What users are saying about
97 Ratings
<a href='https://www.trustradius.com/static/about-trustradius-scoring' target='_blank' rel='nofollow noopener'>trScore algorithm: Learn more.</a>Score 9.1 out of 100
Based on 97 reviews and ratings
834 Ratings
<a href='https://www.trustradius.com/static/about-trustradius-scoring' target='_blank' rel='nofollow noopener'>trScore algorithm: Learn more.</a>Score 8 out of 100
Based on 834 reviews and ratings
Feature Set Ratings
BI Standard Reporting

Apache Kafka
Feature Set Not Supported
N/A
8.5
Tableau Server
85%
Tableau Server ranks higher in 3/3 features
Tableau Server ranks higher in 3/3 features
Pixel Perfect reports
N/A
0 Ratings
9.1
91%
29 Ratings
Customizable dashboards
N/A
0 Ratings
8.6
86%
92 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates
N/A
0 Ratings
7.7
77%
79 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting

Apache Kafka
Feature Set Not Supported
N/A
8.2
Tableau Server
82%
Tableau Server ranks higher in 4/4 features
Tableau Server ranks higher in 4/4 features
Drill-down analysis
N/A
0 Ratings
8.4
84%
93 Ratings
Formatting capabilities
N/A
0 Ratings
6.2
62%
91 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages
N/A
0 Ratings
8.6
86%
58 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration
N/A
0 Ratings
9.4
94%
87 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling

Apache Kafka
Feature Set Not Supported
N/A
8.5
Tableau Server
85%
Tableau Server ranks higher in 5/5 features
Tableau Server ranks higher in 5/5 features
Publish to Web
N/A
0 Ratings
9.9
99%
83 Ratings
Publish to PDF
N/A
0 Ratings
9.2
92%
82 Ratings
Report Versioning
N/A
0 Ratings
9.0
90%
68 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling
N/A
0 Ratings
9.2
92%
75 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers
N/A
0 Ratings
5.1
51%
9 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization

Apache Kafka
Feature Set Not Supported
N/A
8.3
Tableau Server
83%
Tableau Server ranks higher in 3/3 features
Tableau Server ranks higher in 3/3 features
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
N/A
0 Ratings
8.7
87%
84 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
N/A
0 Ratings
8.7
87%
83 Ratings
Predictive Analytics
N/A
0 Ratings
7.5
75%
62 Ratings
Access Control and Security

Apache Kafka
Feature Set Not Supported
N/A
8.2
Tableau Server
82%
Tableau Server ranks higher in 4/4 features
Tableau Server ranks higher in 4/4 features
Multi-User Support (named login)
N/A
0 Ratings
8.2
82%
91 Ratings
Role-Based Security Model
N/A
0 Ratings
8.2
82%
88 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
N/A
0 Ratings
8.0
80%
90 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)
N/A
0 Ratings
8.4
84%
60 Ratings
Mobile Capabilities

Apache Kafka
Feature Set Not Supported
N/A
7.8
Tableau Server
78%
Tableau Server ranks higher in 3/3 features
Tableau Server ranks higher in 3/3 features
Responsive Design for Web Access
N/A
0 Ratings
6.7
67%
75 Ratings
Mobile Application
N/A
0 Ratings
8.0
80%
60 Ratings
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
N/A
0 Ratings
8.6
86%
66 Ratings
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding

Apache Kafka
Feature Set Not Supported
N/A
7.5
Tableau Server
75%
Tableau Server ranks higher in 6/6 features
Tableau Server ranks higher in 6/6 features
REST API
N/A
0 Ratings
9.3
93%
39 Ratings
Javascript API
N/A
0 Ratings
9.6
96%
36 Ratings
iFrames
N/A
0 Ratings
10.0
100%
39 Ratings
Java API
N/A
0 Ratings
5.5
55%
7 Ratings
Themeable User Interface (UI)
N/A
0 Ratings
6.1
61%
9 Ratings
Customizable Platform (Open Source)
N/A
0 Ratings
4.6
46%
7 Ratings
Attribute Ratings
- Apache Kafka is rated higher in 3 areas: Likelihood to Recommend, Usability, Support Rating
- Tableau Server is rated higher in 1 area: Likelihood to Renew
Likelihood to Recommend

