Analytics with Tableau
We use Tableau to generate daily and weekly reports for our business module to generate our key performance indicators. These insights we …
Starting at $70 per month
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What is Tableau Desktop?
Tableau Desktop is a data visualization product from Tableau. It connects to a variety of data sources for combining disparate data sources without coding. It provides tools for discovering patterns and insights, data calculations, forecasts, and statistical summaries and visual…
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Awards
Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards
Popular Features
- Report sharing and collaboration (156)9.393%
- Drill-down analysis (158)9.292%
- Customizable dashboards (165)9.090%
- Formatting capabilities (161)9.090%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
Tableau Creator
$70.00
On Premise
Per User / Per Month
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttp://www.tableau.com/products/desktop
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Starting price (does not include set up fee)
- $70 per month
Product Demos
Tableau Desktop Tutorial | Tableau Desktop Training | Online Tableau Desktop Training - Youtube
YouTube
- Tableau Demo: Quick Tutorial to Getting Started with Tableau Desktop
YouTube
Tableau Desktop Naming Conventions Part 1
YouTube
Tableau Desktop Introduction Part 1
YouTube
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Product Details
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- Competitors
- Tech Details
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What is Tableau Desktop?
Tableau Desktop supports data-driven decisions by helping users to answer questions more quickly, solve harder problems more easily, and uncover new insights.
Tableau Desktop connects directly to hundreds of data sources, both on-premises or in the cloud, with the goal of making it easier to start analyses. Interactive dashboards, drag and drop functionality, and natural language queries help users of all skill levels quickly discover actionable insights, all from its visual interface. Users can ask deeper questions by quickly building calculations, adding trend lines and seeing statistical summaries, or clustering data to see relationships.
Tableau Desktop Video
In this video, the TrustRadius team will be discussing the top business intelligence tools available: Qlik Sense, Tableau, ThoughtSpot, and IBM Cognos Analytics.
Tableau Desktop Competitors
Tableau Desktop Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows, Mac |
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Tableau Desktop is a data visualization product from Tableau. It connects to a variety of data sources for combining disparate data sources without coding. It provides tools for discovering patterns and insights, data calculations, forecasts, and statistical summaries and visual storytelling.
Tableau Desktop starts at $70.
IBM Cognos Analytics, SAP Lumira Discovery, and Qlik Sense are common alternatives for Tableau Desktop.
Reviewers rate Report sharing and collaboration and Publish to Web highest, with a score of 9.3.
The most common users of Tableau Desktop are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(2264)Attribute Ratings
- 8.9Likelihood to Renew
- 8Availability
- 6.1Performance
- 8.6Usability
- 6.9Support Rating
- 8Online Training
- 9.4In-Person Training
- 8Implementation Rating
- 8.1Configurability
- 7Product Scalability
- 10Ease of integration
- 10Vendor pre-sale
- 10Vendor post-sale
- 9.2Data Visualization
- 7.9Data Sources
- 8.4Data Sharing and Collaboration
Reviews
(101-125 of 161)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
October 07, 2016
Tableau - helping you to tell your story ....
We also looked at Qlikview and Microstrategy at the time of making the decision to go with Tableau Desktop. Tableau came out tops in terms of it's ability to connect to a variety of sources out of the box, it's usability, the ease of deployment, and other non-functional requirements. In a number of other areas it was on par with the other tools.
September 16, 2016
Tableau Desktop - Leader of the pack
Tableau is clearly the most intuitive and best looking product out of the box. Whereas other competitors appear to be playing catch up with Tableau.
It also has the biggest online community which enables new users to become proficient in this application very quickly. It also serves as a portal to share and discover new ways to do things, which is something that simply does not happen with competitors that have little to almost non-existent online communities.
It also has the biggest online community which enables new users to become proficient in this application very quickly. It also serves as a portal to share and discover new ways to do things, which is something that simply does not happen with competitors that have little to almost non-existent online communities.
September 09, 2016
Tableau is a good entry-level visualization tool, not great for multi-user, customizable solutions or big datasets
Tableau has a little less learning curve for developers but this is because fewer functions and customization options are available vs. Spotfire. Spotfire is a much more scalable solution, works many times faster with huge databases with over millions of rows.
We selected Tableau because of the lower price and perceived ease of use and shorter learning curve.
September 07, 2016
Tableau is my favorite data visualization tool
- Excel
Tableau is far superior to Excel in the display and visual analysis of data. Charts in Tableau are more professional looking than Excel.
August 29, 2016
Tableau is great for reports!! Wish it looked better and had better options for visualizing.
- Microsoft Excel
Excel is the only other tool I could compare in this category. It does not ingest information or make easy to read reports like Tableau. I use Excel to do research exercises where I use Tableau to send reports to throughout the company.
- SAP Lumira and QlikView
User experience wise Tableau is hands down the winner.
