Adobe Analytics vs. Tableau Desktop

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Adobe Analytics
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Adobe acquired Omniture in 2009 and re-branded the platform as SiteCatalyst. It is now part of Adobe Marketing Cloud along with other products such as social marketing, test and targeting, and tag management. SiteCatalyst is one of the leading vendors in the web analytics category and is particularly strong in combining web analytics with other digital marketing capabilities like audience management and data management. Adobe Analytics also includes predictive marketing capabilities that help…N/A
Tableau Desktop
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Tableau Desktop is a data visualization product from Tableau. It connects to a variety of data sources for combining disparate data sources without coding. It provides tools for discovering patterns and insights, data calculations, forecasts, and statistical summaries and visual storytelling.
$70
per month
Pricing
Adobe AnalyticsTableau Desktop
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Tableau Creator
$70.00
Per User / Per Month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Adobe AnalyticsTableau Desktop
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesYes
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional DetailsAll pricing plans are billed annually.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Adobe AnalyticsTableau Desktop
Considered Both Products
Adobe Analytics
Chose Adobe Analytics
Adobe Analytics is a more sophisticated tool than Google Analytics, especially because of its integration with other Adobe products. While Google Analytics is easier to use, implement, and train others on, specific organizations prefer Adobe Analytics because of data privacy …
Chose Adobe Analytics
Adobe Analytics is better for scale and customization. Google 360 lacks the ability to pull in as many data sources. Google Analytics doesn't give in-depth data. Tableau Desktop isn't a measurement platform, but it does perform better as [a] data visualization and reporting …
Chose Adobe Analytics
It helps to understand what channels and devices are users using and what route they are taking to convert. It helps to check the funnels and drop offs at each stage
Chose Adobe Analytics
Adobe Analytics definitely provides more detailed and comprehensive data analysis than the other tools I have used. It covers all the data set on pre and post sale analysis. Its integrations with other tools, realtime data customizations and other features suits well for …
Chose Adobe Analytics
Adobe Analytics is better because there's just so much more you can do. A lot of those analytics tools, they're very narrow-focused. They're great, but a lot of times it's justextracting the data from those tools and then putting it in Excel and doing your own thing to it. …
Chose Adobe Analytics
More or less all tools are the same however Adobe seems to be bigger brand and being used by business where analytics is being used very seriously
Chose Adobe Analytics
Adobe analytics has less flexibility in terms of joining data sources and creating visualizations. It does well at creating custom analytics, but so do the other platforms. Workspace does tend to be better at creating segmentation.
Chose Adobe Analytics
There are several business analytics software and all have different capabilities depending on the requirement. BI software today are a key and the face of the organizations e-commerce business - weather it is mobile or online. Selection of Adobe analytics was a joint decision …
Chose Adobe Analytics
Adobe analytics was decided on above my pay grade, while I am a user I did not decide to solely use this platform as a company. That being said, I have used other platforms and can see why the complexity of Adobe was chosen over the simplicity of Google Analytics.
Chose Adobe Analytics
Adobe Analytics is far better, in my opinion, as it also integrates easily into other software and 3rd party vendors. For example, using CrazyEgg, we can have the analytics from this tool feed into AEM much easier and have more visibility into success metrics.
Chose Adobe Analytics
Adobe Analytics requires huge financial investments compared to other solutions but we believe Adobe Analytics is the best tool in the market
Chose Adobe Analytics
Google Analytics is the other major player in this space. There are advantages to GA, chiefly, its 'single line of code' implementation. A free version is available. Developers are not required to add an 'out of the box' Google Analytics solution.

That said, Adobe Analytics …
Chose Adobe Analytics
The reporting interface is much simpler and intuitive in Adobe Analytics compared to Google Analytics. Much better anomaly detection capabilities and speed to insights. Easy to drill down by dimensions and customize reports. There are limitations in Google Analytics for the …
Tableau Desktop
Chose Tableau Desktop
- Tableau Desktop is already proven in the market.
- Tableau has a very strong user community.
- Tableau report is very easy to automate so we can save time for reporting.
