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Tableau Server

Tableau Server

Overview

What is Tableau Server?

Tableau Server allows Tableau Desktop users to publish dashboards to a central server to be shared across their organizations. The product is designed to facilitate collaboration across the organization. It can be deployed on a server in the data center,…

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Tableau Server has become an essential tool for organizations across various industries, offering a wide range of use cases that have …
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Tableau to the rescue

8 out of 10
October 05, 2021
Incentivized
It is being used across the organization. It helps us visualize business trends in a nicely presented format which can be easily used by …
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Tableau Server Review

8 out of 10
May 17, 2019
Incentivized
Tableau Server is used by our organization to create and use real-time dashboards and reports. It is used across the entire organization. …
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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

View all 28 features
  • Customizable dashboards (94)
    9.4
    94%
  • Drill-down analysis (95)
    8.7
    87%
  • Formatting capabilities (93)
    8.5
    85%
  • Multi-User Support (named login) (93)
    7.4
    74%
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Pricing

View all pricing

Viewer

$12.00

On Premise
Per User Per Month

Explorer

$35.00

On Premise
Per User Per Month

Creator

$70.00

On Premise
Per User Per Month

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Demos

Tableau Server | How to Restore a Backup

YouTube

Tableau Server | How to Backup Server

YouTube

How Tableau Works | Tableau Tutorial for Beginners | Tableau Server Online Training | Intellipaat

YouTube

Installing Tableau Server 10.5 on Linux

YouTube
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Features

BI Standard Reporting

Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.

9.3
Avg 8.2

Ad-hoc Reporting

Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.

8.9
Avg 8.1

Report Output and Scheduling

Ability to schedule and manager report output.

7.9
Avg 8.4

Data Discovery and Visualization

Data Discovery and Visualization is the analysis of multiple data sources in a search for patterns and outliers and the ability to represent the data visually.

8.5
Avg 8.1

Access Control and Security

Access control means being able to determine who has access to which data.

7.4
Avg 8.6

Mobile Capabilities

Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

7.7
Avg 7.9

Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding

APIs are a set of routines, protocols, and tools for used for embedding one application in another

7.2
Avg 7.9
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Product Details

What is Tableau Server?

Tableau Server is an enterprise self-service analytics platform that supports data-driven decision making throughout the user's organization.

Customers can deploy the way that makes the most sense for their organization - on-premises or in the cloud, on Windows or Linux, while integrating with their existing security and authentication protocols. Customers can provide governed data access while promoting sharing and collaboration with data, dashboards and insights. It includes automated processes and workflows, and users can define access for individual users and groups.

Tableau Server Features

BI Platform Features

  • Supported: Administration via Windows App
  • Supported: Administration via MacOS App
  • Supported: Administration via Web Interface
  • Supported: Live Connection to External Data
  • Supported: Snapshot of External Data
  • Supported: In-memory data model
  • Supported: Multi-Data Source Reporting (Blending)

Supported Data Sources Features

  • Supported: MS Excel Workbooks
  • Supported: Text Files (CSV, etc)
  • Supported: Oracle
  • Supported: MS SQL Server
  • Supported: IBM DB2
  • Supported: Postgres
  • Supported: MySQL
  • Supported: ODBC
  • Supported: Cloudera Hadoop
  • Supported: Hortonworks Hadoop
  • Supported: EMC Greenplum
  • Supported: IBM Netezza
  • Supported: HP Vertica
  • Supported: SAP Hana
  • Supported: Teradata
  • Supported: Salesforce
  • Supported: SAP
  • Supported: Google Analytics

BI Standard Reporting Features

  • Supported: Customizable dashboards
  • Supported: Report Formatting Templates

Ad-hoc Reporting Features

  • Supported: Drill-down analysis
  • Supported: Formatting capabilities
  • Supported: Predictive modeling
  • Supported: Integration with R or other statistical packages
  • Supported: Report sharing and collaboration

Report Output and Scheduling Features

  • Supported: Publish to Web
  • Supported: Publish to PDF
  • Supported: Output Raw Supporting Data
  • Supported: Report Versioning
  • Supported: Report Delivery Scheduling

Data Discovery and Visualization Features

  • Supported: Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
  • Supported: Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
  • Supported: Predictive Analytics
  • Supported: Support for Machine Learning models
  • Supported: Pattern Recognition and Data Mining
  • Supported: Integration with R or other statistical packages

Access Control and Security Features

  • Supported: Multi-User Support (named login)
  • Supported: Role-Based Security Model
  • Supported: Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
  • Supported: Report-Level Access Control
  • Supported: Single Sign-On (SSO)

Mobile Capabilities Features

  • Supported: Responsive Design for Web Access
  • Supported: Mobile Application
  • Supported: Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile

Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding Features

  • Supported: REST API
  • Supported: Javascript API
  • Supported: iFrames

Tableau Server Screenshots

Screenshot of Tableau Server interface and administration view 1.Screenshot of Tableau Server interface and administration view 2.Screenshot of Tableau Server permissions view.Screenshot of Tableau Services Manager (TSM) view 1.Screenshot of Tableau Services Manager (TSM) view 2.

Tableau Server Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsWindows, Linux
Mobile ApplicationApple iOS, Android, Mobile Web
Supported CountriesWorldwide
Supported LanguagesEnglish, French, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese

Frequently Asked Questions

Tableau Server allows Tableau Desktop users to publish dashboards to a central server to be shared across their organizations. The product is designed to facilitate collaboration across the organization. It can be deployed on a server in the data center, or it can be deployed on a public cloud.

Domo, IBM Cognos Analytics, and Looker are common alternatives for Tableau Server.

Reviewers rate Publish to Web highest, with a score of 9.6.

The most common users of Tableau Server are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(876)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Tableau Server has become an essential tool for organizations across various industries, offering a wide range of use cases that have proven valuable to users. Its ability to transform complex data into user-friendly visualizations has been particularly beneficial in emergency preparedness analytics within the healthcare sector. Additionally, dedicated analysts have utilized Tableau Server to create and deploy dashboards that are accessible to all employees, serving as the main repository for reporting needs. This versatility extends beyond healthcare, with organizations from IT to Human Resources leveraging the platform to address key issues such as device availability, performance tracking, and enterprise reporting.

Marketing teams have also found value in Tableau Server, using it to gain a better understanding of their customer base and track product ownership and usage trends. The platform's storytelling approach has been especially valuable for data scientists who use Tableau Server to present data to managers and executives, facilitating understanding and supporting decision-making processes. Furthermore, Tableau Server has been integrated into third-party applications and platforms such as Microsoft SharePoint, making it a convenient one-stop-shop for reporting needs.

Tableau Server's ease of maintenance from an administrator level and seamless integration with Active Directory for user permission management have made it a preferred choice for many organizations. It fosters secure and controlled sharing of work done by Tableau Desktop analysts and developers, enabling real-time data visualization and monitoring across the organization. This has led to increased adoption and expansion of its usage in various departments such as Finance, Supply Chain, and HR.

Overall, Tableau Server's ability to store, visualize, and share information effectively has provided organizations with leverage over other systems. Its versatility and ease of use have made it a trusted platform for reporting and analytics needs across different industries, enabling self-service analytics, cost savings through improved tracking capabilities, enhanced customer experience operations, and centralization of reporting.

Tableau users commonly recommend seeking advice from Tableau representatives to determine the best licenses for their needs. They also suggest optimizing data flows and extract refreshes from the beginning. Additionally, users emphasize the importance of being specific when setting up reports to avoid incorrect data. For example, providing clear filters and selecting the appropriate dimensions and measures ensures accurate results. Another tip is to utilize Tableau's training resources and attend user groups and conferences for additional tips and tricks on using Tableau effectively.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 56)
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Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Tableau Server is generally used when we done with all our visual presentations making, data analysis, making dashboards and now some other persons wants to edit in this by giving access or to present or share online with some other persons. It is very easy to share your work like all the charts, tables, that you worked on and need some suggestions or edits or present to clients you can do anything with this. I have done some projects also in Tableau Desktop, Public and Tableau Server and it is great to share that on Tableau Server with easy links and access without any data loss .
  • To convert raw datasets into powerful reports, dashboards, presentable form .
  • To easy share your work with anyone with easy access without any data loss .
  • A database that stores all your works without any space in your devices and keep safe your data, dashboards etc up-to when you in need to use .
  • Auto- scheduling for backups data in large data sets.
  • More technical updates in coming versions .
  • Speed to upload and opening files
I have done many projects on Tableau Desktop, Public and need to share a large data sets or completed projects with clients so i just shared on Tableau Server and provided links to see or approve without any data loss and security provided to our data . Little bit need some technical training to get used to of it, it has great features and options to get your work easily done if you are well trained.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Tableau Server is an online platform to host and hold all the tableau workbooks, data sources, and related tableau data. Users should have a license in order to use Tableau server and its features. creating security, folder setup, automation, data refresh are some of the best features Tableau servers provides. Scheduling the data extracts and dashboard refresh is the main scope of our project
  • Security
  • extract refresh schedule
  • subscriptions to workbooks & Dashboards
  • download data in crosstab
  • download workbook as image, pdf, twbx
  • permissions should flow from primary folder if changes are made later.
  • download pdf content doesn't have scroll bar it just takes snapshot leaving some data
  • data cache issues should be resolved
Ask data is one of the new and good feature that is available in tableau server. Tableau Server is well suited for a data warehouse build and handling big data. Tableau data aggregation, transformation, clustering capability is powerful and easy to implement. The choice of charts and visualization tools is outstanding.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Tableau Server is actively used in my organisation for connecting to different data sources and viewing different visualisation for deriving insights from them.
  • Connection to different data sources
  • Creating meaningful visualization
  • Advanced Analytics
  • Tableau server can incorporate more AI visualization
  • Errors in visualization can be highlighted quickly
  • ETL capabilities can Ben enhanced
Tableau [Server] is a user friendly tool and is applicable for any areas where KPI can Ben understood by just dragging and dropping the visualization objects.
October 05, 2021

Tableau to the rescue

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is being used across the organization. It helps us visualize business trends in a nicely presented format which can be easily used by all levels of management. Currently we use it for our sales projections, marketing analytics, finance analytics and other business analytics. It is also used to analyze monthly results across different KPI's
  • Visualization of data in multiple formats
  • Concisely present information in a dashboard
  • Allow multiple users to access the same reports simultaneously
  • Sometimes the functionality related to formula entry is difficult
  • You have to create multiple data sheets to create one dashboard
It is well suited where data is clearly arranged in a particular format and is less useful if the data is not in the format usable by tableau
The formulas are sometimes difficult to enter into tableau and that restricts some analysis to be performed.
Visualization within tableau is the best but the trend line graphs are not great
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Tableau is being used as one of several reporting tools. Its primary use was for creating dashboards that could be leveraged by a large segment of the company. The web enablement allowed for broader user adoption than other tools adopted at the time of implementation. Navigation of the workbooks was also more palatable to users vs running individual reports.
  • Visualizations.
  • Simple deployment method.
  • Easy to navigate interface.
  • Server administration is cumbersome.
  • Recent changes (after 10.x) have required rewriting of admin scripts.
  • Cumbersome licensing management.
Tableau may be well suited to non-Microsoft shops. Its methodologies, internal management, and overall approach seem geared more toward Oracle/Java shops. It also does require a decent amount of care and feeding. Backups, upgrades, etc., tend to be cumbersome and require some level of IT knowledge, despite how the product is often sold. Smaller shops that wish to pursue Tableau may be better off leveraging their SaaS offerings.
Jacob Rasmussen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Tableau Server is being used across our entire organization. Every employee at Qualtrics has a Tableau Server user, and we use Tableau Server authentication to display reports and dashboards in our company portal. Tableau Server is used heavily within each department, with dedicated analysts for each team creating and deploying dashboards for all employees to consume. Sales leaders view dashboards regularly to track the progress of their teams, and individual contributors view dashboards frequently to track their own progress.
  • Tableau Server is extremely well at providing a stabile system for us to host data sources and dashboards
  • Tableau Server is great at managing permissions for users, data sources, workbooks, and dashboards
  • 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
Tableau Server is extremely well suited for a company with a few dedicated analysts creating dashboards and reports for a few stakeholders. It is also great at handling a large amount of report viewers, but it is more expensive because you have to pay for each user.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Tableau Server is used in my company as our primary method for sharing business insights. We build visualization dashboards in Tableau Desktop, then publish them to project folders in Tableau Server so that the appropriate teams can access their near real-time metrics.
  • 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
  • I think the UI of how projects and folders within projects are managed could use some improvement. The organization is pretty straightforward, but it's designed for a large amount of content. Accessing a simple dashboard from one published workbook requires clicking into a Project then clicking into the dashboard to actually see the content. It's hard to describe without seeing it, but it always feels like there was an extra, unnecessary click. Seems minor, but this is an annoyance I and my colleagues face many times through the day.
  • There seems to be some formatting issues between what's built in Tableau Desktop (TD) and Tableau Server (TS), e.g., if I format some filters over a background in TD, they show up very legibly with the background as white against the color background. But when published the same filters could have the color of the background and no way to change it to white, and the font has less contrast for some reason. Seems minor, but it wastes a lot of time retrying then re-publishing just to get something to work as expected. The view in TD should be exactly the same as TS.
  • As far as I can tell, there's no way to put a clone of a certain dashboard into multiple projects/folders and have any updates propagate to those clones. Also as far as I can tell, there's no feature that tracks where the same dashboard has been published in multiple places. That means if I have a dashboard that I need to show in multiple places so those teams can access it in their native location with their other content contextual to them, I have to maintain a record of all the places I've published and re-publish to all whenever updates are made. And if it turns out the solution is there in the product, then the UI is clearly pretty dense because I haven't found it whereas this was an intuitive setting to find on a competitor BI tool I have used. I think this should be improved in the product since it's often necessary to manage the same content across multiple locations so various teams are accessing their single location relevant to them.
The scenario where you need Tableau Desktop is if you need to share the content of workbooks across a broad audience, and access it through an on-demand web interface. The alternative being downloading a workbook from some shared drive and opening it in Tableau Desktop. I suppose the latter could work in small team environments, but that would be very tedious for anything beyond a small project.
Mathieu Gaouette | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Tableau is being used mostly by marketing to get a good view of their customer base. It covers the present footprint in terms of product ownership and the trend in usage of services.

