Tableau Cloud vs. Tableau Server

If you're using Tableau as the primary BI tool, then Tableau Cloud is well suited to publish and share the results with a wide(r) audience. It is well suited for various degrees of self-service proficiency, from pure consumers of analytical work to more advanced users who can use web editing for smaller or larger adjustments, and even for desktop power users who will publish their work to Tableau Cloud. It has many good ways to organize the content and make it easily accessible via search, favorites, folders, collections ("playlists for your data"), or history ("recents"). It might not be ideally suited if there are many on-prem sources to be used (even though there are options to connect them) or if you have very special requirements regarding custom server setup, which is limited in a shared cloud environment like Tableau Cloud.

Incentivized

Tableau Server is well suited for a data warehouse build and handling big data. Tableau data aggregation, transformation, clustering capability is powerful and easy to implement. The choice of charts and visualisation tools is outstanding. Customisation and dynamic data visualisation capability is superb. The user interface takes some time getting used to.

Incentivized

• Tableau Online is completely cloud based and that's why the reports and dashboards are accessible even on the go. One doesn't always need to access the office laptop to access the reports.
• The visualizations are interactive and one can quickly change the level at which they want to view the information. For example, one person might be more interested in looking at the country level performances rather than client level. This is intuitive and one doesn't need to create multiple reports for the same.
• The feature to ask questions in plain vanilla English language is great and helpful. For quick adhoc fact checks one can simply type what they are looking for and the Natural Language Programming algorithms under the hood parse the query, interpret it and then fetch the results accordingly in a visual form.

Incentivized

• It's good at doing what it is designed for: accessing visualizations without having to download and open a workbook in Tableau Desktop. The latter would be a very inefficient method for sharing our metrics, so I am glad that we have Tableau Server to serve this function.
• Publishing to Tableau Server is quick and easy. Just a few clicks from Tableau Desktop and a few seconds of publishing through an average speed network, and the new visualizations are live!
• Seeing details on who has viewed the visualization and when. This is something particularly useful to me for trying to drive adoption of some new pages, so I really appreciate the granularity provided in Tableau Server

Incentivized

• Can be a steep learning curve for new users
• Modeling and building algorithms aren't always intuitive and take some testing/retesting to ensure it's working as it should
• Inability to integrate easily with our HRIS platform. Reports are pulled from HRIS at various intervals and uploaded into Tableau

Incentivized

• While it took little time for our data analysts to crank out visualizations, it did take some time(longer than I expected) for our technology operations team to configure the server to share the sizes.
• The server update process is rather cumbersome -- requires a full uninstall/re-install.
• Again, while it took our data analysts next to no time to start creating, I've been in other organizations that have struggled with the feature-rich interface and complexity of the Tableau client. So, it requires the right personnel, with dedicated time, to fully leverage the tool.

Incentivized

The tool's capacity to handle complex data sources.

Incentivized

It simply is used all the time by more and more people. Migrating to something else would involve lots of work and lots of training. The renewal fee being fair, it simply isn't worth migrating to a different tool for now.

Incentivized

From an end user perspective Tableau Online is overall very easy to navigate once you get used to it, my only complaint is that when expanding or contracting a graph, the "plus" and "minus" on the bottom left is sometimes hidden, and should always be visible. From a builder perspective, it can take some getting used to but the sheer depth of customization makes it all worthwhile.

Incentivized

User experience is the most important factor to consider whenever considering capabilities for non-technical business users. If the learning curve is so steep business users must be advanced users to be productive, you hit the wall of diminishing returns, this is exceptionally true when it comes to analyzing data. Transforming data analysts into BI development experts shifts the focus of the analyst from analyzing data to mastering software. Tableau does a masterful job at minimizing the technology and maximizing the users understanding of their data.

Our instance of Tableau Server was hosted on premises (I believe all instances are) so if there were any outages it was normally due to scheduled maintenance on our end. If the Tableau server ever went down, a quick restart solved most issues

While there are definitely cases where a user can do things that will make a particular worksheet or dashboard run slowly, overall the performance is extremely fast. The user experience of exploratory analysis particularly shines, there's nothing out there with the polish of Tableau.

I have no had a lot of experience with the support team, but I know that it’s hardly necessary for the end-user to contact. Usually, the main questions I get are on how to read a certain dashboard or how to navigate to a certain place. Overall, the simplicity of the software is what helps out with less need for support.

Incentivized

I think the folks that work in support are generally pretty good at what they do (when you get them on a WebEx). But the process of reporting issues to them and waiting for a response (via email only) is a hassle. I never understood why you can't just call them up and discuss the issues with them. It would take a handful of email exchanges before they would agree to a WebEx session. That was frustrating.

In our case, they hired a private third party consultant to train our dept. It was extremely boring and felt like it dragged on. Everything I learned was self taught so I was not really paying attention. But I do think that you can easily spend a week on the tool and go over every nook and cranny. We only had the consultant in for a day or two.

The sales consultants do an amazing job of introducing the tool and its capabilities. They are also helpful in explaining the layout of the desktop client and its different functionality. Keep in mind that they use a sample data source (MS Excel) with a very small amount of data to show off what it can do. What you have to remember is that you are buying the tool so that you can connect to large amounts of data (and possibly blend data together from different databases).

I wasn't part of the implementation team

Incentivized

Implementation was over the phone with the vendor, and did not go particularly well. Again, think this was our fault as our integration and IT oversight was poor, and we made errors. Would they have happened had a vendor been onsite? Not sure, probably not, but we probably wouldn't have paid for that either

When weighing the pros and cons of Tableau Online vs. SAP ERP, two key considerations emerged as clear winners. SAP ERP is a powerful data purification tool, but it doesn't measure up to the competition in terms of data presentation. When it came to data visualization and analytics, Tableau was our go-to tool. The price is the second consideration. Tableau, on the other hand, was the more cost-effective option for our requirements.

Incentivized

Looker and Tableau are quite similar products. I think Tableau's ability to view data visually is more comprehensive. The different breakdowns in UTM level versus first touch and last touch are shown in a visual format, making it much easier to view and interpret the results. Tableau also has faster load times compared to Looker for larger datasets.

Incentivized

• No need to hire a team of developers to deliver our product, a huge cost savings for a start up company.
• The ability to work off data extracts allows us to "set in and forget it" so to speak, which allows our customers to use the system during business hours with almost no cost in terms of database usage.
• It has been a great internal tool for dashboarding company metrics and helping us track goals and implement solutions to meet those goals through efficient data analysis.

Incentivized

• Tableau Server has had a huge positive impact. It has allowed us to quickly distribute complex dashboards across the company
• Tableau Server has allowed us to easily manage our entire employee base at the company and control the dashboards they view and interact with

Incentivized