Chose Tableau Desktop
It is a much lighter, easier to understand tool that can be used by anyone, even non tech people. Also, it doesn't need a Microsoft suite or Oracle suite or any other tools to operate it, unlike other tools. But it is good till the basic reporting. For deep level analytics …
Chose Tableau Desktop
Tableau focuses in telling the story, which is a fundamental piece that is hardly found today on any analytics suite. Adobe Analytics is fantastic collecting data but it is very rigid when manipulating the data and building meaningful reports. In my opinion Adobe Analytics is a …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Adobe AnalyticsTableau Desktop
Web Analytics
Comparison of Web Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Analytics
8.9
12 Ratings
11% above category average
Tableau Desktop
-
Ratings
Lead Conversion Tracking8.812 Ratings00 Ratings
Bounce Rate Measurement8.512 Ratings00 Ratings
Device and Browser Reporting8.812 Ratings00 Ratings
Pageview Tracking9.112 Ratings00 Ratings
Event Tracking9.212 Ratings00 Ratings
Reporting in real-time9.212 Ratings00 Ratings
Referral Source Tracking8.512 Ratings00 Ratings
Customizable Dashboards9.112 Ratings00 Ratings
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Analytics
-
Ratings
Tableau Desktop
8.4
167 Ratings
3% above category average
Pixel Perfect reports00 Ratings8.5139 Ratings
Customizable dashboards00 Ratings8.7166 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates00 Ratings7.8145 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Analytics
-
Ratings
Tableau Desktop
9.0
164 Ratings
11% above category average
Drill-down analysis00 Ratings9.0159 Ratings
Formatting capabilities00 Ratings9.3162 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages00 Ratings8.3122 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration00 Ratings9.5157 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Analytics
-
Ratings
Tableau Desktop
8.4
158 Ratings
1% above category average
Publish to Web00 Ratings8.4149 Ratings
Publish to PDF00 Ratings7.9149 Ratings
Report Versioning00 Ratings8.4116 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling00 Ratings9.3123 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers00 Ratings8.173 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Analytics
-
Ratings
Tableau Desktop
8.5
156 Ratings
7% above category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)00 Ratings9.0154 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization00 Ratings8.4149 Ratings
Predictive Analytics00 Ratings8.5126 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining00 Ratings8.02 Ratings
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Analytics
-
Ratings
Tableau Desktop
8.7
142 Ratings
3% above category average
Multi-User Support (named login)00 Ratings9.0139 Ratings
Role-Based Security Model00 Ratings8.1119 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)00 Ratings8.7129 Ratings
Report-Level Access Control00 Ratings9.03 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)00 Ratings8.877 Ratings
Mobile Capabilities
Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Analytics
-
Ratings
Tableau Desktop
8.1
135 Ratings
3% above category average
Responsive Design for Web Access00 Ratings8.4124 Ratings
Mobile Application00 Ratings7.397 Ratings
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile00 Ratings8.7117 Ratings
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
Comparison of Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Analytics
-
Ratings
Tableau Desktop
9.2
64 Ratings
16% above category average
REST API00 Ratings9.356 Ratings
Javascript API00 Ratings8.951 Ratings
iFrames00 Ratings9.449 Ratings
Java API00 Ratings9.946 Ratings
Themeable User Interface (UI)00 Ratings8.653 Ratings
Customizable Platform (Open Source)00 Ratings8.946 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Adobe AnalyticsTableau Desktop
Small Businesses
Serpstat
Serpstat
Score 9.6 out of 10
Cyfe
Cyfe
Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Siteimprove
Siteimprove
Score 9.4 out of 10
Reveal
Reveal
Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Contentsquare
Contentsquare
Score 8.8 out of 10
Jaspersoft Community Edition
Jaspersoft Community Edition
Score 9.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Adobe AnalyticsTableau Desktop
Likelihood to Recommend
8.9
(184 ratings)
8.8
(194 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.9
(43 ratings)
8.9
(39 ratings)
Usability
7.0
(35 ratings)
8.6
(63 ratings)
Availability
8.1
(12 ratings)
8.0
(10 ratings)
Performance
8.0
(11 ratings)
6.1
(9 ratings)
Support Rating
3.6
(41 ratings)
7.0
(56 ratings)
In-Person Training
1.1
(5 ratings)
9.4
(4 ratings)
Online Training
7.0
(5 ratings)
8.0
(4 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.1
(10 ratings)
8.0
(34 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
8.1
(2 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
7.3
(6 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
10.0
(2 ratings)
7.0
(3 ratings)
Professional Services
7.9
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Adobe AnalyticsTableau Desktop
Likelihood to Recommend
Adobe
Adobe Analytics is better than some other tools as it feels better set up for actual "analysis", rather than simply "reporting". The power of Workspace allows you to drag 'n' drop at ease which makes you are far more in control of your own analysis/discovery/exploration. However, regards the final reports and dashboards' look 'n' feel the Workspace PDF output is lacking visually compared to other products like Google's Looker. To engage with less technical end users sometimes Looker feels the better, more polished option.
Read full review
Tableau
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
Adobe
  • They've been really an industry standard tool in analytics for a long, long time. They've got the trusted brand and the reputation, a wonderful community behind it. It is always nice, having that level of support where you can meet other practitioners. It's a great benefit because I can meet other people who have already pushed the tool a lot farther than I have. And it's a great place to get ideas in that way. We came from a world where we were running on a homegrown system that we'd use to do click tracking. You get some advantages on that of the customization, but losing out on community of support was one of the big reasons why we decided to move beyond that and implement Adobe Analytics instead.
Read full review
Tableau
  • 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
Adobe
  • Most of the problems that Adobe Analytics as of now is having, it is getting addressed in a newer tool called Web Desk DK from implementation. They are already addressing that issue with the new tool and also the time data with the customer general analytics. So there is something not in workspace analysis and this is what they're addressing in customer general analytics. Which is good.
