Tableau Reviews

Data Visualization & Analytics: In my last project, we used ESRI maps super-imposed with brand sales and sales history. By adding more dimensions to the data, we were able to drill from sales territories to analyze product sales at individual retail outlets. The next phase will be to add age-group demographics to the analytics.

That also describes our Agile approach. Incrementally add dimensions to the underlying data, and add richness to the analytics capability, and it’s a business-driven approach.

The client is in transition from traditional BI reports to real-time, mobile sales reporting, with a goal of eventually providing predictive analytics. The transition included a move away from IBM Cognos to Tableau, and using IBM Watson for predictive analytics. In this case, Tableau was able to do all the predictive analytics with less development effort and more visual results than Watson Analytics.

The trend I see from clients is towards more mobile solutions, more real-time analytics, and the integration of analytics and order entry. E.g. A sales consultant can seamlessly transition from sales analysis to entering an order while on-site. This implies a BPM integration with SAP, Oracle eBusiness Suite, SFDC and others.

The architecture this client was prototyping was an SFDC application with imbedded analytics provided by Tableau delivered to a tablet device. There are several ways to go about this, but the architecture was selected because SFDC was the system of record for all customer information.

I have used this solution on and off for about three years, more as Solutions Architect and Project Manager than a full-time developer.

I did not encounter any deployment issues, but a production deployment was outside of the scope of my role.

I know the client ran into several ODBC issues with the interface to Denodo, a data virtualization environment, but I can’t comment because Tableau support was outside of the scope of my role.

The client has a large Cognos footprint and they were looking to Tableau as a more agile reporting & analytics tool. For this project, we used Cognos 11 and were experimenting with IBM Watson Analytics. We were able to perform all the analytics they were doing in Watson Analytics, using Tableau.

In prior projects, I have experience with SAP BusinessObjects, SAS and QlikView.

Tableau was installed and configured by an in-house team and it was complete before I arrived on-site.

In my experience most (all) enterprise-scale clients have multiple, entrenched BI reporting tools that Tableau will have a tough time to displace. Tableau is most successful when it is introduced at a departmental or subsidiary level in an organization. That’s the starting point, and grow the ‘footprint’ from there. With that background in mind, make the initial pricing & licensing simple for a department to budget for & approve.

IMO, I don’t think any client can isolate an analytics tool and derive an ROI that stands up to scrutiny. I usually start by looking at a company’s annual report and I look for the transformational initiatives. E.g. They want more mobile capabilities, more real-time decision making, etc. I use that as the entry-point for discussion around capabilities, not a discussion of technical features and I look for real-world use cases to develop a solution architecture.

My advice to clients is always: Start with a clear goal in mind, generate some quick wins, and grow the environment from there. The enterprise-scale initiatives are big on vision, but I’ve seen more failures than successes.

The product is definitely a leader in the analytics-lite & data visualization space. Unless a client has a well-defined use case for one of the statistical or predictive analysis tools, Tableau can meet the needs. If the use case for Tableau becomes too complex, then clients can use the ‘R’ extension. I don’t have hands-on experience with that feature.

Without a doubt the best aspect of Tableau is the data flexibility. I work with Tableau within the confines of a healthcare organization- which is constantly expanding the metrics, datasets and sources we have to draw from in order to meet the needs of the US government, our physicians and most importantly our patients. With Tableau we have the ability to create a dashboard that displays all of the aforementioned data sources in a way that appears uniform.

Before we built a data platform using Tableau we were unable to align our employees around their data. We had a few dozen data sources representing important areas of focus for our operations teams. It was unreasonable to expect our operational leaders to consistently monitor the results of these different reports. Our hope was to build a platform everyone could access, that would be a one stop shop for reliable answers to important business questions; Tableau gave us that ability and made it affordable.

While Tableau is flexible it doesn't deal well with data that comes in a predetermined organization- i.e. data cubes. Our team has repeatedly had trouble trying to import raw data if it had any predetermined structure.

Two years.

No, it was pretty seamless.

The issues we have encountered have been largely due to our own server structure, not Tableau itself.

On the contrary, Tableau gave us the ability to manage larger volumes of data.

7/10.

7/10.

No, not for this purpose.

Very straightforward- we were live with access in a few days, though it took a few months to build our more polished dashboards.

Our decision support team handed deployment, in house.

You will need a team comprised of programmers, developers, user experience specialists and customer service representatives.

I am using it for my personal use. I'm using Tableau Public. It is a downloadable version. I downloaded it to my system and installed it.

