A BI tool that's unlike most others out there
January 25, 2018
A BI tool that's unlike most others out there
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Tableau Server
It was not sufficient for us to create a Tableau file that could be read by the free reader and sent to our customers. We wanted the ability to provide our visualizations online without the data ever leaving our control. The only way to do so was to set up a Tableau Server instance and then provide our model onto the server for access by our customers.
- It provided a way for us to host our visualizations and avoid distributing out the data.
- We could manage external users on this system.
- We were able to create one model but then limit which users could see various "views" of the data based upon what product was purchased.
- The licensing model was very expensive and required us to continually buy more seats all of the time. Long run, it's best for very small teams or when you get over the ~100 user mark, you can buy a server license which avoids the per-seat issue. Keep in mind that you still need to purchase the Tableau Desktop license for each of your data scientists/engineers who will be developing the visualizations ON TOP of these costs.
- We had to contract with a 3rd party to establish and manage an IIS server since that is the requirement for Tableau Server. It was unlike anything else that we were using.
- Tableau will tell you that the license grants you the ability to have three instances (dev, staging, prod), but in reality you likely won't use more than dev & prod, as the workflow was rather awkward for us.
The choice to use Tableau Server is really made for you if you already have adopted Tableau Desktop. If you're focused on an on-premise solution, Tableau is probably the way that you'll have to go. Looker and Mode are cloud-based (so is Tableau Online) and offer a true SaaS-based approach. Mode is decidedly more developer-centric from my perspective; if your users are not SQL experts the learning curve is pretty high. Looker offers a very compelling data modeling layer and is geared more towards open-ended data exploration. Tableau can take pre-processed, structured data (like a CSV) and make it look amazing. You'll really need to consider your own specific needs to evaluate what's best for you based upon what your users need to do.