What users are saying about

Apache Kafka vs Tableau Server

Apache Kafka
97 Ratings
Tableau Server
834 Ratings

Apache Kafka

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

Tableau Server

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.

    Read full review

    Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Verified User
    View all 13 answers on this topic

    Tableau 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.

    Read full review

    Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Verified User
    View all 109 answers on this topic

    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.

    Read full review

    Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Verified User
    View all 13 answers on this topic

    Tableau 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

    Read full review

    Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Verified User
    View all 109 answers on this topic

    Cons

    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.

    Read full review

    Borislav Traykov | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Borislav Traykov
    View all 13 answers on this topic

    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

    Read full review

    Jacob Rasmussen | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Jacob Rasmussen
    View all 109 answers on this topic

    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
    1. 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

    Read full review

    Juan Francisco Tavira | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Juan Francisco Tavira
    View all 1 answers on this topic

    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.

    Read full review

    Mathieu Gaouette | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Mathieu Gaouette
    View all 20 answers on this topic

    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

    Read full review

    Jimesh V Shah | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Jimesh V Shah
    View all 1 answers on this topic

    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.

    Read full review

    Thomas Young | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Thomas Young
    View all 16 answers on this topic

    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

    Read full review

    Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Verified User
    View all 18 answers on this topic

    Performance

    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.

    Read full review

    Jonathan Drummey | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Jonathan Drummey
    View all 16 answers on this topic

    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.

    Read full review

    Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Verified User
    View all 7 answers on this topic

    Tableau 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

    Read full review

    Henry Yennie | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Henry Yennie
    View all 29 answers on this topic

    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.

    Read full review

    Mashhood Syed | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Mashhood Syed
    View all 4 answers on this topic

    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.

    Read full review

    Mel Stephenson | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Mel Stephenson
    View all 9 answers on this topic

    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

    Read full review

    Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Verified User
    View all 26 answers on this topic

    Alternatives 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.

    Read full review

    Tyler Twitchell | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Tyler Twitchell
    View all 13 answers on this topic

    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.

    Read full review

    Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Verified User
    View all 109 answers on this topic

    Return 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.

    Read full review

    Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Verified User
    View all 13 answers on this topic

    Tableau 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.

    Read full review

    Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Verified User
    View all 109 answers on this topic

    Screenshots

    Apache Kafka

    —

    Add comparison