The feature that is currently most valuable is the import feature where I can link to an Excel data source. I'm not using it with any other data source, such as SQL Server. I directly link it to an Excel sheet, and if I change anything in that Excel sheet, the changed data immediately gets reflected in the virtualization. This is something that is very convenient for me as of now.

Its documentation can be improved so that a user can get a good hands-on experience. Tableau is well documented, and on their website, there are a lot of tutorials that are available for free. I started my learning process through those tutorials, but there are certain loopholes in those tutorials, which only got filled through a couple of good YouTube channels that talk about Tableau. YouTube helped me a lot. So, the documentation could be better, I understand that it is evolving day by day, and with more usage, there would be more such documentation.

There are a couple of features that are only available in the cloud version, and I would like to see them in the hosted version. We can only use them in a demo or temporary account for 10 or 15 days, but I would love to see those features in the hosted version that I am using, which is Tableau Public.

I have been using Tableau for almost one and a half years. 

It is stable, but at times, I have seen that it doesn't work for certain datasets. If the data is not correctly sanitized, there are chances that you would end up having no visualization at all, even after spending a lot of time. So, sanitization is a must in Tableau as of now. Other than that, I've not seen anything else. There are no bugs, but if the data is not sanitized, you will not get any visualization. That is a problem. 

It is pretty scalable. There is no doubt about it. In the cloud version, a live data source can also be integrated. So, it seems pretty scalable, but I've not tested how scalable that version is.

I don't have any experience with their technical support. Whatever I've learned to date is from online resources such as YouTube and my personal sources. I've not contacted Tableau support.

Its initial setup is quite straightforward. It took me a while to understand that this version is also available for free for users like me who want to understand the data visualization part, but its installation is pretty easy.

I'm using Tableau Public, which is free.

I compared it with QlikView, which is a leading data visualization tool, but because I had heard a lot about Tableau and I had seen that there is a lot of scope in the market to get hired, I decided to go ahead with Tableau. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

We have diverse use cases for Tableau for our clients who come different industries including manufacturing of ornamental stones, clothing and automotives. These clients have been using Tableau for tasks such as tracking leads, finances and stock management.

Tableau makes it easy to build panels. The best use case for us is the solution's integration with Salesforce because we are also partners of Salesforce.

Some of our clients are looking for better UI when using Tableau as they often work with this solution directly. 

The solution could be improved by facilitating integration with data lakes such as Google Cloud Platform. Some of our clients have around 1 billion lines in their tables and usually we need to scale them from MySQL to a Google Cloud Platform.

We have been partners with Tableau for three years and have been using the solution for four years.

This is a scalable solution. We have databases from 1 million to 100 million roles that run very fast.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

Some of our clients have seen a ROI with Tableau within five to six months as they previously had no BI solution in place. 

When presenting Tableau to clients, we show them how Tableau works and how it integrates as a bundle with other partners such as Salesforce. These integrations make the management of data easier. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use the solution for financial, sales, production, quality reports, or dashboards.

The solution provides our company with easy access to relevant information.

The ease of use is its most valuable aspect. 

The solution allows for the possibility for end-users to do their own reporting. They have access to the use of standard dashboards and so on.

The initial setup is pretty easy.

The stability has been good.

The product needs to allow for better ways to drill down more effectively on the information at hand. Users should be able to dive into the information in an easier way. Right now, it's a bit too difficult. 

We have been using Tableau for about five years.

The stability of the solution is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

That said, initially we had some performance issues. That has been the biggest issue: performance. Especially in our case, as we are using it as a performance database. However, any initial issues have been solved now.

My understanding is that the solution is scalable. We are currently around 400 users and the roles are typically in finance, sales, marketing, and production.

It's the only tool for certain information, therefore, it's very widely used. We are really, really relying on it and that is growing. We are, during the next six months, closing old reports on the old business VPSH Virus environment. When that is done, this will be the only source of information when it comes to certain financial figures.

I'm not so much involved in the technical support side anymore, however, it has been good once you have gotten access to it.

We were using mainly SAP Business Warehouse and also the model solution, however, the biggest solution was based on SAP Business Warehouse and we are replacing that one due to the end of support for that tool.

The initial implementation process was rather straightforward. Yes.

The deployment has been ongoing. The first report to be published was done in about two months or something like that, however, it's an ongoing deployment as we are increasing the information all the time. The use of it is growing from, from month to month.

In terms of maintenance, currently, there are about four persons and their roles are weeding backend development to make sure that we get the data for IT management and the front end development.

We did have some help from a third party. We didn't need much help, however, there was some. Our experience was very good.

I'm not sure about our licensing costs at this time. We have changed license models during the journey.

