely and opens up interesting new possibilities. If your application can take advantage of the above… Read more →
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:It depends on the Data architecture and the complexity of your requirement Some great tools in the market are Qlik Sense, Power BI, OBIEE, Tableau, etc. I have recently started using Cognos… more »
    Top Answer:Both tools have their positives and negatives. First, I should mention that I am relatively new to Tableau. I have been working on and off Tableau for about a year, but getting to work on it… more »
    Top Answer:Tableau is easy to set up and maintain. In about a day it is possible for the entire platform to be deployed for use. This relatively short amount of time can make all the difference for companies… more »
    Top Answer:I found the user experience with vendors on Zendesk to be straightforward, especially when it comes to understanding and searching for specific tickets. The search and navigation tools are easy to… more »
    Top Answer:You have to pay extra for better support. So it's not only the license that you pay for, but you have to pay extra for the support as well. The pricing is expensive. Back then, we were paying $51 per… more »
    Top Answer:As per me, there arent much significant issues or areas for improvement with Zendesk, as my usage of it is limited. I appreciate its ability to organize tickets effectively based on tags, allowing me… more »
    Ranking
    2nd
    out of 50 in Reporting
    Views
    17,135
    Comparisons
    14,826
    Reviews
    13
    Average Words per Review
    537
    Rating
    8.7
    12th
    out of 50 in Reporting
    Views
    108
    Comparisons
    87
    Reviews
    6
    Average Words per Review
    539
    Rating
    8.2
    Comparisons
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    Amazon QuickSight logo
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    SAS Visual Analytics logo
    Compared 5% of the time.
    Databricks logo
    Compared 4% of the time.
    ServiceNow logo
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    JIRA Service Management logo
    Compared 14% of the time.
    Atlassian Confluence logo
    Compared 11% of the time.
    Freshservice logo
    Compared 9% of the time.
    Microsoft Dynamics CRM logo
    Compared 4% of the time.
    Also Known As
    Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online
    Zendesk Support, Zendesk Guide, Zendesk Sell
    Learn More
    Overview

    Tableau is a tool for data visualization and business intelligence that allows businesses to report insights through easy-to-use, customizable visualizations and dashboards. Tableau makes it exceedingly simple for its customers to organize, manage, visualize, and comprehend data. It enables users to dig deep into the data so that they can see patterns and gain meaningful insights. 

    Make data-driven decisions with confidence thanks to Tableau’s assistance in providing faster answers to queries, solving harder problems more easily, and offering new insights more frequently. Tableau integrates directly to hundreds of data sources, both in the cloud and on premises, making it simpler to begin research. People of various skill levels can quickly find actionable information using Tableau’s natural language queries, interactive dashboards, and drag-and-drop capabilities. By quickly creating strong calculations, adding trend lines to examine statistical summaries, or clustering data to identify relationships, users can ask more in-depth inquiries.

    Tableau has many valuable key features:

    • Tableau dashboards provide a complete view of your data through visualizations, visual objects, text, and more.
    • Tableau provides convenient, real-time options to collaborate with other users and instantly share data in the form of visualizations, sheets, and dashboards. 
    • Tableau ensures connectivity to both live data sources and data extraction from external data sources as in-memory data. This gives users the flexibility to use data from more than one source without any restrictions. 
    • Tableau gives many data source option, ranging from spreadsheets, big data, on-premise files, relational databases, non-relational databases, data warehouses, and big data, to on-cloud data. 
    • Tableau has a lot of pre-installed information on maps, such as cities, postal codes, and administrative boundaries. 
    • Tableau has a foolproof security system based on authentication and permission systems for data connections and user access. Tableau also gives you the freedom to integrate with other security protocols.

    Tableau stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Some of these include its fast data access, easy creation of visualizations, and its stability. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

    Romil S., Deputy General Manager of IT at Nayara Energy, notes, "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.

    Ariful M., Consulting Practice Partner of Data, Analytics & AI at FH, writes, “Tableau is very flexible and easy to learn. It has drag-and-drop function analytics, and its design is very good.

    Zendesk Support is intuitive, and it's built with support agents in mind. Everything they need lives in a single, dynamic help desk interface so it's easy to be productive and manage customer interactions.

    Sample Customers
    Accenture, Adobe, Amazon.com, Bank of America, Charles Schwab Corp, Citigroup, Coca-Cola Company, Cornell University, Dell, Deloitte, Duke University, eBay, Exxon Mobil, Fannie Mae, Ferrari, French Red Cross, Goldman Sachs, Google, Government of Canada, HP, Intel, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Macy's, Merck, The New York Times, PayPal, Pfizer, US Army, US Air Force, Skype, and Walmart.
    Mailchimp, Tesco, Vimeo, Instacart, Mediaocean, Slack, Uber
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Computer Software Company12%
    University7%
    Healthcare Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization35%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Computer Software Company8%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company24%
    Financial Services Firm14%
    Construction Company10%
    Non Profit7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company22%
    Educational Organization10%
    Financial Services Firm7%
    University6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business32%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise50%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business13%
    Midsize Enterprise40%
    Large Enterprise46%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business46%
    Midsize Enterprise35%
    Large Enterprise19%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise20%
    Large Enterprise55%
    Buyer's Guide
    Tableau vs. Zendesk
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Tableau vs. Zendesk and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    772,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Tableau is ranked 2nd in Reporting with 293 reviews while Zendesk is ranked 12th in Reporting with 57 reviews. Tableau is rated 8.4, while Zendesk is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Tableau writes "Provides fast data access with in-memory extracts, makes it easy to create visualizations, and saves time". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zendesk writes "Stable tool, making it reliable for handling tasks but difficult initial setup". Tableau is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Domo, Amazon QuickSight, SAS Visual Analytics and Databricks, whereas Zendesk is most compared with ServiceNow, JIRA Service Management, Atlassian Confluence, Freshservice and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. See our Tableau vs. Zendesk report.

    See our list of best Reporting vendors.

    We monitor all Reporting reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.