Item: Tableau Cloud
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Tableau Online

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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 and Cons

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.

Alternatives Considered

Looker, Periscope Data and Domo

I would say that Tableau Online has the most sophisticated capabilities, but not the most straightforward UI or path to learn and operate within it quickly. It felt more technical than the other products I used and did not look as good, but I also found that it could answer a much wider variety of business needs than the others. Only after using Tableau Online a lot for a year+ did I come to see this though.

Other Software Used

Arm Treasure Data, Amazon Redshift, Slack

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.

Tableau Cloud Feature Ratings

Comments

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Great if the investment and know-how is there!