Tableau - Good Viz, Poor Admin
March 18, 2020

Tableau - Good Viz, Poor Admin

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
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.

Pros

  • Visualizations.
  • Simple deployment method.
  • Easy to navigate interface.

Cons

  • 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.
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.

Tableau Server Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
5.5
Customizable dashboards
7
Report Formatting Templates
4
5.7
Drill-down analysis
6
Formatting capabilities
5
Integration with R or other statistical packages
Not Rated
Report sharing and collaboration
6
7.0
Publish to Web
8
Publish to PDF
6
8.5
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
9
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
8
Predictive Analytics
Not Rated
7.5
Multi-User Support (named login)
7
Role-Based Security Model
8
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
7
Single Sign-On (SSO)
8
6.0
Responsive Design for Web Access
6
Mobile Application
Not Rated
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
6
Not Rated
REST API
Not Rated
Javascript API
Not Rated
iFrames
Not Rated

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