I use Tableau in a jewelry company to analyze sales and service inventory.
Tableau [Private Offer Only]
Carahsoft Technology Corp.External reviews
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With a straightforward initial setup phase in place, the tool is useful for businesses to analyze their sales and service inventory
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
I can't comment on the valuable features of Tableau. I am familiar with some of the other tools, but I can't point out one specific big feature of Tableau.
What needs improvement?
A specific thing in Tableau is that I have looked at how to add pictures to the reports. I don't have the ability in Tableau to create a tooltip and see the picture of a piece of jewelry or watch that is a best seller.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Tableau for over five years. I don't remember the version of the solution I am using, but I feel it is the upgraded version. Maybe the server is not the latest one, which might be behind by a year. I am a customer of the solution.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Tableau does break down a little bit. The server version of Tableau doesn't allow you to see what is going on, making it a part of Tableau that is not great. Tableau's server version doesn't provide the ability to extract the information to see why the reports or dashboard didn't run properly. When you refresh in Tableau, you can't see what it's doing, and nothing happens since it doesn't show you what's going on, and then Tableau gets fixed all of a sudden.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
One of my biggest problems is getting all the users to use Tableau, but that's not a specific problem of the tool alone since it is one of the most common problems among BI tools.
I only have ten Tableau licenses that are used in my company.
How are customer service and support?
I have only sought some local support within Israel for Tableau. The only way to solve the problems in Tableau is through checking on forums.
How was the initial setup?
Tableau is deployed on-premises.
Tableau's initial setup was straightforward. When you need to make complicated dashboards, that can be very difficult in Tableau, but the initial setup was very quick. Connecting the data sources was very easy in Tableau.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing for Tableau is the same as the other products in the market. I haven't checked Tableau's price recently, but I don't think it is a factor when choosing the tool.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing Tableau, I had checked QlikView, which is now Qlik Sense, and I preferred the way Tableau works over Qlik Sense. Tableau made me feel independent and not dependent on programmers, making it more user-friendly.
What other advice do I have?
I would look at Microsoft Power BI. I am unsure if I would push Tableau since it is not a widely used tool. I don't know if others in the field of jewelry use Tableau.
Overall, I rate the solution between a seven and eight out of ten.
Substantial amount of customization available, stable, and scalable
What is our primary use case?
We use Tableau for the all kind of dashboards.
How has it helped my organization?
Tableau as a BI solution provides a platform to develop user-friendly, story telling dashboards, which provide insights to help management take decisions.
What is most valuable?
The solution has a lot of customization when comparing to Microsoft BI.
What needs improvement?
The customization requires a lot of effort and should be simplified. The performance could be better. When comparing the performance of Tableau to other solutions, such as Microsoft BI, they are not as good.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Tableau for approximately four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability is very good.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Tableau has good scaling capabilities.
We have approximately 30 to 40 users using this solution in my organization.
How are customer service and support?
The support is good for Tableau. However, if we ask for a certain feature they will not entertain us, unless other customers are also asking for the same feature.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We previously were using Microsoft BI and we switched to Tableau because of the increased level of customization it provides. Microstrategy can also be a considerable alternative.
How was the initial setup?
The installation is complicated and took us approximately four hours.
What about the implementation team?
It would be best to use an integrator or other professional assistance for the implementation.
We have approximately two engineers that handle the maintenance of the solution.
What was our ROI?
Our management can take decisions based on insights provided by Tableau, which are smart and help us reduce costs and data issues.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
There is a license for the use of this solution and it is on a per-user basis. The server is free but the users you have to pay for.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We performed a POC before going with Tableau, we tried Power BI because Power BI is competing against tableau. But to use Power BI at its full potential, you need the Power BI cloud edition, which our organization cannot go with. So the obvious choice was to go with Tableau.
What other advice do I have?
Tableau is very good, but customers have to understand the requirements of hardware and software the way Tableau works. If they have some requirements that Tableau cannot meet, they will understand how to do it in an alternate way.
I rate Tableau an eight out of ten.
Tableau provides very fast interactive visual analysis.
I do use both Tableau and QlikView. Although very different, I really like both solutions. They belong to the new BI generation known as Interactive Visual Analytics.
In my opinion, QlikView has a more intuitive interface for regular users or executives that are not technical experts but the development side is a little more complex. Up to version 12 QlikView did not provide drag & drop features.
If a user wanted to see something not included in the application the new object had to be created by a power user or developer because Qlikview's scripting has somewhat of a learning curve.
On the positive side, QlikView's scripting is a great asset as it functions as an ETL allowing the integration of hundreds of different data sources into the same visual app.
Another feature that’s extremely useful is Qlik’s proprietary Associative Model that allows the users to visualize data relationships that exist as well as those that do not.
Tableau on the other hand is a lot easier to use for developers, analysts or power users who need to connect, manipulate and visualize data rather quickly. While this makes Tableau a better fit for the more analytical crowd, it may not be as appealing or intuitive to the regular or casual business users as QlikView is.
Tableau has full pivot, drag & drop and drill down capabilities that are great for developers or power users. They can rotate measures and dimensions and graph them instantly using visualization best practices as suggested by the "show-me" feature.
Tableau’s provides a forecasting function and the capability to connect with the open source statistical program R to include predictive modeling.
Tableau includes a Data Interpreter that makes data cleansing, column splitting and crosstab pivoting very intuitive. Tableau’s latest versions allow joining tables from different data bases and have included the hyper data engine that provides 5 times faster query speeds.
The latest version includes "relationships" with an algorithm that makes
the necessary data connections automatically with no need to perform joins or add Level of Detail scripts (LOD) to eliminate duplicates. However one can still create joins to override relationships if for some reason it was necessary.
Also when opening older files containing joins they are kept under a
"migrated data base" or the migrated joins can be deleted to be replaced with simpler automatic relationships. Tableau releases updated versions once a quarter.
Both Tableau and Qlik continue to be excellent. They are positioned at the top of the leader's quadrant in Gartner's 2022 Magic Quadrant report for BI and Analytics platforms.
In my experience the choice depends on the fit with the company culture and the users' profile.
Qlik introduction of their new platform called “Qlik Sense” provides intuitive drag & drop functionality to create visualizations. At this point Qlik Sense Desktop is free for personal and small group of cloud business users that need to easily develop analytic applications on their own - with virtually no IT intervention.
Recently Tableau has moved to a subscription based model but still offers free products: Tableau Public and Tableau Reader to ease the user entry process.
It certainly seems like Qlik Sense is an attempt to regain some of the impressive growth Tableau has enjoyed during the last few years playing in the truly self-service visual BI segment.
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