Adobe Analytics vs. Tableau Desktop

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Adobe Analytics
Score 8.2 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 8.5 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.
$1,380
per year (purchased via a Creator license)
Pricing
Adobe AnalyticsTableau Desktop
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Tableau Creator License
$115
per month (billed annually) per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Adobe AnalyticsTableau Desktop
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesYes
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional DetailsAll pricing plans are billed annually. A Creator license includes Tableau Desktop, Tableau Prep Builder, and Tableau Pulse. Discounts sometimes available for volume.
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
Adobe Analytics far surpasses Google Analytics in the following arenas: journey analysis. Adobe Analytics very clearly portrays user journey data unlike any other web analytics tool.
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 …
Features
Adobe AnalyticsTableau Desktop
Web Analytics
Comparison of Web Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Analytics
8.0
98 Ratings
1% below category average
Tableau Desktop
-
Ratings
Lead Conversion Tracking7.589 Ratings00 Ratings
Bounce Rate Measurement7.795 Ratings00 Ratings
Device and Browser Reporting8.496 Ratings00 Ratings
Pageview Tracking8.794 Ratings00 Ratings
Event Tracking8.594 Ratings00 Ratings
Reporting in real-time6.992 Ratings00 Ratings
Referral Source Tracking8.092 Ratings00 Ratings
Customizable Dashboards8.393 Ratings00 Ratings
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Analytics
-
Ratings
Tableau Desktop
8.4
175 Ratings
3% above category average
Pixel Perfect reports00 Ratings8.0145 Ratings
Customizable dashboards00 Ratings9.2174 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates00 Ratings8.1151 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Analytics
-
Ratings
Tableau Desktop
8.4
172 Ratings
5% above category average
Drill-down analysis00 Ratings8.5167 Ratings
Formatting capabilities00 Ratings8.4170 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages00 Ratings8.0126 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration00 Ratings8.5165 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
166 Ratings
2% above category average
Publish to Web00 Ratings8.0155 Ratings
Publish to PDF00 Ratings8.1154 Ratings
Report Versioning00 Ratings8.4120 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling00 Ratings8.5128 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers00 Ratings8.878 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Analytics
-
Ratings
Tableau Desktop
8.3
164 Ratings
4% above category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)00 Ratings8.5162 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization00 Ratings8.5156 Ratings
Predictive Analytics00 Ratings8.6131 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining00 Ratings7.57 Ratings
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Analytics
-
Ratings
Tableau Desktop
9.0
149 Ratings
6% above category average
Multi-User Support (named login)00 Ratings9.0145 Ratings
Role-Based Security Model00 Ratings9.0125 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)00 Ratings8.7136 Ratings
Report-Level Access Control00 Ratings9.010 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)00 Ratings9.283 Ratings
Mobile Capabilities
Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Analytics
-
Ratings
Tableau Desktop
7.9
141 Ratings
2% above category average
Responsive Design for Web Access00 Ratings8.7130 Ratings
Mobile Application00 Ratings7.4101 Ratings
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile00 Ratings7.4122 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
7.7
67 Ratings
0% below category average
REST API00 Ratings8.259 Ratings
Javascript API00 Ratings7.653 Ratings
iFrames00 Ratings6.751 Ratings
Java API00 Ratings8.148 Ratings
Themeable User Interface (UI)00 Ratings7.254 Ratings
Customizable Platform (Open Source)00 Ratings8.248 Ratings
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User Ratings
Adobe AnalyticsTableau Desktop
Likelihood to Recommend
8.3
(228 ratings)
8.8
(203 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.5
(95 ratings)
7.5
(41 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(80 ratings)
8.3
(73 ratings)
Availability
8.1
(12 ratings)
10.0
(11 ratings)
Performance
8.0
(11 ratings)
8.0
(10 ratings)
Support Rating
3.6
(41 ratings)
1.0
(57 ratings)
In-Person Training
1.1
(5 ratings)
9.4
(4 ratings)
Online Training
7.0
(5 ratings)
8.0
(5 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.1
(10 ratings)
8.0
(34 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(3 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)
9.0
(4 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
Honestly, because Adobe Analytics is so customizable, I found that it is very well-suited for almost any type of web digital experience tracking of behavioral analytics. It has a very robust mech architecture for any type of e-commerce platform. But it is extensible and is easily adaptable to other circumstances. For example, in our university situation, we've been able to use it for student portal experience tracking, how well they are interacting, interfacing with our internal sites, and how well they are working with our task submission processes. But it does a great job of managing all aspects of the key journeys, especially from a marketing perspective. So while it might not be as out-of-the-box for some of those other alternative use cases outside of marketing, it's extensible and customizable enough that it's worked really well and met our needs.
