Tableau – Pros and Cons

In our previous post in the Business Intelligence (BI) series, we looked at the basic definitions, features, and advantages of BI in general. In this article, we look at the Tableau BI tool, in particular, and discuss its pros and cons.

Pros

• Excellent user interface: Tableau customers report among the highest scores in terms of breadth and ease of use, along with high business benefits realized. Tableau is the leader in BI tools regarding user interfaces and is recognized as the gold standard for its visual-based data discovery. Gartner’s “Market Share Analysis: Business Intelligence and Analytics Software” report ranked it as the fastest-growing business intelligence and software vendor of 2013, noting the year’s growth rate of more than 80 percent!
• Integration: Tableau integrates well with third-party big data platforms, including Hadoop. Tableau also supports Google BigQuery API– a plus for organizations that want highly detailed analytics.  Tableau provides an extensive roster of native data connections allowing easy integration with data from many sources.
• Mobile Support: The excellent user interface is carried further onto mobile devices. and dashboard reports are automatically mobile-optimized. Compared to other vendors, BI users show the most adoption of mobile features, primarily due to the easy adaptability of the mobile user interface.
• User Forums and Customer Service: Tableau has a very active user and developer community where queries are answered quickly. Tableau also receives excellent reviews in customer service. As per the Gartner report, despite Tableau’s exceptional growth, it has continued to deliver stellar customer experience and business value.  The fact that they have maintained that level of service points to their level of commitment to the customer.
• Low cost: Compared to its big data counterparts, such as Business Objects and Qlik, Tableau is a comparatively low-cost solution.  Having a SaaS option allows organizations to choose a lower initial cost ownership model as well as to be able to scale licensing quickly and easily.
• Easy to upgrade: 9 out of 10 Tableau customers are using the latest release of the software, which hints at the fact that the upgrades are easy to be carried out.

Cons

• Initial Data Preparation:  Companies need to have strong technical skills to build the initial structure.  This is typically done by IT or a consulting organization.   Once the integration with the data source is done, though users with no or very little SQL knowledge can also access the tool to create the dashboards and analyze data.
• Features: Some argue that not all statistical features are provided by Tableau. Business–centric solutions such as Tableau are used broadly throughout the organization, though they do have a narrower set of capabilities.
• Financial Reporting:  Although great for analytical purposes, Tableau and other BI tools cannot replace Financial Reporting applications.   This does require the financial analyst to be proficient in several reporting tools and to use them interchangeably.

As per the Gartner report, customers place a high value on ease of use, satisfaction with product features, sales experience, support, product quality, upgrade experience, user enablement, achievement of business benefits, and supporting a range of analysis for all users. Tableau is gaining momentum because it excels in delivering in all these areas.

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