We did evaluate other options. At the end of the day, it came down to the license cost and the ease of use. 

I'm a customer and an end-user.

I don't remember the version number. It could be the latest or the second latest.

I would advise potential new users to make a proper evaluation to make sure that it fits their needs. There might also be other solutions on the market today that they should comply with to make sure that they get the best solution. They should be cautious about how they have, what kind of availability they have to access data from other systems.

Also, it's important to make sure that you have educated the end-users in the proper way.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten overall. There's always room for improvement. Even if it was the most cost-efficient solution at that time, it's still costly, of course, to implement these kinds of tools. I'm also a little bit concerned about if they are a part of Salesforce, what that will mean for us in terms of impact.

We use the solution to allow management the ability to create dashboards for our data center.

The solution is easy to use, flexible, our clients enjoy seeing the data on maps, and you do not need to be an expert in SQL to use it.

There could be improvements on the mobile application, it is lacking features. 

I have been using the solution for approximately one year.

I have found the solution to be stable.

The scalability is good, we have 100 users using the solution in my organization.

I am not satisfied at all with the support response, it takes a lot of time. Some tickets will take more than 10 days to have an answer, this is not helpful. There is some documentation that is very useful on their site. This is the worst support I have experienced, the support could definitely be faster.

We were using Qlik Sense before this solution.

The installation is straightforward. The time it took for the installation was approximately four hours. However, the configuration takes a lot longer but it is not a problem with this solution it is common for configurations to take a while.

We did the deployment ourselves. We have a team of two administrators doing the maintenance for the solution and a team of four for the development of the dashboard. 

There is a license required, we pay an annual license which is priced fair.

I recommend this solution to others. We are satisfied with the solution and are going to keep using it in the future.

I rate Tableau an eight out of ten.

Its dashboarding is the most valuable. It is easy to create visualizations and dashboards and import Excel sheets and ESP files in Tableau as compared to other tools.

I am a BI consultant. I have worked on different reporting tools, such as Power BI and MicroStrategy. As compared to other tools, Tableau lags behind in handling huge enterprise-level data in terms of robust security and the single integrated metadata concept. When we connect to large or very big databases, then performance-wise, I sometimes found Tableau a little bit slow.

It can have the single metadata concept like other tools for the reusability of the objects in multiple reports.

I have around three years of experience in using Tableau.

Its scalability is fine. However, in my experience, I haven't seen large-scale projects in Tableau. For such projects, tools like Cognos and MicroStrategy were used. It may be because I didn't get a chance to work on very large projects. I have seen it being used only for small-scale to medium-scale projects, not for large-scale projects.

Their technical support is very good.

The initial setup is straightforward. We can configure the server and do all the setup in half a day.

It is reasonable and cheap as compared to other major tools. It has a good price, and people go for it because of its pricing.

For small-scale to medium-scale projects, I would recommend Tableau or Power BI. For large-scale projects, I would recommend MicroStrategy.

I would rate Tableau a seven out of ten. Most of the things are good in this solution.

The following features were why we picked Tableau:

1. Ease of use and integration.
2. Analysis of data without need for coding.
3. Gold standard intuitive, interactive, visualization experience.

Non tech users are able to use the self contained platform, interact with data and share findings.

1. Tableau Online does not have any way of automating the usage reports. You can download them as a PDF but have to do so manually to distribute them. There is no way to schedule these reports for business users who would like to measure users activity.
2. While you can see how many licenses are used, there is no way to see how many licenses are available for use. You have to contact support to get this information.

We have used this solution for six months.

No, we have not experienced any downtime or stability issues as yet with Tableau Online.

No, we have not experienced any scalability issues as yet with Tableau Online.

I would rate the technical support as eight out of 10. There are some inherent issues that are related to versions that they were not able to sort out and tickets remained unresolved.

We used SSRS as our reporting solution. We switched because the deployment was archaic.

We deployed the solution using IFrame via Salesforce.com. We experienced issues while configuring SSO through SAML.

Tableau was not accepting any metadata files that were uploaded whether they were new or ones that have we had worked on in the past. It claimed they were “invalid”. We opened a support ticket to find that this was a known issue. With the help of support, the issue was resolved at the Tableau back end.

The quote is only valid for 15 days. There may be price changes (after 15 days) that might impact your cost and finance budget.

We evaluated eight vendors: Power BI, Tableau, Qlik, SAS, MicroStrategy, Domo, Sisense, and R Shiny. We compared FOSS and COTS options, assessed feature sets, vendors, and support. COTS was preferred, with Tableau edging out Power BI.

Be sure to review all the vendors and features/functionality. There are many products out there in the market today.