SPS Commerce vs. Tableau Desktop vs. Tableau Public

When you find yourself growing and finding success faster than you can keep up with, SPS Commerce will save your life and your reputation. The services they offer are easy to understand, they are available with suggestions and ideas for better ways, personalization is available to best suit your needs or the needs of your customers so that you can really shine and relieve the worries that come with growing pains. SPS also helps to keep information accurate with less human touching to cause errors.

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

Tableau public is the best platform to build dashboards for your personal profile and share with recruiters. It's always good to keep ourselves updated on the latest features, create sample dashboards and save them to a personal profile. Tableau public is free and doesn't need any subscription. anyone can create an account and start building reports.

• We can easily create and send order confirmations.
• We respond to the corresponding receiving departments with timely and accurate ASN's.
• Once the order has shipped, customer service utilizes the invoicing function.

Incentivized

• 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

• Data visualization: lots of different options, including bar, scatter, pie, waterfall charts to explore relationships between variables, and to present findings/trends to different teams
• Integrates readily with limited, though different data sources: TXT, CSV, TDE, Access
• Exports reports for review of different dashboards: client-ready/team-ready, with a clean and tidy presentation in PDF format (or hardcopy)

Incentivized

• We have quite a few people here who use this portal, and we have it set up to receive an email when an order is available to print. As of now, you can only add a few recipients to receive those emails; it limits you.
• Invoicing is challenging at times as you have to remember to go in and invoice. If you forgot, it is hard to find the order to invoice, as it seems to disappear.
• We still haven't figured out how to have some of the invoicing features auto-populate, so there isn't so much to fill out. I wish some of those features were easier to use, or find if you have them.

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

• Tableau Public (both Desktop and Server) like their "for a fee" counterparts offer very easy to learn and use tools to transform data into pictures and gain insights into your data. Most organizations report a reduction in development time of 10x vs. other similar tools, due to the intuitive user interface. That said, with Tableau Public, published workbooks are "disconnected" from the underlying data sources and require periodic updates when the data changes. Users are limited to 1 Gb of storage space per user ID and password as well.
• I would like to see better options for public sharing of visualizations and data from within the "for a fee" products as more and more organizations are moving in the direction of data sharing with partners and their communities.

Incentivized

If I can drop it, I will this year. We gave it a decent try for over 4 years and it has gotten worse with each added connection.

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

It's free, right? I'll keep using the free version. So the real question to ask is this? Will I pay $999 for the Personal version or $1,999 for the Professional? Yikes! That is a big stretch. I'm not sure about that. The product comparison chart is at: http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/comparison

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.

Tableau public is a great training tool to understand the basics of Tableau before buying it. A great tool to extend Excel's visualization and to publish data for others. Not useful for anything you need secure. No ability to access databases. Static information only.

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

Phone support is generally very good and you can get a person on the phone within a few minutes. Their emailed customer support however is very poor and often goes several days or longer before receiving a response, if ever at all

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

I have not yet required to contact support as the documentation and help i found online has always worked so far

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

I found it sufficient, and fast. I could easily "kick the tires" with Tableau on my data so I got up and running fast.

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

Start at the end and work backward. Identify the business case / issue and questions the end users have, then identify the data needed, and where to get it.

Incentivized

In my opinion, SPS Commerce is the bottom out of all three provided here. I think, essentially, if you are looking to be hands off and only oboard on setup and don't plan on growing your business and want to not understand anything about EDI and how it affects your company, SPS Commerce is a fine choice. Just if you want to do anything beyond that, I believe you are going to have the worst time.

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

Google Charts/Drive is sufficient for simpler data sets, but it does not integrate with other web platforms and the visualization does not look as professional. I'm not aware of any other competitors that offer the same package as Microsoft.

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.

• I enrolled in a product I ended up not using because the vendor that required it ended our working relationship and SPS refused to offer a refund. After I canceled it, they continued to charge our account for three more months of service.
• The interface is simple and easy to understand and use, so it saved time when preparing shipments.

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

• Tableau Public visualizations have helped drive traffic to our content and sites
• The lack of cost means it's easy to demonstrate our experience to attract paying clients

Incentivized