Read full review
Tableau
The best scenario is definitely to collect data from several sources and create dedicated dashboards for specific recipients. However, I miss the possibility of explaining these reports in more detail. Sometimes, we order a report, and after half a year, we don't remember the meaning of some data (I know it's our fault as an organization, but the tool could force better practices).
Read full review
Pros
Adobe
  • Within my role of advertising, I can come in, and I can see I'm paying for visitors, paying to drive people to the website. So I can see the differences in my different traffic sources, whether that's a Google search campaign or a Facebook social campaign. I can measure the quality of that traffic and see what they're doing, whether they're bouncing right away and leaving the website, or spending more or less time on the website. And whether they're taking the actions. My ad campaign is focused on filling out forms, and ultimately, that's it. Just measure and see if my campaigns are successful or not.
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
  • I think the biggest room for improvement is performance. When I go in certain times of the day or for certain clients, it's slow and it won't load the reports that I need. And as a result, needing to answer a question where you normally have the expectation of it being a near real-time answer that you get when you have to wait for reports to load or you have to wait because the reports can't load at all. It's a really unfortunate thing. It's a big problem actually. So I'd say that's one area of improvement. It's just improving the performance of the reports so that they'll load consistently all the time quickly and effectively.
Read full review
Tableau
  • Pricing should be more user-friendly and usage-driven
  • Making edits to the production reports is fairly tough and has a vast scope of additional capabilities
  • Tableau Desktop should be able to differentiate itself from the Tableau server else there is no major meaning of two different products being offered
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Likelihood to Renew
Adobe
We need it to discover threats long before they become a loophole in the security ecosystem. Also, it is very much compliant with customer standards and expectations. It provides marketing intelligence through in-depth analysis. Overall, a very good product to gain customer attention and thereby improve market
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
It is necessary to have a minimum knowledge on tracking tools so you can use the tool on full performance. It is not an introduction tool, so please bear that in mind. Once you got the knowledge you just need a small training on how to create your custom reports, where to find the components you need and how to add them to your dashboard. Then you share your report or create a rule for periodic sharing and it's done. Finally, if you have a lot of data stored the tool might be a little slower but that's ok.
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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.
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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
Support for Adobe Analytics is ok, it used to be worse years ago. Now, the technology team at Adobe is way more knowledgeable on the product itself as well as the implementation. They also study your custom implementation and have good knowledge of where your company stands. Dedicated support is something worth considering.
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Tableau
Tableau support has been extremely responsive and willing to help with all of our requests. They have assisted with creating advanced analysis and many different types of custom icons, data formatting, formulas, and actions embedded into graphs. Tableau offers a weekly presentation of features and assists with internal company projects.
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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
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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.
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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
I think the training was good overall, but it was maybe stating the obvious things that a tech savvy young engineer would be able to pick up themselves too. However, the example work books were good and Tableau web community has helped me with many problems
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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.
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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
We evaluated and we currently use Mixpanel and we have Google Analytics on a couple of our properties. And honestly, once you get the hang of the Adobe Analytics workspace, the other products really don't stack up against it because the segmentation and the ability to create reports pretty rapidly are invaluable.
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Tableau
I have used Power BI as well, the pricing is better, and also training costs or certifications are not that high. Since there is python integration in Power BI where I can use data cleaning and visualizing libraries and also some machine learning models. I can import my python scripts and create a visualization on processed data.
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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
  • Adobe Analytics impacts nearly every aspect of a billion plus dollar revenue eCommerce business. From measuring the impact of new build features to marketing campaigns.
  • We are saving substantial money and resource effort by consolidating all of our properties to Adobe Analytics from alternative solutions, at which point we will finally be able to report on Total Digital, rather than disparate reports.
  • We support experimentation on every platform and the performance is only known through Adobe Analytics tagging.
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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.
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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