Grist vs. Tableau Desktop

This is well suited to someone (or a team) who are technically minded and have a dataset that they need to be able to use in many ways. It's less appropriate for a team who isn't technically minded and/or don't have the data they need to manipulate. It would be useful for things that you could use a database or spreadsheet for such as CRM, Advertising database, Business tracking, Health tracking etc.

Incentivized

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).

Incentivized

• Provides amazing customer service, help, examples, and explains what they are having you do
• The layout is easy

• 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.

Incentivized

• Making the user permissions more obvious on how to use them - They are highly adaptable, but hard to understand how to use them
• Small changes such as auto colouring the choices/toggles options and being able to edit them once set.
• Being able to copy the formatting from one column to the next

Incentivized

• Pricing should be more user-friendly and usage-driven
• Making edits to the production reports is fairly tough and has a vast scope of additional capabilities
• Tableau Desktop should be able to differentiate itself from the Tableau server else there is no major meaning of two different products being offered

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Grist is easier to use, faster, and loads quicker with heavy data.

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.

Incentivized

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.

• It's saved a lot of time in both creating an advertising database and managing it week to week effectively. I had previously created in others that haven't worked, and this does, saving me a good 1 hour weekly, and 5 hours or more each time I had problems with the last ones
• Being able to stay on track with this has meant I'm following up at the right time (advertisers) and keeping a professional manner and not losing business due to missed communication
• Saving me $ from buying a program like Access (or Airtable monthly) and then the learning curve that that has. This has a much easier learning curve to say the least.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized