It is the "one-stop shop" for all analytical questions and reporting. The scope covers all departments like finance, people & culture, sales, marketing, customer success, customer support, and development. We are tracking financial performance, sales pipeline development, customer health metrics to reduce churn, etc. Tableau Cloud serves as the single entry point for everyone with data questions, as all the reports, dashboards, and ad hoc analyses are published there.
Pros
Self-Service.
Governance and differentiated permissions.
Easy and intuitive to use.
Cons
Performance of background jobs like extract refreshes.
Web edit functionality continuously improving, but not equal to desktop experience.
Limited logging and audit functionalities compared to Tableau Server.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you're using Tableau as the primary BI tool, then Tableau Cloud is well suited to publish and share the results with a wide(r) audience. It is well suited for various degrees of self-service proficiency, from pure consumers of analytical work to more advanced users who can use web editing for smaller or larger adjustments, and even for desktop power users who will publish their work to Tableau Cloud. It has many good ways to organize the content and make it easily accessible via search, favorites, folders, collections ("playlists for your data"), or history ("recents"). It might not be ideally suited if there are many on-prem sources to be used (even though there are options to connect them) or if you have very special requirements regarding custom server setup, which is limited in a shared cloud environment like Tableau Cloud.
VU
Verified User
Professional (Computer Software company, 501-1000 employees)
We integrate our data and analytics through a Tableau Online interface, making it our primary delivery device of our product to our customers. We also use it internally for help in analyzing our scorecard metrics and to help us meet our quarterly, annual, and long-term goals. The biggest business problem it addresses for us is it allows us to deliver our product without having to hire a team of developers to build a custom solution to visualize our data and analytics.
Pros
Robust data integration with a variety of databases
Ability to display complex data visualizations with many options for user interactivity
Look and feel is impressive no matter what device you use to access it
Cons
Exporting functionality is limited
Cost and complexity of license structure
Filtering on large datasets can at times be slow
Likelihood to Recommend
In our specific use case, we only require a once a day refresh of our data which allows the entire online system to operate off of extracts. That is very important as we use our daytime working hours to work on feature updates and implementation items rather than having to worry about any extra load on our database (which would be required with a direct connection to the online system). Importing the extracts is rather seamless and robust enough to handle large volumes of data.
Scenarios where Tableau Online would be less appropriate is where there is a high need to export and distribute data and reports. That functionality is rather limited in the online system.
VU
Verified User
Team Lead (Computer Software company, 1-10 employees)
Tableau [Online] is used in [a] few departments in my organization. Mainly using Tableau Online for report/chart sharing with clients and executive team ,and this also helps to do some quick changes in charts.
Pros
Easy sharing with clients and executive team.
Can quickly fix some report issue in browser.
Can easily create different views .
Cons
Online editor is not that great.
Mobile view can be better.
Filters are not working properly with large datasets.
Likelihood to Recommend
This is the only available tool in our organization and best suited for our needs.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (Computer Software company, 5001-10,000 employees)
Our organization uses Tableau [Online] to effectively share data across many different business units. We have so many different data points and were previously using excel and other tools to share it with less than stellar results. We find that using Tableau [Online] makes reporting cleaner and easier to understand. We also built an integration with our software so that our customers can use our API to pull data from our tools to build their own reports in Tableau.
Pros
Dashboards
Compiling data and making a variety visual charts
Connects easily to most databases
Can easily blend data
Usable on many different device types
Cons
Their paid version can be pricier than some competitors
Report distribution can a challenge
You need technical resources to get things up and running
Likelihood to Recommend
[Tableau Online] is a very robust tool and allows you to create reports for all different levels of your organization. And with it's ability to extract data from so many different tools, you can easily pull in data from many different systems to give you a single report. You can also easily filter dashboards to show different levels versus having to edit. Once up and running, it is really pretty easy to generate dashboards.
Our entire organization is using Tableau and it's helping us all unify our goals, benchmarks, and direct our daily and monthly focus based on what our numbers are. It helps everyone to see clearly where we are succeeding and where we are falling short so that we can improve our processes and product.