Read full review
Tableau
  • 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
Adobe
We've found multiple uses for Adobe Analytics in our organization. Each department analyzes the data they need and creates actionables based off of that data. For E-Commerce, we're constantly using data to analyze user engagement, website performance and evaluate ROI.
Read full review
Tableau
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
Adobe
Sometimes the processing times are very long. I have had reports or dashboards time out multiple times during presentations. It could be improved. It is understandable since there is a huge data set that the tool is processing before showing anything, however for a company that large they should invest in optimizing processing times.
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Tableau
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.
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Reliability and Availability
Adobe
I do not ever recall a time when Adobe Analytics was unavailable to me to use in the 8 or so years I have been an end user of the product. My most-used day-to-day analytics tool Parse.ly however, generally has a multiple hours planned offline maintenance every two to four weeks, and sometimes has issues collecting realtime analytics that last anywhere between 15 minutes to an hour, and happen anywhere between 1 to 5 times a month.
Read full review
Tableau
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.
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Performance
Adobe
Again, no issues here. Performance within the day updates hourly. other reports are updated overnight and available to access by the next morning. Pages load quickly, the site navigates easily and the UX is quite straightforward to get command over. On this front, I give Adobe kudos for building a great experience to work within
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Tableau
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
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Support Rating
Adobe
I barely see any communication from Adobe Analytics. The content on the web is also not that great or easy to read. I would recommend a better communication about the product and the new addons information to come to its user by a better mean.
Read full review
Tableau
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
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In-Person Training
Adobe
It was a one-day training several years ago that cost the organization several thousand dollars. There were only about 10 people in the training class. Adobe tried to cram so much information into that one-day class that none of our users felt like they really learned anything helpful from the experience. Follow-up training is too expensive
Read full review
Tableau
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
Adobe
The online training for Adobe SiteCatalyst consists of short product videos. These are ok, but only go so far. For a while Adobe charged a fee for this, but recently made these available for free. There are many great blog posts that help users learn how to apply the product as well.
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Tableau
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
Adobe
One of the benefits and obstacles to successfully using Adobe Analytics is a great / more accurate implementation, make sure your analytics group is intimate with the details of the implementation and that the requirements are driven by the business.
Read full review
Tableau
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.
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Alternatives Considered
Adobe
I think Adobe's been around longer as a product but Tealium, from when I did research, it has auto-tagging. So one of my biggest pet peeves is when I'm rolling out new features, and whether it's an app or a website, is that I have to go speak with our metrics team or tagging team and we have to come up with these different strategies. Okay, how are we gonna tag it? What are we going to name it? It just seems like a lot of wasted time in my opinion. I want to track everything. I want to know every single thing these people are doing. We shouldn't have to have this conversation if we tag this, you might not have time to tag this right away for MVP. It's like that to me right now. That shouldn't even be a conversation. I should be able to release a feature, I should be able to just automatically go pull reports on that. And just figure out exactly what they were doing.
Read full review
Tableau
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.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Adobe
Adobe Analytics is relatively affordable compared to other tools, given it provides a range of flexible variables to use that I have not found in any other tools so far. It is worth investing in if your company is medium or large-sized and brings a steady flow of revenue. For small companies, it can be overpriced.
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Tableau
No answers on this topic
Scalability
Adobe
My organization uses Adobe Analytics across a multitude of brand portfolios. Each brand has multiple websites, mobile apps and some even have connected TV apps/channels on Roku and similar devices. Adobe can handle the multitude of properties that have simple, small(ish) websites and the larger brand properties that include web, mobile and connected TVs/OTT devices.
Each of those larger brands has multiple categories and channels to keep track of. We can see the data by channel/device or aggregate all the data together. This gives our executive teams the full picture and the departmental teams the view they need to see their own performance.
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Tableau
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.
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Professional Services
Adobe
The professional services team is one of the best teams for complex adobe analytics implementations, especially for clients having multiple website and mobile applications. However, the cost of professional services is a bit high which makes few clients opt out of it, but for large scale implementations they are very helpful
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Tableau
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Adobe
  • I like to think it's positive. It's a very steep learning curve, so we do face a lot of challenges with adoption inside of the companies. My team and I evangelize this and also who's in charge of data and advanced analytics, but it's very hard to leverage that with typical business analysis people. These are people who live their life in Excel and SQL and Power BI. They just use this very occasionally and by only looking at that sort of aggregate data, they miss out on behavior and what actually happens in execution. And because it's such a steep learning curve, we do have a challenge pushing it in there.
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Tableau
  • 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

Adobe Analytics Screenshots

Screenshot of the Alert Builder in Adobe Analytics.Screenshot of an Analysis Workspace Training Tutorial in Adobe AnalyticsScreenshot of Attribution in Adobe AnalyticsScreenshot of the Segment Builder in Adobe AnalyticsScreenshot of Anomaly Detection in Adobe AnalyticsScreenshot of the Alert Builder in Adobe Analytics