Tableau is used by data scientists to present data to managers and executive. It has a storytelling approach that facilitates the understanding of data and eases the decision-making process.
  • Tableau server's portal and general look is really convenient and pretty. Users feel comfortable using it.
  • The learning curve of Tableau Server from an end-user perspective is really short. For the creator of content, it is a little more complex but easy to learn. Tableau has really succeeded in creating a user-friendly software.
  • From an administration point of view, Tableau is great. Installation and housekeeping are really easy and quick.
  • Visuals are really appealing and will help "sell" your presentations.
  • Tableau allows connectivity to a huge selection of data sources and data formats.
  • Online training for software is free and of very good quality.
  • Tableau doesn't (at least when I used it) have custom widgets or elements in the creation of dashboards. Its main competitor, Power BI, allows this. Because of that, some visualizations are challenging and need the use of advanced tricks that most users don't know about.
  • Tableau logs a lot of information, and sometimes, getting the right information from these logs when something goes wrong is challenging.
  • Tableau support is not the quickest. This sounds bad, but I have to specify that I very rarely had to contact them. However, when I did, the answer took a few more days than with other providers.
Tableau Server should be considered in organizations where you have several consumers of data and fewer creators. The licensing of the server will make you save and allow you to have some governance over your dashboards.

In an environment where you have a lot of creators, the use of a server might not bring a lot of benefits, because creators using the desktop version can open and modify other people's dashboards.
Thomas Young | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Tableau Server is used by our organization to implement real-time data visualization and monitoring. The software is used only by certain departments. Tableau Server makes real-time data analytics easy for busy executives who want interactive visualizations and reporting without having to put too much work into what they are doing.
  • Tableau is perhaps the most aesthetically pleasing software to create beautiful visualizations that get updated in real-time. I wish this software had been around 20 years ago.
  • Tableau Server makes sharing visualizations across the organization seamless. I don't think I could do my job without it.
  • Tableau Server is used to create interactive daily reports, updated automatically and in an interactive style.
  • Tableau Server is sometimes referred to as simply Microsoft Excel with a power boost. I understand the reason analysts say this. It is because the software is almost exclusively a visualization software. If you're looking for truly advanced analytics combined with cutting-edge visualization, Tableau Server isn't it.
  • Tableau Server limits the type of graphs a user can create. There are numerous workarounds for different graph types, but they are not easy to implement.
  • Tableau Server can sometimes be slow to render graphics with lots of data and calculated fields.
Tableau Server is awesome for creating easy to understand visualizations for busy executives. An analyst can be up and running with some cool visualizations fairly quickly. But, if you're thinking of using Tableau Server for real machine learning, this is not the tool.
January 02, 2019

