Tableau Online
by Tableau Software | Founded 2003, Mountain View, CA
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What is Tableau Online?
Industry Specialties: Serves all industries
Tableau Online is a fully-hosted SaaS that enables users to perform self-service data analytics through the cloud from any device, anywhere at any time. It can create advanced visualizations that draw data from a variety of database sources and convert that data into understandable results. By creating and exploring interactive dashboards, users are easily able to discover insights and share them with others, empowering all members of an organization to make data-informed decisions.
Each deployment requires at least one creator membership, which includes the desktop version, prep builder and a creator license for online. Users can acquire additional licenses for explorers and viewers, with a minimum of five explorers or 100 viewers. Subscriptions are priced per user per month and billed annually. Enterprise pricing with volume discounts where applicable is also available. The vendor also offers a data management add-on that enhances data preparation and governance.
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Tableau Online Pricing
Based on our most recent analysis, Tableau Online pricing and cost details are described here:
- Price
- $$$$$
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- Pricing Model
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- Free Trial
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Tableau Online Benefits and Insights
Why use Tableau Online?
Key differentiators & advantages of Tableau Online
- Harness the Cloud: Accessible any time, anywhere and from any mobile device or internet browser. Easily share analytics with others both inside and outside of the organization, enhancing collaboration.
- Ease of Use: Analyze data through a user-friendly UI, intuitive drag-and-drop actions and natural language processing.
- Fast Implementation: Skip the long setup that comes with an on-premise solution like Tableau Desktop and get started right away. Ready to roll out in hours and doesn’t require server configuration, IT intervention, upgrades or any other administrative tasks.
- Scalability: Provides the flexibility for companies to buy exactly what they need and scale up or down with licenses as needed.
- Tailored To Your Team: Empower everyone to do their jobs better with the proper access to data according to their role and license. Organizations pay only for the functionality they want.
- Data-Informed Decision Making: Uncover trends and patterns in data through artificial intelligence and machine learning and highlight it for analysts to examine. Discover insights visually and make decisions backed by data.
- Self-Service BI: Drive data literacy throughout an organization. Everyone gets more from their data through a self-service model — drill-down, filter and blend data through interactive dashboards to dig deeper for answers.
- Everything in Real-Time: Set data to refresh manually or on an automatic schedule to ensure that all information is up-to-date. Share insights with others at the click of a button, keeping everyone in the loop.
- Direct Web Authoring: Provide analyst teams with a centralized workspace and enable those without Tableau Desktop to create data visualizations based on data source connections. Grant administrators extensive projects and content permissions to ensure strict data governance.
- Hassle-Free Upkeep: All updates roll out automatically, ensuring everyone has the latest version and features. Provides data security and IT staff to maintain the servers, saving valuable time and money by taking care of all hardware and maintenance. Reduces the number of computers and Tableau Desktop deployments a business needs to manage.
- Free Trial: Try out any of Tableau’s deployment options, including Online, through a free 14-day trial that includes the data management add-on.
Industry Expertise
Tableau offers a versatile suite of business intelligence solutions for customers in all industries, including financial services, IT, healthcare, retail, government, higher education, insurance, manufacturing, travel, energy and resources, the automotive industry and more.
Tableau Online Reviews
Average customer reviews & user sentiment summary for Tableau Online:
5306 reviews
Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews
Based on an aggregate of Tableau Online reviews taken from the sources above, the following pros & cons have been curated by a SelectHub Market Analyst.
Pros
Cons
Researcher's Summary:
Tableau Online is a strong BI offering that serves as one of several options from Tableau, well known for its powerful data visualization tools. Many users would agree with this sentiment, citing its drag-and-drop capabilities, customization options and wide range of visualization options. Its intuitive UI invites users of all skill levels to analyze and work with data, though additional training is necessary to make use of the platform, with dashboard customization being one example where many users said they needed IT support. It establishes a private workspace on the web for users to analyze and work with data, with most users agreeing that it empowers cross-departmental collaboration, allowing for smoother communication between analysts and end-users. Accessible from both web browsers and mobile devices, it moves data analysis away from the desktop and enables users to bring their data wherever they go - a feature highly praised in recent reviews. Data source connectivity also rated highly with users who found it easy to connect to major data sources, though some noted that connections to unsupported sources were tricky.
The most significant issue for most Tableau Online users is data refreshes - users said that they needed to publish new data to their site manually in order to refresh the information, a process that was both time consuming and damaging to data accuracy. For these reasons, Tableau Online struggles with real-time data and is better suited for historical data analysis, according to several reviews. In addition, the platform experiences performance issues, loading slowly when users filter or refresh data in particular. Others express concern that its licensing model is too restrictive and cost-prohibitive, requiring a minimum of 100 licenses for certain roles; several reviewers said that the ROI is simply not there for smaller to mid-sized businesses.
Overall, Tableau Online offers many features that can help companies spread data literacy throughout their organization with relative ease of use, but may not be a good fit for all user needs.
Key Features
- Data Connectivity: Browse published data sources on the organization’s Tableau site, upload Excel or text-based data sources directly to browsers, use connectors to connect to data in a cloud database or server, or make use of dashboard starters to connect to common enterprise solutions.
- Dashboard Starters: Instead of creating data visualizations from scratch, connect accounts to Tableau and in just a few clicks, retrieve data from enterprise solutions already in use to automatically populate pre-designed dashboards. Currently provides Dashboard Starters for Salesforce, Oracle Eloqua, Marketo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator and ServiceNow.
- Tableau Site: Supplies a private workspace on the web to publish workbooks and collaborate with colleagues. Tableau sites integrate with Tableau Desktop; publish insights directly to the site from desktop at any time to share with others.
