Tableau - Good Viz, Poor Admin
March 18, 2020
Tableau - Good Viz, Poor Admin
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Tableau Server
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.
- Introduced concept of corporate reporting.
- Provided a single point of access for most critical business data.
- Poor query performance against Tableau extracts has caused usage to wane over time.
Today, if my shop is largely Microsoft-centric, I would be hard pressed to choose a product other than Power BI. Tableau was the visualization leader for years, but Microsoft has caught up with them in many areas, and surpassed them in some. Its ability to source, transform, and model data is superior to Tableau. Tableau still has the lead in some visualizations, but Power BI's rise is evidenced by its ever-increasing position in the leadership section of the Gartner Magic Quadrant.