Intuitive and easy BI

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I used Tableau as another BI tool, by the client where the Tableau server installation was used and most production reports were accessible here.
Tableau has proven to be a great tool for the collection of data from multiple data sources, with varying complexity -- we used spreadsheets, SQL tables as well as Google Analytics connection. The tool was a standard platform in a multinational organization and was used for years, so the data was already linked, including the local eDWH solution, providing support for regular as well as ad-hoc reports.
  • Many available plugins, incl. the one I have used for regional analysis (data enriched with addresses / GPS attributes)
  • Narratives (story building) is a great tool for creating and sharing your analysis with your audience
  • Data visualization is one of the best you can get today
  • Supports mobile usage
  • Connection to SQL database: by connecting it to a database, one has to employ an SQL specialist to write the script
  • No autosave function
  • No automatized notification feature (e.g. alert based on value out of range, in a report)
  • Very expensive solutions
If you have to quickly explore a large volume of unknown big data (really large tables), then Tableau is a great choice.
It is a great tool for any ad-hoc analysis that has to deliver an interactive story to management (client), it will not only deliver nice visualizations, but will also allow for drill-downs to the primary data and proof for your audience that your numbers in the presented graph are correct
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Tableau provides agile, easy to use, and effective ways to visualize data. We have used Tableau visualizations to inform decisions regarding our strategic goals. It took very little time for our data analysts to become familiar with the Tableau toolset. We had several data dashboards up on day one of our implementation.
  • It's extremely intuitive to use the visualizations. Users can manipulate and construct meaning and additional questions from the data quickly.
  • Tableau is very flexible -- it's completely data source agnostic. It will take data from any source.
  • Our development team learned it very quickly.
  • While it took little time for our data analysts to crank out visualizations, it did take some time(longer than I expected) for our technology operations team to configure the server to share the sizes.
  • The server update process is rather cumbersome -- requires a full uninstall/re-install.
  • Again, while it took our data analysts next to no time to start creating, I've been in other organizations that have struggled with the feature-rich interface and complexity of the Tableau client. So, it requires the right personnel, with dedicated time, to fully leverage the tool.
Tableau is a fully agnostic tool for simply representing complex data. If thought is given to the design of the visualizations, they are very powerful and intuitive to use. We recently used Tableau to go deeper into our staffing. We looked at various demographic profiles of attendance centers to see which ones should receive more FTE. This would have taken much longer and been much less insightful without Tableau.
Subhadipto Poddar | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Tableau Server is used by our department to visualize displays. The transportation department uses it to visualize different performance parameters like congestion, delay, and other measures across the state. It is also being used to work in collaboration by different research groups at Iowa State University. Tableau server is also used to visualize different accident hotspots in the state of Iowa.
  • Access from any device
  • Worksheets can be managed online
  • Can change and visualize new stuff
  • Easy to use
  • Public server gives first few lines free of charge
  • Free lines are limited to 10 million per single connection
  • Premium is expensive
  • New data sources cam be published from Tableau Desktop
When you are using it to collaborate with other Tableau Servers, it is very useful. However, if you have data sets to be added from another sheet, it is not possible using Tableau Server. Tableau desktop version needs to be used to cope up with such a scenario. Thus we should have both Tableau Server as well as the desktop accounts.
Justin Pulley | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it across the organization, but I only manage 1 or quite a few. It is the trusted platform for visualization across the organization.
  • User management; you have a plethora of options built in (LDAP, Domain, SAML, etc.) for SSO and user management.
  • Dashboard Hosting; you have the option to host your dashboard in a few different ways. You can embed it as part of a larger web page, have it emailed automatically, or view it directly on the server.
  • Web Editing; while not as robust as a full fledged desktop I can see that it is edging that way. The web editing is great for fast, small, on the fly edits during a working session with a customer.
  • Installation; the latest iteration was an absolute nightmare to install. It failed to install several times.
  • Web Editing; while it is okay at small edits it would be a very nice feature to have an integrated solution that is as robust as desktop.
  • User Management; in certain aspects user management could use a small boost. Have a setting that allows Active Directory / LDAP based users be removed/deleted from the server automatically instead of forcing a script be written and deployed. If the user no longer exists in the AD or LDAP group they should be removed vice set to inactive as an option.
Server is appropriate anywhere really, but it comes down to cost. If you are a small org, say 20 people, that cost is going to be $16,800 per year. That is a steep price and other options might be more cost effective. Additionally, large high availability Tableau clusters increase the costs.
Shoaib Yari | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Tableau Server is being used at Ellie Mae as a platform for not only sharing enterprise level Tableau dashboards created by our BI developers, but also as a location to host business specific data sources for end users to create their own ad-hoc visualizations.
  • Allows for easy sharing of data and actionable insights with an extremely user-friendly visual interface