Pros
Easy to use
Easy to understand
Easy to share
Cons
Sometimes the charts don't refresh themselves and we have to manually refresh them.
Likelihood to Recommend
Daily/Monthly/Annual Revenue is very helpful to track with Tableau. Sometimes it's harder to track customer satisfaction or areas where the data needs to be analyzed on a sentiment level.
Tableau Online is the bridge between our data teams and the business and product teams. It is our primary visualization tool that sits on top of our data sources which we consider our sources of truth. The primary way it adds value is giving us a lot of tools to present different types of data in ways that various type of business stakeholders can best understand and use it. We also use it as the front-end to our in-house sales commission system. Sales reps log in to Tableau Online and can track their performance and commission.
Pros
It has been very easy for us to connect various data sources to Tableau Online, such as data from Treasure Data, Google Sheets, Redshift, and custom CSVs.
Tableau Online's interface is easy to use as a bridge between data teams and other stakeholders who primarily consume data insights and reporting. It is easy to publish dashboards that users can log on to and see and interact with.
Tableau, generally speaking, has calculations and other types of data manipulations available which can scale with your own business questions' complexity. It has been great to learn more about Tableau's functionality and find out that we can answer more complex questions we weren't able to answer before by using things they have available such as level of detail functions, order of operation filtering, and data prep.
Cons
I believe being a skilled creator and an adept user in Tableau Online is not straightforward. It takes time and there is a learning curve. I have personally been to three Tableau conferences and felt like I needed a year of owning our company's Tableau creator license to feel comfortable and deliver powerful insight for our company.
The UI available to edit dashboards could improve to be more friendly and modern. It sometimes feels like you are operating in a very rigid environment when editing dashboards in Tableau Online.
The options to organize a company's dashboards and assign permissions are also not straightforward and the solutions I am aware of leave me wishing there was more.
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau Online is great for an organization that has some people very familiar with owning a creator license who can create, organize, and distribute dashboards across many different teams. In other words, Tableau Online would be good for a company that seriously invests in it internally. Managing the company's Tableau instance and data sources should occupy a significant time of someone or several people's jobs, in addition to insuring users know enough to be able to navigate, discover, and interact with what's available and stay up to date as well. I would strongly recommend that Tableau Online is worth it if it becomes an integral part of a company's data stack. Without such a commitment, I do not see a lot of value coming from Tableau Online aside from the ability to create visualizations/marketing content which could be useful in certain business settings.
VU
Verified User
Analyst in Corporate (Internet company, 201-500 employees)
Tableau Online is used in my small startup company to consult clients on Tableau's use case. The power of hosting it on the cloud and the security and control it provides is at an enterprise level. As for my business need, I looked to roll up KPIs across various departments across our cybersecurity functions.
Pros
Quick startup and configuration. Get it, set it, GO! Configuration is easy and done in a matter of a few clicks
Easy implementation of enterprise-level security and access with integration with AD Groups.
Maintenance and housekeeping of the server instance is easy and can come with support.
Cons
Tableau Online could improve its mobile interface
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau Online is best suited for a start-up or a small organization who would like to share work within and outside the team over a secured network.
VU
Verified User
Professional in Information Technology (Computer Software company, 501-1000 employees)
Tableau is used to track all user data metrics. This helps in being able to find power users, find new opportunities for the sales team, understand use-cases within our client base, and overall understand any given account. Tableau is bringing insights to the sales team daily. We can attribute a huge percentage of our growth to Tableau data.
Pros
It handles large amounts of information.
It is customizable enough to bubble up powerful insights.
It plugs into enough data sources to be meaningful.
Cons
Tableau Online can be really clunky.
It's not easy to filter data.
We see awkward UX while trying to perform specific actions on the platform.
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau is very well suited for any saas company. Being able to track usage data for millions of users and then crunch that data/make it digestible and relevant, is invaluable. It helps you understand your users better, make better product decisions, spot opportunities for growth within existing accounts, and overall provide the best experience for your customers.