August 22, 2016
Tableau Desktop - A Powerful, Insightful, Dynamic Tool
- SAP BusinessObjects Lumira
I feel like Tableau is easier to use and offers a greater selection of visualizations. I feel that the dashboards are easier to put together and offer a great amount of flexibility for the end-user. Tableau has an excellent user support group. I find the community to be extremely helpful and supportive.
August 19, 2016
Big Data Made Pretty
August 10, 2016
Tableau Review
- OBIEE
Ease of use, user friendly. The user finds it easy to work with and started creating things from day 1.
- D3.js and TIBCO Spotfire
Tableau is more powerful than Excel. One does have more flexibility by using programming libraries like D3.js, which have been designed specifically for data visualization, but they also require the user to know how to program with javascript. Tableau is great for users who want the power of a professional visualization platform, but do not want to spend time programming it.
July 18, 2016
Best tool for visualisation
- SAP BusinessObjects Lumira
It is more useful and easy.
- D3.js and SAP BusinessObjects Lumira
Excel is the ultimate jack-of-all-trades Swiss army knife approach. You can do almost anything but it is missing much of the polish of dedicated applications of Tableau. Great for the initial approach to a new dataset. I have created some custom Excel macros that go in and run calculations on combinations of fields -- mostly to see if there are data relationships. This is hard to do almost anywhere else.
D3.js is an incredibly flexible tool if you are willing to deal with the tremendous overhead of the associated programming. It has a huge learning curve and I would never recommend it for the exploratory or initial examination phase. But for incredibly detailed and robust displays, it is terrific. Expect to take a week to get anything done right.
Lumira is a nice get started and get something out the door product. It still feels like a beta-level product. This could be useful for departments that don't have specialized people or want something more than what Excel offers but aren't willing to pay for the full Tableau license. Good for SAP houses of course but I wouldn't count out the other two.
D3.js is an incredibly flexible tool if you are willing to deal with the tremendous overhead of the associated programming. It has a huge learning curve and I would never recommend it for the exploratory or initial examination phase. But for incredibly detailed and robust displays, it is terrific. Expect to take a week to get anything done right.
Lumira is a nice get started and get something out the door product. It still feels like a beta-level product. This could be useful for departments that don't have specialized people or want something more than what Excel offers but aren't willing to pay for the full Tableau license. Good for SAP houses of course but I wouldn't count out the other two.
June 29, 2016
Tableau-University Use
- SAP BusinessObjects Lumira
Tableau is not as user-friendly as SAP Lumira. SAP Lumira is more efficient and productive time-wise, especially for first-time users. Tableau is better for more complex and detailed dashboards; especially interactive dashboards. Tableau enables users to create interactive dashboards and really allows for predictive analytics in addition to normal analytics.
June 27, 2016
The Current Leader in Visualization
More flexible and easier to use than Lumira
June 21, 2016
Tableau: Good but not idiot proof
- Microsoft PowerBI and SAP Business Objects
Tableau has superior mapping out of the box but the visualizations within PowerBI are superior. BusinesObjects allows an end-user to explore/write queries without knowledge of SQL and a cursory knowledge of the data whereas both PowerBI and Tableau require some SQL and data infrastructure knowledge and training.
June 09, 2016
Best data visualization and analytics tool out there
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- MicroStrategy Analytics,Adobe Analytics,Goolge Analytics
Tableau focuses in telling the story, which is a fundamental piece that is hardly found today on any analytics suite. Adobe Analytics is fantastic collecting data but it is very rigid when manipulating the data and building meaningful reports. In my opinion Adobe Analytics is a better tool for monitoring web performance and tracking specific goals. But Tableau offers an incredible flexibility building reports on the flight and analyzing the information that matters. MicroStrategy is slowly catching up, but its tools still rigid and some times very inaccurate, for instance if you wants to build a report using geo-data. MicroStrategy has more users, most of them corporate (4,000) than Tableau (2,600) which give them the benefit of economy scale. they would be able to improve the product quickly and why not, catch up with Tableau in the future. Tableau for me is a Mac and MicroStrategy a PC. Tableau is clean, smart and functional, MicroStrategy is useful, but ugly and too cumbersome sometimes.
June 08, 2016
Tableau Desktop - Why & Why not?
- IBM Cognos, SQL Server Reporting and MicroStrategy
My current work environment uses both Tableau Online, MicroStrategy & SSRS in parallel. Tableau is much closer to the SSRS in terms of visualization tool where as MicroStrategy is an enterprise data modeling and reporting tool.