  • Acts as an environment to implement and enforce data governance with centralized and certified data sources
  • Easy to deploy, scale to our specific needs, and monitor
  • Enterprise level implementation is very pricey
  • Dashboard layout changes if the screen resolution of the Tableau developer is different from the end user's screen resolution
  • Embedding is limited and difficult
If you want a BI tool with the capabilities to create and share rich, vibrant reports with advanced data visualization options, Tableau can’t be beat. It’s easy to implement and has a very active and helpful online community. If, however, you are looking for a more affordable option, it’s better to look elsewhere.
Henry Yennie | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Tableau Server is the backbone for emergency preparedness analytics for the Louisiana State Department of Health. As the lead agency for public health and medical services during an emergency, we collect a large amount of near real-time information from over 1,500 healthcare facilities. This data includes operational statuses, power statuses, fuel usage and needs, and census/bed availability. Tableau takes this data stream and transforms it into user-friendly visualizations for staff both in the field and in the State Emergency Operations Center. On a day-to-day basis, Tableau provides tools and interactive maps to our state trauma network so that they can determine the most appropriate facility for high risk patient routing.
  • Summarize complex data in an easy to understand format.
  • Very fast idea/need to realization timelines.
  • Ability for end users to interact with data sets, giving them filters, groupings and other tools to get the data they need.
  • Tableau's mapping capabilities are "almost there". We would love to have Tableau able to function as our sole GIS product. Each version of Tableau brings us closer to that goal.
  • We would like to have the ability to schedule data transfers. The new Data Prep tool is step in that direction.
  • We still have need to produce lists of summarized data. Making this process a little more straightforward would be nice.
Tableau Server is able to handle our data very efficiently and quickly. The design to publish cycle, using the Desktop Creator tool, is very fast making needed adjustments to visualizations very easy in a rapidly changing event. The ease with which a non-technical person can make changes to a visualization that is connected to our source data is unmatched. We can put this tool in the hands of "unsophisticated IT users" and have them productive quickly. This efficiency and usability is deeper with the mobile application. We now have field hospital coordinators using the mobile app to assist in patient routing and facility evacuations.
Kishore Ummadisetti | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using Tableau as the primary BI tool for Accurate organization. We used Tableau for creating dashboards, and we integrate those into our Clients portal using JS API. We also use the tool internally across all departments for data analysis and to build self-service reports/dashboards.
  • Tableau is an easy to use yet powerful analytics tool. We have created 100+ dashboards for our clients in a short time.
  • Tableau supports multiple data connectors to pull data from almost any database, and CRM tools. We are able to pull data into Tableau from multiple databases.
  • If your business is looking at a tool to put data in the user's hands and avoid IT requests overhead around reporting, Tableau is the tool.
  • It is not easy to subscribe to dashboards or send e-mails outside of Tableau users. We have to use open source solutions like VizAlerts to make this happen. I believe for a tool like Tableau this should be an out of box solution.
  • Even though Tableau is an easy to use tool, there is still a solid learning curve to get familiar with the use of Tableau. One should invest a good amount of time to get an organization to adapt to Tableau, especially if the organization hasn't already used similar tools already.
  • Tableau Desktop is powerful. Tableau Web Portal provides a lot of the same functionality as Tableau Desktop, yet there are lots of gaps.
  • Data blending is one of the more powerful features. However, this only works with limited data. If you are blending a million rows of a data source, we found it very difficult to blend.
Tableau Server works well in providing a self-service analytics tool. To work with live data, you better have the data in query efficient schema (data warehouse.) Tableau has a good security model. It is easy to integrate with other external tools.
David Vander Leest | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Tableau Server is being used across multiple business platforms at Wells Enterprise. We have used it as our primary analytics tool and as our primary catalyst to provide self-service analytics to all business platforms. Our most active departments currently include Revenue Managment, Finance, Sales, Quality Assurance.
  • Tableau Server is a must-have if you want to easily foster an environment of collaboration of dashboards and analytics built by your end users.
  • Tableau Server has a strong and very flexible security model.
  • Upgrades and maintenance of Tableau Server are fairly painless.
  • Tableau Server provides a one-stop-shop for Tableau Desktop users to find data to work with.
  • Content Discovery can be challenging. Unless users have security to data sources or dashboards, they often don't know they are there.
  • Tableau Server doesn't natively support the ability to send PDF versions of dashboards to users that aren't Tableau Server users. An open source project was developed called VizAlerts that provides a workaround for this, but it should really just be built into the product.
  • There are no phone numbers to call if you need support. The only way to contact Tableau Support is via email. If we have an urgent problem we typically need to reach out to our account executive to get appropriate attention.
Tableau Server does a great job at visualizing data. It's very fast and flexible when dealing with data that comes from multiple sources. It also allows users to quickly pull in other non-federated data that may just live in a spreadsheet or file. Tableau is not necessarily the best fit if you want traditional tabular reports.
October 05, 2018

