What users are saying about
59 Ratings
<a href='https://www.trustradius.com/static/about-trustradius-scoring' target='_blank' rel='nofollow noopener noreferrer'>trScore algorithm: Learn more.</a>Score 8.9 out of 100
Based on 59 reviews and ratings
750 Ratings
<a href='https://www.trustradius.com/static/about-trustradius-scoring' target='_blank' rel='nofollow noopener noreferrer'>trScore algorithm: Learn more.</a>Score 7.9 out of 100
Based on 750 reviews and ratings
Likelihood to Recommend
Apache Kafka
Despite the disadvantages I list, I really believe that Kafka is the right choice whenever you need a queueing or message broker system. Kafka is way too battle-tested and scales too well to ever not consider it. The only exception is if your use case requires many, many small topics. Also, Kafka doesn't support delay queues out of the box and so you will need to "hack" it through special code on the consumer side.

Verified User
Engineer in Engineering
Internet Company, 201-500 employeesTableau Server
Tableau may be well suited to non-Microsoft shops. Its methodologies, internal management, and overall approach seem geared more toward Oracle/Java shops. It also does require a decent amount of care and feeding. Backups, upgrades, etc., tend to be cumbersome and require some level of IT knowledge, despite how the product is often sold. Smaller shops that wish to pursue Tableau may be better off leveraging their SaaS offerings.

Verified User
Professional in Information Technology
Architecture & Planning Company, 1001-5000 employeesFeature Rating Comparison
BI Standard Reporting
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
7.4
Pixel Perfect reports
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
9.1
Customizable dashboards
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
7.2
Report Formatting Templates
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
5.7
Ad-hoc Reporting
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
6.4
Drill-down analysis
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
6.6
Formatting capabilities
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
6.5
Integration with R or other statistical packages
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
5.9
Report sharing and collaboration
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
6.6
Report Output and Scheduling
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
6.5
Publish to Web
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
7.3
Publish to PDF
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
6.6
Report Versioning
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
6.6
Report Delivery Scheduling
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
6.7
Delivery to Remote Servers
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
5.1
Data Discovery and Visualization
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
6.5
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
7.3
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
7.2
Predictive Analytics
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
5.1
Access Control and Security
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
7.2
Multi-User Support (named login)
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
7.0
Role-Based Security Model
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
7.4
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
7.1
Single Sign-On (SSO)
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
7.3
Mobile Capabilities
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
6.7
Responsive Design for Web Access
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
6.4
Dedicated iOS Application
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
7.0
Dedicated Android Application
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
6.9
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
6.5
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
5.7
REST API
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
6.1
Javascript API
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
6.3
iFrames
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
5.5
Java API
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
5.6
Themeable User Interface (UI)
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
6.1
Customizable Platform (Open Source)
Apache Kafka
—
Tableau Server
4.6
Pros
Apache Kafka
- Apache Kafka is able to handle a large number of I/Os (writes) using 3-4 cheap servers.
- It scales very well over large workloads and can handle extreme-scale deployments (eg. Linkedin with 300 billion user events each day).
- The same Kafka setup can be used as a messaging bus, storage system or a log aggregator making it easy to maintain as one system feeding multiple applications.

Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology
Airlines/Aviation Company, 51-200 employeesTableau Server
- It's good at doing what it is designed for: accessing visualizations without having to download and open a workbook in Tableau Desktop. The latter would be a very inefficient method for sharing our metrics, so I am glad that we have Tableau Server to serve this function.
- Publishing to Tableau Server is quick and easy. Just a few clicks from Tableau Desktop and a few seconds of publishing through an average speed network, and the new visualizations are live!
- Seeing details on who has viewed the visualization and when. This is something particularly useful to me for trying to drive adoption of some new pages, so I really appreciate the granularity provided in Tableau Server

Verified User
Program Manager in Customer Service
Computer Software Company, 10,001+ employeesCons
Apache Kafka
- Still a bit inmature, some clients have required recoding in the last few versions
- New feaures coming very fast, several upgrades a year may be required
- Not many commercial companies provide support
Global Technology Centre - Middleware
ProdubanFinancial Services, 10,001+ employees
Tableau Server
- Tableau Server has had some issue handling some of our larger data sets. Our extract refreshes fail intermittently with no obvious error that we can fix
- Tableau Server has been hard to work with before they launched their new Rest API, which is also a little tricky to work with
Data Engineer
QualtricsComputer Software, 1001-5000 employees
Likelihood to Renew
Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka 9.0
Based on 1 answer
Kafka is quickly becoming core product of the organization, indeed it is replacing older messaging systems. No better alternatives found yet
Global Technology Centre - Middleware
ProdubanFinancial Services, 10,001+ employees
Tableau Server
Tableau Server 10.0
Based on 20 answers
It simply is used all the time by more and more people.Migrating to something else would involve lots of work and lots of training.The renewal fee being fair, it simply isn't worth migrating to a different tool for now.
Consultant BI senior/Administrateur - spécialité SAS
Prospective MG inc.Telecommunications, 10,001+ employees
Usability
Apache Kafka
No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic
Tableau Server
Tableau Server 9.0
Based on 11 answers
Tableau Server is unbeatable at creating easy to use, interactive dashboards for busy executives. The software also saves time for the busy analyst that is tired of always using Excel. Tableau Server is a head and shoulders improvement over Excel.
Owner, previous CEO
Econometric StudiosFinancial Services, 10,001+ employees
Reliability and Availability
Apache Kafka
No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic
Tableau Server
Tableau Server 9.0
Based on 9 answers
Our instance of Tableau Server was hosted on premises (I believe all instances are) so if there were any outages it was normally due to scheduled maintenance on our end. If the Tableau server ever went down, a quick restart solved most issues

Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology
Management Consulting Company, 10,001+ employeesPerformance
Apache Kafka
No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic
Tableau Server
Tableau Server 8.1
Based on 8 answers
While there are definitely cases where a user can do things that will make a particular worksheet or dashboard run slowly, overall the performance is extremely fast. The user experience of exploratory analysis particularly shines, there's nothing out there with the polish of Tableau.
Quality Management Data Analyst
Southern Maine Medical CenterHospital & Health Care, 1001-5000 employees
Support Rating
Apache Kafka
Apache Kafka 8.8
Based on 6 answers
We are using the Apache open source version of Kafka. The community is a good place to ask questions. and we can get most of our problems resolved there.

Verified User
Strategist in Information Technology
Package/Freight Delivery Company, 10,001+ employeesTableau Server
Tableau Server 9.1
Based on 12 answers
We have consistently had highly satisfactory results every time we've reached out for help. Our contractor, used for Tableau server maintenance and dashboard development is very technically skilled. When he hits a roadblock on how to do something with Tableau, the support staff have provided timely and useful guidance. He frequently compares it to Cognos and says that while Cognos has capabilities Tableau doesn't, the bottom line value for us is a no-brainer
Program Manager
Department of Health & HospitalsGovernment Administration, 1001-5000 employees
In-Person Training
Apache Kafka
No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic
Tableau Server
Tableau Server 8.0
Based on 4 answers
In our case, they hired a private third party consultant to train our dept. It was extremely boring and felt like it dragged on. Everything I learned was self taught so I was not really paying attention. But I do think that you can easily spend a week on the tool and go over every nook and cranny. We only had the consultant in for a day or two.
BI Analyst
Kaiser Foundation Health PlanUtilities, 10,001+ employees
Online Training
Apache Kafka
No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic
Tableau Server
Tableau Server 9.0
Based on 9 answers
The Tableau website is full of videos that you can follow at your own pace. As a very small company with a Tableau install, access to these free resources was incredibly useful to allowing me to implement Tableau to its potential in a reasonable and proportionate manner.
MD
InterWorksComputer Software, 11-50 employees
Implementation Rating
Apache Kafka
No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic
Tableau Server
Tableau Server 9.1
Based on 13 answers
Implementation was over the phone with the vendor, and did not go particularly well. Again, think this was our fault as our integration and IT oversight was poor, and we made errors. Would they have happened had a vendor been onsite? Not sure, probably not, but we probably wouldn't have paid for that either

Verified User
Director in Information Technology
Leisure, Travel & Tourism Company, 1001-5000 employeesAlternatives Considered
Apache Kafka
I would only use RabbitMQ over Kafka when you need to have delay queues or tons of small topics/queues around.I don't know too much about Pulsar - currently evaluating it - but it's supposed to have the same or better throughput while allowing for tons of queues. Stay tuned - I might update this review after we finish evaluating Pulsar. It's much less battle-tested though.

Verified User
Engineer in Engineering
Internet Company, 201-500 employeesTableau Server
We used and still are using IBM Cognos for business intelligence purposes. It is good for use as a data infrastructure and analytic framework, rather than a BI toolkit, but Tableau is replacing Cognos fast. We used D3.js for a few proofs of concept visualization and dashboarding, but those efforts stopped because of productivity and maintenance problems.

Verified User
Project Manager in Research & Development
Hospital & Health Care Company, 10,001+ employeesReturn on Investment
Apache Kafka
- Positive impact on ROI since now we can use one large deployment of Apache Kafka that can be used for multiple scenarios ( storage systems, log aggregate, messaging queue ).
- It is open-source so there are no licenses or subscription fees reducing the cost of deployment.
- Data can now be ingested and analyzed in real-time making it easy to fine-tune the customer experience and decision making for internal IT.

Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology
Airlines/Aviation Company, 51-200 employeesTableau Server
- Tableau does take dedicated FTE to create and analyze the data. It's too complex (and powerful) a product not to have someone dedicated to developing with it.
- There are some significant setup for the server product.
- Once sever setup is complete, it's largely "fire and forget" until an update is necessary. The server update process is cumbersome.

Verified User
Executive in Information Technology
Education Management Company, 1001-5000 employeesScreenshots
Apache Kafka
—Pricing Details
Apache Kafka
General
Free Trial
—Free/Freemium Version
—Premium Consulting/Integration Services
—Entry-level set up fee?
No
Apache Kafka Editions & Modules
—
Additional Pricing Details
—Tableau Server
General
Free Trial
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
—Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Entry-level set up fee?
No
Tableau Server Editions & Modules
Edition
Creator | $70.001 |
---|---|
Explorer | $35.001 |
Viewer | $12.001 |
- Per User Per Month