I'd classify Lyra as a custom visualization design surface while tableau is more of a data exploration tool. Quite different I think in both use an intent. Tab

I'd classify Lyra as a custom visualization design surface while tableau is more of a data exploration tool. Quite different I think in both use an intent. Tableau is great for quickly pulling in data and building towards pretty standard charts, then playing around within them to explore the data. It drives you towards relatively simple charts that most people can understand and that's a good thing because most of it's users need significant guidance. And tableau is also a dashboarding platform, but I'm assuming you're talking about just the main visualization builder. Lyra on the other hand is more of a photoshop like tool for producing unique data graphics. That's where the comparison to custom visualizations in d3 makes sense. d3 isn't about building standard charts (though you can do so) it's a framework for building all sorts of custom rich interactive visualizations. You can do some data exploration in Lyra, but a more constrained tool like tableau, spotfire, etc is easier for that purpose. Where Lyra is interesting IMO is in it's ability to make more custom visualizations without coding - seems like using some kind of grammar of graphics definition under the hood. Programming languages/frameworks like R, julia, pandas, d3 etc are of course the most flexible tools but they've got a high barrier of entry for a lot of folks who need to produce visualizations and explore data. For the most part this level of vis customization has been restricted to writing a program - lyra feels a lot like a nicer visual ggplot designer in R - so it's nice to see someone making an attempt at bringing some of these capabilities into a gui.