Great software that is easy to use and easy to connect to data
What do you like best about the product?
The easy, drag and drop methods to creating sophisticated reports from your data. This software is easy to link to your database live so that you can access updated information every day as opposed to refreshing data. The data visualization is clear and aesthetically pleasing. There are many different charts that are easy to set up and are useful to use in dashboards. The story features is of great use for presentations and for organizing your data in a meaningful way. The trending and forecasting modeling is easy to use and to evaluate. It is easy to extract data from the model information.
What do you dislike about the product?
Working with time series data can take a lot of data cleansing before hand. Also, it can be difficult to make data relationship links that work in the direction of your intended use.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Quickly and accurately providing interactive reports. We have realized the benefit of being able to create dashboards quickly for our team to view.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Connect to your data live. This helps keep up to date analysis without having to refresh data manually.
Wave can be difficult to set up if you have a lot of salesforce customizations
What do you like best about the product?
The visual effects are very good and that sold us and our executives.
What do you dislike about the product?
It's not plug and play if you have a lot of customizations in your salesforce instance. If so, make sure you have an administrator or 3rd party consultant who has the analytical experience to set up analytics software.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Ability to analyze sales process and deals to improve productivity and pin point areas for improvement
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Check how your salesforce instance is setup before considering Wave. If you have a lot of customizations, hire a 3rd party consultant or go with another product like tableau.
Visual Reports
What do you like best about the product?
1) stunning dashboards
2) easy metrics
3) easy attributes
4) easy color coding
5) good visualizations
6) Different functions like Avg, Sum, count
What do you dislike about the product?
1) on fly reports
2) less visualizations
3) limited data
4) not supporting mobile dashboards
5) huge licence cost
6) limited map widgets
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
1) creating dashboards on fly with in 10 -20 mints
2) taking data from different datasources
3) creating mobile dashboard
4) testing data with static reports
Recommendations to others considering the product:
easy to use, easy to understand, easy to learn
Best visualization on the market
What do you like best about the product?
Powerful data visualization tool, many options for data connections and great ecosystem of partners.
What do you dislike about the product?
Desktop is a great tool, but when looking at Server and other products, economics become challenging or unsustainable.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Combine data from many sources, visualize data to make it easy to understand.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Understand the different options - cloud, server, desktop in thinking about long-term strategy.
Best BI Analytic Visualization Tool Hands Down
What do you like best about the product?
The ease of use and incredible data visualization. Enables me to "see" my data!
What do you dislike about the product?
Absolutely nothing! Tableau has more bells and whistles than any one could want in a data visualization tool!
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We're able to clearly see our data and reveal the stories behind the data including correlations between revenue and customer satisfaction.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Take the appropriate training provided to save yourself a lot of frustration.
I was shocked by the power of this tool.
What do you like best about the product?
The application takes very complex sets of data from a variety of different sources, and consolidates them into one easily analyzable view. The program also surprises you with extra capabilities, like the ability to map data to geographic points for a map view.
What do you dislike about the product?
There is sometimes a disconnect when connecting datasets from Excel or other legacy applications to Tableau.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We are working on global business planning and strategy for sales, and Tableau allows us to easily visualize our analyses for effective presentations.
Easy reporting and intuitive access
What do you like best about the product?
Very friendly to connect data sources from files, databases, cubes to any other sources.
What do you dislike about the product?
Mobile availability is something that is missing
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Avoiding IT teams to build reports to connect to data
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.
Long term fan, unmatched all in one package
What do you like best about the product?
My favourite feature is the fast drag and drop ability. Yes it's basically like the Excel Pivot Tables when you take it down to basics, but it's just far more powerful and feature rich. My favourite feature is the world maps. This is what enabled me to get Tableau a foot in the door at my org. Showing execs their metrics across the globe visually for the first time just inspired "wow" moments.
What do you dislike about the product?
While some of the features are very good, and a lot of products don't have them, they could do with some extra kick e.g. look at some of the Microsoft GeoFlow work. Not saying 3D globes are the most ideal presentation for data, but it's revolution rather than Tableau's gradual evolution. Last thing I don't like is that Tableau seem's to have to be hacked to get most work done. Out of the box it's amazingly feature rich, but to get a lot of things working, you have to do work arounds, programming, and things that don't generally fall under the category of "accessible".
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Make sure you create a great and continual relationship with your account manager. Ours has been incredibly helpful, offering extended trials, on-site demo's, free consultancy and so on. Additionally, make sure your data quality and systems are in order before purchasing. Tableau is more forgiving than most software, but you can't edit data in Tableau so you need to get it right first time. Finally, because Excel is usually the #1 product and people find change incredibly hard, make sure you have an effective strategy for keeping the momentum going internally. It's far too easy for users to forget to use Tableau and keep to what they know.
