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Tableau is a visualization software that you can bolt on top of many different data sources, from spreadsheets to BI tools and even AWS RedShift to get awesome

Tableau is a visualization software that you can bolt on top of many different data sources, from spreadsheets to BI tools and even AWS RedShift to get awesome looking dashboards and interactive visuals. They are/were extremely popular with many sales organizations for internal dashboarding and even some media outlets used their stuff for public websites. Sad to see this state of things for them, as the product was true good at one point. That said, I have not touched it in 3-4 years, so not sure how competitive it is now.

floppydisk 11y ago
They still are popular, especially in the government contracting world. It's almost a mandatory requirement their business analysts use Tableau when creating dashboards for clients.
cscharenberg 11y ago
The product is awesome. I made some really neat visualizations and analyses with it during an MBA project using the 15-day trial. But it's ridiculously expensive - $1000 per year with some real limitations on how many data sources you can connect. If I could dabble with it for $50/year I would. $1000 though? That limits their market tremendously to big companies only. It's hard enough to get an $80 tool approved. -- Looks like they give it free for students now, which is cool: https://www.tableau.com/academic/student https://www.tableau.com/academic/student. But after learning it, there's no path to bring the software with them when they move to actual companies, because of the cost.
- TheLogothete 11y ago
  Tableau is an enterprise product and it's one the cheaper ones out there. You can't offer that kind of a product for $50/year.
  - CamperBob2 11y ago
    You can't, but Microsoft can. That's what the rest of the world might call a "bad omen."
  - greggyb 11y ago
    Power BI, Microsoft's answer to it is $10/mo - yes, not $50/year, but a lot closer to that than to $1,000. The vis layer doesn't need to be expensive.
    - TheLogothete 11y ago
      PowerBI has nowhere near the capabilities of Tableau. On top of that, PowerBI is subsidized in order to funnel customers for SQL Server.
      - WhitneyLand 11y ago
        What's are some of the biggest things missing in Power BI compared to Tableau?
        greggyb 11y ago
        Tableau offers a richer end-user customization interface. Power BI offers custom visuals, but these are definitely developer-only at this point. The behavior you get from the baked in pieces is more rigidly defined than that from Tableau (monthly releases address these things one item at a time). Out of the box mapping is miles better in Tableau. Overall Tableau is more fully-featured than Power BI. Tableau aims to be a complete BI presentation layer. Power BI is positioned as the self-service and personalized consumption component as a part of a larger BI presentation layer. Microsoft would prefer that the entirety of the BI stack be made up of their technologies, but Power BI can consume other data sources, and its reports can be embedded in other apps, so it fits into other technologies as well. We could go feature-by-feature and Tableau would win the majority of presentation sophistication bullets (more fine-grained control of display, filtering, interactions - richer collection of built-in visualizations). The differentiator for Power BI is more on the self-service end. Personalized dashboards (dashboard and report are two distinct concepts in Power BI) can be trivially created from published reports. Customized reports can easily be extended from published reports and datasets. There's a strong collaboration framework based on Office 365 groups and with lessons learned from SharePoint. There is also a pretty seamless upgrade path. Power Pivot models can currently be promoted to SSAS, and the expectation is for the same to be possible with Power BI models (all the same backing database technology). I hate to be so vague, but there's a lot to both products. I'd be happy to dive deeper into some specific cases if you've got questions.
vailripper 11y ago
We're using them for a client, and pretty much every client I've worked with lately is using them. I think they'll be just fine, it's still a good product.
- sologoub 11y ago
  The AWS RedShift integration was a really good move, as one of the reasons we did not adopt them at my previous company was the requirement that the data set fit in memory of the server. With RedShift, you offload the actual crunching to the db that can handle billions of rows, and then visualize the results.

floppydisk 11y ago

They still are popular, especially in the government contracting world. It's almost a mandatory requirement their business analysts use Tableau when creating dashboards for clients.

cscharenberg 11y ago

The product is awesome. I made some really neat visualizations and analyses with it during an MBA project using the 15-day trial. But it's ridiculously expensive - $1000 per year with some real limitations on how many data sources you can connect. If I could dabble with it for $50/year I would. $1000 though? That limits their market tremendously to big companies only. It's hard enough to get an $80 tool approved. -- Looks like they give it free for students now, which is cool: https://www.tableau.com/academic/student https://www.tableau.com/academic/student. But after learning it, there's no path to bring the software with them when they move to actual companies, because of the cost.

TheLogothete 11y ago
Tableau is an enterprise product and it's one the cheaper ones out there. You can't offer that kind of a product for $50/year.
- CamperBob2 11y ago
  You can't, but Microsoft can. That's what the rest of the world might call a "bad omen."
- greggyb 11y ago
  Power BI, Microsoft's answer to it is $10/mo - yes, not $50/year, but a lot closer to that than to $1,000. The vis layer doesn't need to be expensive.
  - TheLogothete 11y ago
    PowerBI has nowhere near the capabilities of Tableau. On top of that, PowerBI is subsidized in order to funnel customers for SQL Server.
    - WhitneyLand 11y ago
      What's are some of the biggest things missing in Power BI compared to Tableau?
      - greggyb 11y ago
        Tableau offers a richer end-user customization interface. Power BI offers custom visuals, but these are definitely developer-only at this point. The behavior you get from the baked in pieces is more rigidly defined than that from Tableau (monthly releases address these things one item at a time). Out of the box mapping is miles better in Tableau. Overall Tableau is more fully-featured than Power BI. Tableau aims to be a complete BI presentation layer. Power BI is positioned as the self-service and personalized consumption component as a part of a larger BI presentation layer. Microsoft would prefer that the entirety of the BI stack be made up of their technologies, but Power BI can consume other data sources, and its reports can be embedded in other apps, so it fits into other technologies as well. We could go feature-by-feature and Tableau would win the majority of presentation sophistication bullets (more fine-grained control of display, filtering, interactions - richer collection of built-in visualizations). The differentiator for Power BI is more on the self-service end. Personalized dashboards (dashboard and report are two distinct concepts in Power BI) can be trivially created from published reports. Customized reports can easily be extended from published reports and datasets. There's a strong collaboration framework based on Office 365 groups and with lessons learned from SharePoint. There is also a pretty seamless upgrade path. Power Pivot models can currently be promoted to SSAS, and the expectation is for the same to be possible with Power BI models (all the same backing database technology). I hate to be so vague, but there's a lot to both products. I'd be happy to dive deeper into some specific cases if you've got questions.

vailripper 11y ago

We're using them for a client, and pretty much every client I've worked with lately is using them. I think they'll be just fine, it's still a good product.

sologoub 11y ago
The AWS RedShift integration was a really good move, as one of the reasons we did not adopt them at my previous company was the requirement that the data set fit in memory of the server. With RedShift, you offload the actual crunching to the db that can handle billions of rows, and then visualize the results.