Tableau Server is great

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
At the moment just a small group is using it. However, we hope after we have more workbooks set up and people see the benefits, the user base will expand to the whole department and then organization. It allows for quick dissemination of the usual data and quick question answering, as well as consistent outputs within our group.
  • Quick access to data in one place that is easy to find
  • Ability for inexperienced users to interact with the data
  • Easy sharing, downloading. Everyone can get what they want.
  • Management of users is easy
  • Editing a workbook in Server has gotten much better, but it would be nice to add even more Desktop-like functionality.
  • Not being able to get rid of the Default project is annoying.
  • When tasks fail, send an email to the admin instead of just a notification in server.
  • Would be great to be able to purchase more licenses within Server.
It works best when the majority of people won't be building workbooks themselves, then the data can still be shared, but for a much lower cost than buying everyone desktop licenses.
Thomas Cook | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Tableau Server across the organization. It started in a business unit (Revenue Cycle, which handles healthcare billing, coding, claims, etc.) to help share information. From there it was shared with other business units, and Revenue Cycle also played a role as a center of excellence and consulting. Five years later it was absorbed by the main IT organization. Now we are in the process of rolling out, formalizing, and organizing that same role.
  • Democratizes information. Any user can share information.
  • The community is supportive.
  • Auditing has always been lacking. The repository has some information, but being able to see what is clicked and what filters are used is needed.
  • The UI has improved over the years, but finding content is still hard. People keep looking at custom portals or embedding content since it is hard to find.
  • The 2018.2 upgrade is onerous and we have been putting it off. Not just because of tabadmin to tsm changes but also because o the updater not making the upgrade seamless. I have to reset every configuration.
  • Backup and restore is slow.
Good for
  • if you want answers and interactivity
  • self-service
Not for:
  • well formatted and paginated pdf reports to print out
  • an Excel replacement
  • printing
September 23, 2018

Tableau Server and IT

Shaheed Ahmad | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is being used for data virtualization.
  • We were using a third party tool to visualize data in SSRS reports. Tableau is very helpful to visualize the data. Tableau visuals are easy to develop and need a very minimal amount of IT support.
  • It would be better if Tableau could work like Microsoft SSRS reports work. Through SSRS , we can call the Stored procedures and pass the parameter, but in Tableau there are a few constraints.
Visuals can be made quickly and with out having much technical background.
September 17, 2018

Tableau - The One Stop Shop

Ryan Akana | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Tableau Server as the main repository for all reporting needs for the entire organization. It is used by all parts of the organization, from IT to Human Resources. About 90% of the data is pulled from our various SQL databases within the organization. With less than 10% of the data coming from external resources such as clients/vendors that are merged into some of our reports.

We also use Tableau to pull data for some of our third-party applications, since Tableau provides so many options for connecting to different data sources. We also use Tableau to create reports for data that resides in Microsoft SharePoint. It has basically become the one stop shop for all our reporting needs. We are looking forward to Tableau adding a scheduling feature to produce extracts from their application someday soon, wink, wink! =-)

I will also say that the software, from an administrator level, is very simple and easy to maintain. There are a few maintenance items that must be completed such as running tab admin - cleanup, since there is so much information that is stored in the cache of the Tableau Server, but you can schedule that to run on its own. It easily integrates with Active Directory, making it easy for us to manage user permissions to the various projects in Tableau. We manage all permissions at the project level and we do not go below that as it becomes a nightmare if you were to do that at the report level. Save yourself some time and headache by managing it at the project level.