- Role-Based Permissions: Managers can set role-based access to individual dashboards or the system as a whole. Keep tabs on access to the site, views and dashboards based on license type, site role and content permissions.
- Web Authoring: Explorers — create and edit workbooks directly on the website, utilizing published data sources to generate and tailor views, dashboards and stories. Creator licensees, do even more — connect to new data sources, prepare data and use Ask Data and Dashboard Starters to jumpstart analysis.
- Ask Data: Quickly build data visualizations by typing analytical questions in natural language; interact with data and receive answers in the form of automatically generated graphics. From there, customize and adjust the fields and visualization types as needed.
- Geo Visualization: View data geographically to gain location-based insights and improve transparency into business operations. Connect the solution to Google Maps for exact positioning or utilize its built-in geographic features to plot data on a map.
- Multi-Table Data Analysis: With Relationships, combine data from multiple tables for analysis. Unlike joins, relationships ensure more accurate analysis by preserving values and the native level of detail in data, instead of duplicating it. Automatic, dynamic and context-aware, relationships create custom, flexible data sources that can be easily defined, changed, used and reused for data visualizations or analytic flows.
- Data Exploration: Dig deeper into data; drill down, focus on particular regions of dense data or hone in on a group of outliers and view underlying data sources. Hovering over selected marks triggers tooltips that offer more options for those data points.
- Present Data Your Way: Communicate data insights in any way, through any kind of data visualizations. Customize and format almost every component of a workbook, build an interactive dashboard or create a story sheet that tells a visually compelling narrative.
- Metrics: Create metrics that track changes to data over time and monitor KPIs like daily sales numbers.
- Share Content: Share projects, workbooks, views, flows and more with others directly through the Tableau site or by sending a direct link to the content. Embed a view into a web page or for offline usage, download a view as an image, .csv file, PDF, PowerPoint or Tableau workbook.
- Updates by Email: Subscribe to a view or workbook and receive an emailed image or PDF snapshot at regular intervals, without needing to log-in to the platform. Set data-driven alerts that trigger and send an email notification if data reaches certain defined conditions or thresholds. Tableau Online checks these alerts every 60 minutes.
- Comments: Engage in conversation about insights with colleagues through @mention tagging and interactive snapshots.
- Tableau Catalog: Automatically indexes all content on a Tableau site, gathering metadata and enabling quick search of all data. Identify stale or deprecated data, better understand the data that powers published visualizations and trace the source of data and impact of changes to that data.
- Developer Resources: Extend the capabilities of Tableau with resources from the Developer Portal, including APIs, data connectors, documentation and examples, as well as discussions on the Tableau developer community forums.
- Mobile App: Get a personal window into the organization’s Tableau site via a native mobile app for iOS and Android systems with controls optimized for touch. Through curated data headlines, always see the most significant KPIs first. Offline sync keeps data visualizations up-to-date, even on-the-go.
Limitations
At the time of this review’s publication, these are the limitations of Tableau Online based on user feedback:
- Functionality is lacking compared to Tableau Desktop.
- Keyboard shortcuts for web authoring are different from those used in Tableau Desktop.
- Ask Data doesn't support multidimensional cube data sources.
- Users say that data filtering and data refreshing can be slow.
- Licensing costs and pricing models can be too expensive for smaller organizations.
- Users report issues with the mobile app’s user interface and security features.
Suite Support
Access to Tableau’s standard support package is included in all subscriptions and is available for the duration of a subscription. Tableau also has extended and premium support programs available that offer accelerated response times and additional contact options.
Targeted response times vary based on the user’s support plan and the case’s priority level on a scale of P1 being critical, P2 being high priority, P3 medium priority and P4 low priority. Standard support is available online during Tableau business hours, which are Monday through Friday 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. PST for customers in the Americas. Extended support adds 24/7 coverage for P1 issues, while premium support extends 24/7 coverage to P1 and P2 issues.
Premium Support for Tableau Online includes a service-level agreement that guarantees services monthly availability of 99.9% and entitles customers under this SLA to a unique service credit on their account in the event availability falls short. Premium Support also includes the dedicated support of a technical account manager with recurring status calls and service reports, access to a senior support team, case escalation and oversight and more.
mail_outlineEmail: Only license support queries are processed through email and accessed through the customer portal. Users do not typically email Tableau directly, but submit a web form or customer portal request, as detailed below.
phonePhone: Live phone support is only offered to premium support package subscribers. Those subscribers can call support 24/7 for both priority 1 and priority 2 issues, as defined in Tableau’s technical support guidelines.
schoolTraining: Tableau offers its library of free training videos, how-to guides, manuals and community forums for users struggling with a small issue or seeking training. Users can also schedule classroom training sessions, attend conferences and enroll in role-based eLearning courses through the site.
local_offerTickets: To submit a service request, users can either use the web contact form or the customer portal. To start a case, users should go to either the “Contact Us” page on Tableau’s website or the product support page from the customer portal. Users can input a keyword that describes the nature of their problem (for example, “how to join tables”).
The query will search Tableau’s resource library and forums to see if the question has been answered elsewhere. If users don’t find an answer to the problem, they can move to the next step and select “continue to create a case.” In the description box, users should fill out the required information in as much detail as possible.
The query will search Tableau’s resource library and forums to see if the question has been answered elsewhere. If users don’t find an answer to the problem, they can move to the next step and select “continue to create a case.” In the description box, users should fill out the required information in as much detail as possible.
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Custom version cannot be requested — rather users can do limited customizations on their own, such as:
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