BIME Analytics (discontinued) vs Tableau Desktop

Well suited if you need to create multiple reports and send them out easily to multiple clients. It is not well suited if you need a lot of data sources. It slows the product way down and makes reports take forever to load.

Tableau Desktop is better for data analysis and visualization. Its advanced visualization features helped us better understand our business and customer demographics. We use Tableau Desktop to track our team’s progress. Real-time analyses and interactive dashboards are helpful for monitoring data. We can now create and share insights in ways we couldn’t before. It’s easy to put faith in and use these insights. Tableau Desktop can compare data from previous years with weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual comparisons. It assists businesses in identifying the best and least-sold products. However, this requires expensive licenses and skilled personnel, which small businesses cannot afford.

• Easy to create reports
• Easy to edit
• Easy to customize

• 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.

• It was SLOW!
• Some of the graphs can be confusing
• Not really set up for a single vertical company.

• 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

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.

It is a good tool for creating beautiful visualizations and sharing dashboards. It does offer a variety of features and also making interactive dashboards. It is easy to learn and create custom visualizations really fast. It does offer good API connectivity to gather data. But it lacks the structure for data cleaning and processing.

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.

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

The Tableau Desktop's support team has been very helpful and tend to response very quickly. After all you have paid very premium price for the product and it goes to the services. This makes using the tool much easier for these who doesn't have such experience to get help quickly.

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.

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

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.

BIME was more accurate with sending out reports than RavenTools, and had a lot more customizable options. GDS has suited us well though, because it integrates with a lot of different platforms and allows us to deliver our reporting for no additional cost.

Tableau hands-down wins based upon functionality, interoperability with a wide variety of enterprise-class data connections, end-user support, and quality of visualizations. Tableau Desktop offers a substantially more robust, refined, and mature product. It became quickly apparent that there was no real comparison. For applications that need fast, accurate analytics using a wide portfolio of underlying data sources, Tableau Desktop is the clear winner.

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.

• 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.