9.3
Apache Kafka
93%
13 Ratings
7.8
Tableau Server
78%
109 Ratings
Likelihood to Renew

9.0
Apache Kafka
90%
1 Rating
10.0
Tableau Server
100%
20 Ratings
Usability

10.0
Apache Kafka
100%
1 Rating
7.6
Tableau Server
76%
16 Ratings
Availability

Apache Kafka
N/A
0 Ratings
9.0
Tableau Server
90%
18 Ratings
Performance

Apache Kafka
N/A
0 Ratings
8.1
Tableau Server
81%
16 Ratings
Support Rating

8.6
Apache Kafka
86%
7 Ratings
7.2
Tableau Server
72%
29 Ratings
In-Person Training

Apache Kafka
N/A
0 Ratings
8.0
Tableau Server
80%
4 Ratings
Online Training

Apache Kafka
N/A
0 Ratings
9.0
Tableau Server
90%
9 Ratings
Implementation Rating

Apache Kafka
N/A
0 Ratings
9.1
Tableau Server
91%
26 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 Server is well suited for a data warehouse build and handling big data. Tableau data aggregation, transformation, clustering capability is powerful and easy to implement. The choice of charts and visualisation tools is outstanding. Customisation and dynamic data visualisation capability is superb. The user interface takes some time getting used to.

Verified User
Project Manager in Information Technology
Financial Services Company, 11-50 employeesPros
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
- The Kafka Tool is a community-made Java application that looks and feels from the past century.
- Logging can be confusing. This certainly shows when we have to do troubleshooting.
- Hybrid scenarios - pub/sub, but there are services in and outside a Kubernetes cluster. Then there are a ~3 options, but only 2 (the harder ones) are production-safe.
DevOps Team Leader
CognyteInformation Technology & Services, 1001-5000 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
Pricing Details
Apache Kafka
General
Free Trial
—Free/Freemium Version
—Premium Consulting/Integration Services
—Entry-level set up fee?
No
Starting Price
—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
Starting Price
$12 Per User Per Month
Tableau Server Editions & Modules
Edition
Creator | $70.001 |
---|---|
Explorer | $35.001 |
Viewer | $12.001 |
- Per User Per Month
Additional Pricing Details
—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
Apache Kafka 10.0
Based on 1 answer
Apache Kafka is highly recommended to develop loosely coupled, real-time processing applications. Also, Apache Kafka provides property based configuration. Producer, Consumer and broker contain their own separate property file
Senior Software Engineer
Accion LabsInformation Technology & Services, 1001-5000 employees
Tableau Server
Tableau Server 7.6
Based on 16 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 18 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 16 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 8.6
Based on 7 answers
Support for Apache Kafka (if willing to pay) is available from Confluent that includes the same time that created Kafka at Linkedin so they know this software in and out. Moreover, Apache Kafka is well known and best practices documents and deployment scenarios are easily available for download. For example, from eBay, Linkedin, Uber, and NYTimes.

Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology
Airlines/Aviation Company, 51-200 employeesTableau Server
Tableau Server 7.2
Based on 29 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 26 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
We really needed to get away from using a SQL database to act as a queue for processing records, so a new solution was needed. Kafka is a leading software application initially designed for queuing messages which is essentially what we were looking for. It has a great user community and is used across the industry. We also use and trust several other products from Confluent which helped seal the decision.
Senior System Engineer
NetDocumentsComputer Software, 201-500 employees
Tableau Server
Today, if my shop is largely Microsoft-centric, I would be hard pressed to choose a product other than Power BI. Tableau was the visualization leader for years, but Microsoft has caught up with them in many areas, and surpassed them in some. Its ability to source, transform, and model data is superior to Tableau. Tableau still has the lead in some visualizations, but Power BI's rise is evidenced by its ever-increasing position in the leadership section of the Gartner Magic Quadrant.

Verified User
Professional in Information Technology
Architecture & Planning Company, 1001-5000 employeesReturn on Investment
Apache Kafka
- Kafka makes the messaging itself more reliable (as it has the distributed storage by itself and the message doesn't disappear even after it has been consumed).
- Kafka can support a much higher volume use case, without too much extra pressure on the existed hardware.

Verified User
Strategist in Information Technology
Package/Freight Delivery Company, 10,001+ 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 employees