January 16, 2018

Tableau Server Review: "Show your data with pride!"

Sr. Business Intelligence Developer

Manheim - A Cox Automotive companyAutomotive, 10,001+ employees

Score 10 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Tableau Server is used within my organization to present users with an easily understandable visualization of our very large data sets. These data sets include web log information, customer information, and transaction information. By using Tableau, we are able to present this data in a number of formats including tabular format as well as various charts and graphs. Because the charts and graphs are interactive, the user experience has been received very well.

Pros and Cons

Tableau's visual presentation of data is unsurpassed
Tableau Server is easily integrated into various database and technologies such as Business Objects
Because the Tableau user community is so large, we are able to obtain answers to the majority of our questions through news feeds and online user groups and communities.

On the lowest level, many of Tableau's features and strengths are too complicated for the typical end-user
IT expertise is required to fully implement Tableau Server
Tableau Server is very weak in source-code versioning.

Alternatives Considered

We find Tableau Server much more flexible and powerful for the developer. The resulting dashboard and interactive charts far surpass those of Business Objects. IBM Cognos is much too restrictive in its ability to present data visualizations in a way that is easily integrated into both web platforms and mobile applications.

Data Integration

We have multiple data sources from SQL, to Oracle, to Hadoop and Tableau provides connectors to allow native connection to each of these. Our company embraces a large number of various technologies and Tableau's ability to connect to each of these is a requirement. This connectivity is one of the driving factors behind our decision to choose Tableau.

Collaboration and Sharing

The ability to present data in the way we desire, to the end-point we desire is a requirement for us Tableau allows us to easily present our data either automatically through scheduled distribution or interactively through a web or mobile interface is pivotal in our maintaining the role as the leader in our industry.

Other Software Used

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence (BI) Platform, TIBCO Jaspersoft, Amazon Web Services

Likelihood to Recommend

- Tableau Server is particularly strong in the creation and presentation of dashboards
- I would not recommend Tableau out-of-the-box for use by an end-user

BI Platform ()

Supported Data Sources ()

BI Standard Reporting

Pixel Perfect reports

Customizable dashboards

Report Formatting Templates

Ad-hoc Reporting

Drill-down analysis

Formatting capabilities

Integration with R or other statistical packages

Not Rated

Report sharing and collaboration