Tableau DesktopPricing

Tableau Pricing 2022

When you need a data analytics solution for your business intelligence needs it is, frankly, overwhelming. There is a sea of amazing and complex platforms designed to streamline workloads and offer customizable tools. Tableau is one of the major solutions for analytics and can be found in a number of versions for your convenience. With this software, you can see your data in new and innovative ways.

What is Tableau?

Tableau is a business software development company that specializes in offering a data analytics platform. In August 2019 Salesforce completed their acquisition of Tableau so they are offered as a service on Salesforce's main site as well.

They can be used for data visualization through interactive dashboards, graphs, maps, etc. Business intelligence (BI) data analysis is one of the main reasons a company might use them.

With the power BI tools, teams can access the ability to pull from multiple data sources and make data-driven decisions using comprehensive dashboards. It’s meant to be easy for Microsoft Excel users to pick up.

The most frequent use cases for this software include IT, computer software, healthcare, and marketing companies. They’re made up of mid-size companies but a good amount of small businesses and enterprise teams.

End-users are generally in the data science field such as data scientists or data analysts. Scientists collect the data and analysts interpret and interact with the data. Tableau makes it so data analysts can easily clean raw data and make it more presentable (data preparation) without coding. The software does come with the capability for data scientists to pull and work with data in coded formats like R or Python.

They have several different product versions including Tableau Desktop, Tableau Online, Tableau Prep Builder, and Tableau Server. The platform even has a free version called Tableau Public. For all paid versions the software has user licenses that are all the same costs but features do depend on the product you chose.

We are just going into the functionality and reviews for a couple of their popular versions Tableau Public, and Tableau Desktop. If you want to see the user license costs, they can be found in the pricing section next.

For a quick introduction to Tableau software see their demo video below.

What is Tableau? | A Tableau Overview

How Much Does Tableau Cost?

Their pricing model consists of tableau licenses for three different types of user accounts. The Creator license is for full workflow and collaboration, while Explorer and Viewer licenses are limited. Explorers can manage limited content while Viewer is for looking at finished data and getting alerts. For the user access breakdown between licenses go here.

Tableau also offers more enterprise-level plans on their team subscriptions page like Tableau Data Management but no upfront pricing details are offered.

Tableau Public

The Tableau Public version is the free version that most of you are probably excited to learn more about. You can find their website here, and the download page here.

When you go to the website you will be able to access a free download of the program and develop and share data visualizations with people all over the world. It’s an online-only program, and not meant to be private.

The platform was designed to encourage its users to connect and collaborate with their findings and learn from each other. They can build a shared virtual experience and see not just other teams’ data but also learn more about other people in the field. You can upload “visual resumes'' which are interactive. On the site you can also gain access to visualizations about news, events, and education. Downloading isn’t required if you want to view some responsive graphs or maps right now.

If you’re just starting out in the data science field this is the best place to get connected. You could be a new grad, a startup, or a small business looking to become more involved with other teams. Enterprises could even use it to offer more transparency and impress potential clients or just be more visible in the field.

Tableau Public has very positive reviewer sentiment from all types of business users and a trScore of 8.7/10. A large number of positive reviews may seem too good to be true, but in many high-rated reviews, you can still find constructive criticism on areas for improvement. You can use that information to figure out if a product has the functionality you need.

The main highlights teams have discussed include the tool’s ease of use, how it can be used for training, and how it has the desktop version’s features. You can also integrate with Tableau Desktop as well. If you’re a team that wants some transparency you can certainly benefit from using the public version in tandem with the private version.

The negatives end-users have noted include data privacy concerns due to its public nature, integrations, and its inability to work well with certain versions of Microsoft Excel workbooks.

Feel free to go look through reviews yourself and see if it’s the right choice. If you’re wondering how we decide what reviews get published and why then check out this article here.

Tableau Desktop

Tableau Desktop is designed for data visualization and real-time data exploration all under your own control. It can be an on-premise or cloud-based solution.

You can integrate and structure your data in a codeless environment and access advanced augmented analytics. Their augmented analytics relies on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to achieve faster insights for data analysts. It also doubles as a tool for data scientists pulling raw data from Python.

The general reviewer sentiment for this software is positive with a trScore of 8.4/10.

The common areas that end-users praise about the software are the visualizations and organized UI. Their main negative is their customer support and it has been expressed pretty strongly in some reviews. That of course does not automatically mean your experience will be the same, but it’s still worth knowing about. Other issues were with functionality such as with handling bigger datasets.

You can find the rest of the software reviews here. As your team looks through the common pros and cons, consider which features are necessary and which ones aren’t that necessary.

What is an Alternative for Tableau?

Zoho Analytics comes from the major business software development company Zoho, which allows integrations with its plethora of tools. Their analytics solution is built to be a self-service BI platform.

They do have a Free Plan for up to 2 users, but this will require signup to know more. They also have the option to contact them for custom plans. Their pricing details are not based on individual users but include users within the plans in increments. Additional users cost $8/month each.

Zoho also has a viewer subscription as well at $80/month for 25 view-only users, similar to Tableau’s option for viewer licenses. The main pricing difference is that Tableau only offers licenses that must be purchased per user whereas Zoho has subscriptions with included user amounts.

In this case, it makes Zoho Analytics a cheaper option for small businesses but Tableau is better for teams with numbers that don’t fit in a package minimum. Zoho’s Standard user plan is still cheaper than Tableau Creator. For flexibility, Tableau licenses allow the ability to only pay for the type of users you need and add a level of security to those restricted roles.

When it comes to functionality they are both powerful BI platforms that allow integrations and the ability to connect to a variety of data sources or databases. In comparison, Zoho does have more transparency with their comprehensive feature breakdown on the pricing page whereas Tableau breakdown is less about tools and more about actions between licenses.

For an in-depth comparison of Zoho Analytics, Tableau Desktop, and Tableau Server, see the breakdown here.

More Resources

If you're interested in more software like Tableau then you’re in luck. There are several related software categories to choose from. There is of course user visualization and data discovery visualization software. With Tableau being able to be used for business intelligence, you may also be interested in business intelligence software. Other relevant software to you may include data catalog and retail analytics applications.

Tableau for Data Science and Data Visualization - Crash Course Tutorial

For those that have used any of the platforms discussed here, please leave a review to help other buyers make informed decisions.