Likelihood to Recommend If you do not have a large budget and are a large organization, I would steer clear of Actuate. If you are looking to do very complex washboarding, I would not use them. Your developers have to be very skilled to work with this. Plan to bring in consultants if necessary to help your process. Adhoc reporting is weak. If your pricing is user based and you expand, this could be very expensive.
Read full review Tableau Desktop is one the finest tool available in the market with such a wide range of capabilities in its suite that makes it easy to generate insights. Further, if optimally designed, then its reports are fairly simple to understand, yet capable enough to make changes at the required levels. One can create a variety of visualizations as required by the business or the clients. The data pipelines in the backend are very robust. The tableau desktop also provides options to develop the reports in developer mode, which is one of the finest features to embed and execute even the most complex possible logic. It's easier to operate, simple to navigate, and fluent to understand by the users.
Read full review Pros The report outputs can vary across different types such as HTML, PDF, and Excel Their open source offering is very sufficient There are great boards and blogs for developers and engineers to expand and use their features. The people from the company that I've worked with are professional and courteous. Read full review An excellent tool for data visualization, it presents information in an appealing visual format—an exceptional platform for storing and analyzing data in any size organization. Through interactive parameters, it enables real-time interaction with the user and is easy to learn and get support from the community. Read full review Cons The documentation on all the available features, but most importantly on the scripting side, can be improved The standard look & feel of some basic options, like parameter selection or sorting and filtering, looks dated and can't be customized The server portal needs to provide better tools More integration is needed with other OpenText products Read full review Formatting the data to work correctly in graphical presentations can be time consuming Daily data extracts can run slowly depending on how much data is required and the source of the data The desktop version is required for advanced functionality, editing on [the] Tableau server allows only limited features Read full review Likelihood to Renew I am no longer working for the company that was using Actuate but I believe they would continue to use it because the stitching costs would be to high. It would require a complete rewrite of the reports and the never version of Actuate (BIRT) even required an almost complete report rewrite
Read full review Our use of Tableau Desktop is still fairly low, and will continue over time. The only real concern is around cost of the licenses, and I have mentioned this to Tableau and fully expect the development of more sensible models for our industry. This will remove any impediment to expansion of our use.
Read full review Usability It is quite intuitive to use. It is fit specifically for doing sentiment, emotion, and intention analysis as well as text classification and text summarization. I would have given 10 if it is fit for the purpose of doing image processing and analysis as well. There is a huge market to analyze video and image data.
Read full review Tableau Desktop has proven to be a lifesaver in many situations. Once we've completed the initial setup, it's simple to use. It has all of the features we need to quickly and efficiently synthesize our data. Tableau Desktop has advanced capabilities to improve our company's data structure and enable self-service for our employees.
Read full review Reliability and Availability When used as a stand-alone tool, Tableau Desktop has unlimited uptime, which is always nice. When used in conjunction with Tableau Server, this tool has as much uptime as your server admins are willing to give it. All in all, I've never had an issue with Tableau's availability.
Read full review Performance Tableau Desktop's performance is solid. You can really dig into a large dataset in the form of a spreadsheet, and it exhibits similarly good performance when accessing a moderately sized Oracle database. I noticed that with Tableau Desktop 9.3, the performance using a spreadsheet started to slow around 75K rows by about 60 columns. This was easily remedied by creating an extract and pushing it to Tableau Server, where performance went to lightning fast
Read full review Support Rating Always there on the front and backend for us and the client.
Read full review I have never really used support much, to be honest. I think the support is not as user-friendly to search and use it. I did have an encounter with them once and it required a bit of going back and forth for licensing before reaching a resolution. They did solve my issue though
Read full review In-Person Training It is admittedly hard to train a group of people with disparate levels of ability coming in, but the software is so easy to use that this is not a huge problem; anyone who can follow simple instructions can catch up pretty quickly.
Read full review Online Training The training for new users are quite good because it covers topic wise training and the best part was that it also had video tutorials which are very helpful
Read full review Implementation Rating Again, training is the key and the company provides a lot of example videos that will help users discover use cases that will greatly assist their creation of original visualizations. As with any new software tool, productivity will decline for a period. In the case of Tableau, the decline period is short and the later gains are well worth it.
David Fickes Decision Sciences - Modeling, Simulation & Analysis
Read full review Alternatives Considered It is vastly superior to these in many ways, for complex reporting it is a much more sophisticated solution. Visualizations are very good. Javascript extensibility is very powerful, others don't support this or as well. Pentaho and MS are both OLAP oriented. Pentaho is moving more toward big data, which was not our primary focus. Others are stuck in the Crystal Reports Band metaphor.
Read full review If we do not have legacy tools which have already been set up, I would switch the visualization method to open source software via
PyCharm ,
Atom , and
Visual Studio IDE . These IDEs cannot directly help you to visualize the data but you can use many python packages to do so through these IDEs.
Read full review Scalability Tableau Desktop's scaleability is really limited to the scale of your back-end data systems. If you want to pull down an extract and work quickly in-memory, in my application it scaled to a few tens of millions of rows using the in-memory engine. But it's really only limited by your back-end data store if you have or are willing to invest in an optimized SQL store or purpose-built query engine like Veritca or Netezza or something similar.
Read full review Return on Investment Actuate can handle 50 to 60 sub reports inside a report very well. Dynamically creating the datasource, chart, graph, reports are the main advantages. We can do any level of drilling, and can create a performance matrix dashboard efficiently. Read full review Tableau was acquired years ago, and has provided good value with the content created. Ongoing maintenance costs for the platform, both to maintain desktop and server licensing has made the continuing value questionable when compared to other offerings in the marketplace. Users have largely been satisfied with the content, but not with the overall performance. This is due to a combination of factors including the performance of the Tableau engines as well as development deficiencies. Read full review ScreenShots OpenText Magellan Screenshots