Tableau Public vs. Tableau Server vs. Viewpoint Analytics

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.

Whole funnel and specific channel performance from upper to lower funnel metrics. The ability to view full channel performance for some time, such as weekly, monthly, or quarterly, has truly been monumental in how my team optimizes specific channels and campaigns. Daily performance tracking is a bit overwhelming, with load times and having to refresh specific live views over time. It can be challenging to do so at times, as extensive dashboards take much longer to load.

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

• 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

Incentivized

• 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

• 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

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

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.

Incentivized

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.

Tableau Server takes training and experience in order to unlock the application's full potential. This is best handled by a qualified data scientist or data analytics manager. Tableau user interface layout, nomenclature, and command structure take time and training to become proficient with. Integration and connectivity require proper IT developer support.

Incentivized

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.

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

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

• 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.

Incentivized