Grow, from Epicor since the March 2022 acquisition, is a business intelligence software that is designed to empower businesses to become data-driven and accelerate growth by aligning team objectives and inspiring strategic decisions.
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Tableau Server
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Tableau Server allows Tableau Desktop users to publish dashboards to a central server to be shared across their organizations. The product is designed to facilitate collaboration across the organization. It can be deployed on a server in the data center, or it can be deployed on a public cloud.
Grow.com is well suited if you have a lot of data or client data to manage. If you do not have tons of data, there are other options out there that are a bit more simple and easy to use and a better price.
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.
I love the fact that you have a team of developers who can help me build metrics or fix metrics that I do not create properly. I had to learn SQL in order to really build the metrics that mattered, which was a lot of fun, but resulted in many broken metrics. The vendor's team was great in responding to me requests for help!
Really, really appreciate the fact that Grow has SQL formulas to reference when building metrics. Again, as a novice, this accelerated my ability to learn and not have to leave your site and resources and stay within the Grow web properties.
Great account managers who check in regularly and are willing to help out whenever needed.
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
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
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.
Grow.com is structured in [...] such a way that it is easy to get started for individuals that known SQL. For individuals that are not as well versed at SQL, the learning curve is much steeper. In such cases, it would be better for users to learn SQL and then go for data visualization with Grow.com.
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.
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
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.
If there is one area that Grow.com excel[s] upon much better than other data visualization tools, it is Grow.com's customer/tech support. Grow.com responds much quicker and does a better job of getting to a solution [than] any other business intelligence tool on the market. The support staff gets the big picture [...] and knows how to help.
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
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.
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.
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
Grow doesn't have as many advanced analytics features and other capabilities as some other 'dashboard' platforms on the market. Simply, if you want a tool for internal use only that has high-level analytics capabilities (regressions, completely custom visualizations, modeling), Grow probably isn't the platform for you. To put it another way, if you have a team of data engineers and scientists doing complex analysis, Grow might not make the most sense. However, if you understand the value of data/visualization/dashboards, but lack some of those skillsets in your company, Grow might be the perfect fit. Not only is it incredibly scalable and reasonably priced compared to other market solutions, but their transform capabilities really stand out. They have many native data transformations that mimic SQL coding of a dataset, without requiring any knowledge of SQL. They've converted these transformations to easy-to-use tools in the platform, which are perfect for the less-technical user.
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.
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.
