Logi Symphony vs. Tableau Server

Considering it's price point in the market, Dundas BI offers a lot of functionality. They are constantly adding features and bug fixes which is great, but also means there are always updates to take if you want everything to work as expected. The standard user interface is pretty easy to understand, but it takes a while for developers and power users to become independent of documentation.

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

• Project organization from Development to Production, you get a production and development license but I think the best way to do it is with DEV and Prod project in the Production box. Use the development box for testing updates and really crazy things. With the Dev and Prod projects on the same box, you just publish from Dev to Prod and you are done. Users only have access to the Prod projects so no one can mess up what you are working on.
• Security - If you have a hierarchy (subsidiaries, divisions, department, teams) and you want each group to see only their data, then Security hierarchies are for you!
• Dependent filters! What's this you ask? Here is an example of how it can be used, in your company you have departments and who works for what department is in your database. You make a dashboard that has a department filter (only show these departments), a managers filter, and employee filter. Not every manager or employee is in multiple departments usually only one. With dependent filters you can say that the manager and employee filter are dependent on what is selected in the departments filter so when you go to filter them they only show the managers or employees that are part of that department, and you can even it do so employees are not only dependent on department but on manager as well. Then it gets even better as it can be done in reverse as well so when you select a manager then go to the department it only shows the departments he works for (there are better situations where this is more useful).
• It is scriptable! From calculate columns, null replacements, button actions, load actions, hover over events there a way to do what you want.
• They are constantly improving and listens to your suggestions.

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

• Not too many cons for how we use the application. It really is easy and powerful. Very powerful.
• Licensing is one thing that could be looked into. It is simple, but a little confusing. For example, if I get a license today, but a new release comes out tomorrow, it seems that the license doesn't work with the new release. Maybe that is by design, but it would be nice to clearly understand.

• 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

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

We are still in the implementation phase, but so far we are finding it to be easy to use and learn. The eLearning courses that they have made available for free, as well as User Forums and other training videos have made even difficult concepts easier to understand.

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.

We have bi-weekly calls with our Success Manager, as well as access to support as needed. Any question that I have had, multiple people have been willing and able to jump on a call to talk me through it, or send an email with the solution

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).

Providing that you have the client's needs well known, creating BI content using Dundas BI is a walk in the park!

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

We have tested Tableau prior to Dundas BI and though Tableau is a great package in itself, Dundas BI is much more cost-effective for our needs and requirements and hence zeroed in on Dundas BI. We have also tried microstrategy but it has a very dated UI and doesn't suit our needs in today's more modern world

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

• Coming from an SQL based standard delivery model, Dundas BI has provided a fantastic rate of ROI.
• The preparation and delivery time has reduced from weeks to just a few hours.

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