Based on the use case we use different tools. Here are the pros & cons
Pros
Cons
i) Report Scheduling Options are not the best in Tableau. If we see new a requirement of a report with email distribution, mobile distribution we don't prefer Tableau
ii) Big Data (Hadoop) Live Interactions are slow. You need a special approach and extra implementation using middleware to make data retrieval faster
iii) Architect mode is not available
Based on the use case we use different tools. Here are the pros & cons
Pros
i) Suits perfectly for SQL Environment( not big data). We have created the maximum of our dashboard against SQL Server Database. They are perfectly designed, fast while retrieving data, and has very efficient online manipulation.
ii) I prefer using Tableau Online if I want to drill down.
iii) Unlike MicroStrategy we don't have to create attributes and facts inside the tool. Tableau just sits a extra layer on top of my data model and inherits all objects inside the tool.
iv) Unlike SSRS Tableau Online helps us to create on the fly calculations in the web browser. So no manipulation is needed every time in the dataset
v) Good Customer Support unlike MicroStrategy (In MicroStrategy cases are opened for weeks but no proper resolutions are made by experts).
Cons
i) Report Scheduling Options are not the best in Tableau. If we see new a requirement of a report with email distribution, mobile distribution we don't prefer Tableau
ii) Big Data (Hadoop) Live Interactions are slow. You need a special approach and extra implementation using middleware to make data retrieval faster
iii) Architect mode is not available
It is easier to start with Tableau. The out of the box ready feel is more with Tableau than any of the other BI products. Product scalability is at a steep cost with Tableau but it gives the possibility to begin small and then grow as it proves its capability as compared to all other products that need a massive single purchase. I love the fact that users come up to us and ask for reports in Tableau because it is so popular that lots of people have never used it but like to see their data reports in tableau just because they saw some other data report in tableau in a news article or somewhere else on a website.
May 25, 2016
Tableau Desktop reality revealed
- SAP Business Objects, IBM Cognos and Pentaho
Tableau Desktop is better than any of its competitors as it is cost effective and user friendly.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I have used SSRS, Crystal Reports, Microsoft Excel, and Business Objects. Tableau offers more functionality than the rest and is pretty intuitive. I think SSRS is the easiest to use. Query speed is excellent with SSRS (at least when you are connected to SQL Server). Microsoft Excel is also intuitive but harder to maintain when the file is being touched by multiple people. I think Business Objects is the worst product out of all of them.
Crystal Reports:
Comes in 3rd place
You are limited in what you can do.
Nothing is intuitive.
Isn't fun to use at all.
The last version I used was 11 and I had to modify someone else's reports. What they left behind was a mess (isn't it always?). So having to go into CR and update the report was doable but just a painful process because of the way the UI is layed out.
If the only tool you have is BO Xcelsius, and you are are trying to visualize anything beyond a few thousand rows do yourself a favor and get Tableau. Xcelsius was the USE CASE that allowed us to get Tableau. Its very limited in what it can do. Its unfortunate that companies have to keep on spending money on new tools but these older tools really are limited in what they can do and the UI's usually suck. I think SSRS has a pretty nice UI. Its simple and it allows you to do drag and drop which saves time. If you are a Microsoft shop, then you know that the best way to build reports is to let the SQL do all the heavy lifting and then just have your SSRS report do the final tweaks. I liked how easy it was to build sub-reports in SSRS. It just matches up a key found in the report and then displays all the details of that key in the sub-report. Creating parameters is also very easy to do in SSRS.
Tableau is fun to use and there is a lot you can do with it. Because of how hot it is right now, you might even get new business if you tell them you are using Tableau :) (and then you can go back and measure the ROI in Tableau desktop).
Crystal Reports:
Comes in 3rd place
You are limited in what you can do.
Nothing is intuitive.
Isn't fun to use at all.
The last version I used was 11 and I had to modify someone else's reports. What they left behind was a mess (isn't it always?). So having to go into CR and update the report was doable but just a painful process because of the way the UI is layed out.
If the only tool you have is BO Xcelsius, and you are are trying to visualize anything beyond a few thousand rows do yourself a favor and get Tableau. Xcelsius was the USE CASE that allowed us to get Tableau. Its very limited in what it can do. Its unfortunate that companies have to keep on spending money on new tools but these older tools really are limited in what they can do and the UI's usually suck. I think SSRS has a pretty nice UI. Its simple and it allows you to do drag and drop which saves time. If you are a Microsoft shop, then you know that the best way to build reports is to let the SQL do all the heavy lifting and then just have your SSRS report do the final tweaks. I liked how easy it was to build sub-reports in SSRS. It just matches up a key found in the report and then displays all the details of that key in the sub-report. Creating parameters is also very easy to do in SSRS.
Tableau is fun to use and there is a lot you can do with it. Because of how hot it is right now, you might even get new business if you tell them you are using Tableau :) (and then you can go back and measure the ROI in Tableau desktop).
May 24, 2016
Tableau Desktop for BI Professionials
Have not used any other competitor products.
May 24, 2016
Tableau Makes Data Sexy!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
QlikView, Business Objects
May 24, 2016
Tableau for Analysis- great tool!
- spotfire and QlikView
We use tableau to see the feasibility for a client requirement.
I rank it better
I rank it better
- For a nice user interface
- easy drag drop features
- nice visualizations
- variety of charts
- Nice and easy map graph and integration.
May 24, 2016
Dashboard Experts, Scorecard Headaches