Tableau allows you to set up a PROD, QA and DEV environment under one license, which is nice. When we perform an upgrade we will normally copy our PROD server and rename it to a QA server to perform the upgrade. Once the QA environment is upgraded we have a few of our analysts from different parts of the organization perform rigorous testing to ensure reports, functionality, processes, and so on, are working correctly in order to avoid any interruption to the business. Once everything has been signed off by the testers, we perform a back up of our PROD server, and after that we perform the upgrade. We haven't had any issues with our Tableau Servers ever, and we are always on the latest releases for Tableau. We perform two to three upgrades in a year in order to take advantage of all the latest and greatest that Tableau has to offer in order to give you an idea of how easy it is to upgrade to Tableau.
  • Various connections to different data sources all in one product. We have so many different data sources within our organization. Tableau makes it easy for us to have all of our reporting in one place.
  • The ability to leverage the software with the company's growth. We have acquired three companies in the last 3 years. Our company has grown from 800 to 1500 plus employees in that short amount of time. Our Tableau Server is the same from day one when we purchased the software, and that was 6 years ago. We haven't need to buy additional cores as we have eight cores right now and we are doing extremely well for an organization with such large growth.
  • The process of how one manages permissions to the different projects saves IT time and resources.
  • I would really like to have the ability to schedule a report as an extract (TXT, CSV, Excel, PDF, or other) that I can either email, place onto a network share, or other transfer method.)
It is well suited for any type of business or organization. I cannot see anyone or group that would not benefit for a software.
Duran Roberts | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Tableau is being used across our entire organization for data analytics and reporting. The business problem it addresses is our business requirements, meaning us being able to keep a close watch on whether we're hitting our goals that were in the contracts with our clients.
  • Geo-mapping
  • Data drill-down
  • Sharing dashboards online
  • Better ways to move dashboard items, like when all items need to be moved 2 x or y radius to the right, down, etc.
  • More Graphs and Charts
  • Better color customization
  • Maybe a search bar for tools or other items
It's great with complex graphs but it isn't user-friendly for the intermediate user.
September 07, 2018

Experience with Tableau

Sandeep Munagala | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
When I started with GOGO, Tableau was one of the BI tools used across the company, where we have distributed usernames to multiple people for their development or usage. I played a key role to enable Tableau as an Enterprise tool with AD Authentication (OKTA Integration,) which helped hugely increase traffic to the Tableau Server.

Most of the departments like Finance, Supply Chain, Airline customers, etc., use Tableau. The only department that I see we are lagging in is HR. HR is looking forward to automating the dashboards, but due to connectivity issues with Workday (as Tableau doesn't have a Workday connector,) we are unable to automate the dashboards.

The Supply Chain department is very much impressed with the tool, as they have had a lot of work reduced at their end. Also, they have better tracking of the vendor details & gap analysis of the stock purchase, which saves a good amount of money for the company by avoiding penalties for late delivery.
  • Saves plenty of time in Development Work.
  • Better Visualization
  • Flexibility to connect to plenty of databases, if not create your data set, using WDC functionality
  • Easy Server maintenance & very quick releases by Tableau.
  • Workday connectivity will help easy integration for HR department & this will encourage more usage in our company
  • Enabling the XML format of the dashboard will help easily share the dashboard, like in COGNOS
There used to be a lot of limitations in the past for Tableau to integrate with various databases. Now most of the time, if we are not able to find the connector, we are encouraging users to provide the source of data and we are automating using R script to download the dataset on the server and utilize it from the server This is what's happening in our situation where we help users to automate the reports. Tableau is flexible in these situations.

As HR data is a larger chunk of data, we are unable to automate using R Script and have security issues with Workday. This would be a scenario where we'd have to look into alternatives.
September 07, 2018

Tableau Server Review

Gabriel Horwitz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Tableau Server is being used as an analytical solution that provides dashboards and analytics to all functions. It is being used heavily by the data analytics team that provides analytics for teams such as HR, Technology, Sales etc. It addresses business problems by creating visualizations for datasets and allowing analyses to be easily digested.
  • Visualizations
  • Ad-hoc Analysis
  • Self-service analytics
  • Easier functionality for external facing server
Appropriate for self-service and not appropriate for advanced analysis, like regression analyses.
September 04, 2018

My Tableau server review

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Tableau Server is implemented as an enterprise visualization tool across the organization. At present we are migrating the reports/dashboards running in legacy tools. In the future, Tableau will be used to find the insights of the business happenings, which will help us make better decisions, identify business challenges, and learn how to improvise business solutions.
  • Architecture of the Tableau Server is very simple and easy to implement. It can be easily scaled up/scaled down based on the business needs
  • The licensing concepts of user-based/CPU core based is best in standards. We can choose based on our needs
  • Tableau DB connectors. It connects all types of data sources available and it is also made very simple and powerful
  • Too many releases of Tableau Server products. Maybe it could be half yearly so that we can plan for the upgrades of our server as needed
  • Two Node installation should support high availability by making the repository in both nodes
It is suited across all industries. Simple and powerful tool for any business solutions
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