Grafana is a data visualization tool developed by Grafana Labs in New York. It is available open source, managed (Grafana Cloud), or via an enterprise edition with enhanced features. Grafana has pluggable data source model and comes bundled with support for popular time series databases like Graphite. It also has built-in support for cloud monitoring vendors like Amazon Cloudwatch, Microsoft Azure and SQL databases like MySQL. Grafana can combine data from many places into a single dashboard.
$0
Tableau Desktop
Score 8.4 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
Grafana
Tableau Desktop
Editions & Modules
Grafana Cloud - Pro
$8
per month up to 1 active user
Grafana Cloud - Free
Free
10k metrics + 50GB logs + 50GB traces up to 3 active users
Grafana Cloud - Advanced
Volume Discounts
custom data usage custom active users
Grafana - Enterprise Stack
Custom Pricing
Tableau Creator License
$115
per month (billed annually) per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Grafana
Tableau Desktop
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
All 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
Grafana
Tableau Desktop
Features
Grafana
Tableau Desktop
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.3
7 Ratings
3% above category average
Tableau Desktop
8.4
175 Ratings
3% above category average
Pixel Perfect reports
8.07 Ratings
8.0145 Ratings
Customizable dashboards
8.47 Ratings
9.1174 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates
8.47 Ratings
8.1151 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.0
6 Ratings
3% above category average
Tableau Desktop
8.3
172 Ratings
3% above category average
Drill-down analysis
8.06 Ratings
8.5167 Ratings
Formatting capabilities
8.46 Ratings
8.4170 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages
7.76 Ratings
8.0126 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration
8.05 Ratings
8.5165 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.4
6 Ratings
3% above category average
Tableau Desktop
8.3
166 Ratings
1% above category average
Publish to Web
8.26 Ratings
8.0155 Ratings
Publish to PDF
8.66 Ratings
8.0154 Ratings
Report Versioning
8.26 Ratings
8.3120 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling
8.46 Ratings
8.5128 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers
8.66 Ratings
8.878 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Just about any organization with more than one server and more than one cluster as it scales very well. Configuration of the application takes time and finesse to fine tune to where the balance of load time and getting data quickly meets. The plugins add load time but fine tuning for the application to meet demand needs nailed down at implementation
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).
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.
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 infinitely flexible. If you can imagine it, Grafana can almost certainly do it. Usability may be in the eye of the beholder however, as there is time needed to curate the experience and get the dashboards customized to how it makes sense to you. I know one thing they are working on are more templates, based on data sources
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
Grafana blows Nagios out of the water when it comes to customization. The ability to feed almost any data source makes it very versatile and the cost is great.
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.
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.