Tableau Public vs. Cyfe, by Traject

Tableau Public is great, especially if you're new to the platform or considering implementing it within an organization. The Public version has most of the capabilities of the full version, with extensive community documentation to troubleshoot issues you may run into. Additionally, there are many resources to check out Public workbooks from other users and communities: a GREAT learning resource to figure out new, innovative ways to visualize and present data. It is perfect for evaluating public datasets, for doing exploratory data analysis, or contributing to cross-organizational or extracurricular projects that may benefit from more sophisticated data analysis and exploration. Tableau Public, because it stores to the cloud and has limitations on connectivity (ie, cannot connect to SQL servers) is not suited for confidential, financial, PII, etc., data, and care should be taken to avoid including sensitive data in any of the Tableau Public workbooks used by an individual or organization.

Incentivized

Cyfe might be for you if you are looking for a cost-effective way to display all of your marketing metrics in one place. If you are looking for a detailed, fine-tuned, niche, or extremely specific metrics, this might not be the best solution. Cyfe is good for a general health check-up of marketing, but not a finely tuned examination.

Incentivized

• Tableau Public can work with data that are differently formatted, such as MS Excel, .txt file, Google Sheets, not sure about MS Access.
• GUI interface of Tableau Public is not that hard to start working on; Also, it can generate codes for the operations and so it is relatively easy to visualize and correct mistakes.
• Lots of Tableau Public users upload their work to the online community, users can easily find very good figures/graphs that are similar to their problems and so they can use these figures/graphs as templates to modify and make their own ones.

Incentivized

• Cyfe makes it easy to create a professional looking dashboards in a short amount of time. With so many built-in data sources and the intuitive nature of the interface, you can have beautiful looking charts and graphs in no time!
• One of the best features of Cyfe is the many data sources built-in and that each dashboard is not constrained to one source. One of the drawbacks I've seen in other tools is the limited ability to pull from multiple Google Analytics profiles, multiple AdWords accounts or from both AdWords and Bing in one dashboard. Cyfe has no such limitation.
• Google Spreadsheets - if the data you need to show is not available via an API, being able to pull from Google spreadsheets is a great solution. Once set up, you can add data whenever you need to the spreadsheet and your widgets in the Cyfe dashboard are automatically updated. Huge time saver!

• The biggest drawback to the Public version of Tableau is that any data used in the program is 'public' and therefore not secure: workbooks are saved to the cloud, rather than locally
• Tableau Public limits data ingestion to 10 million rows per source
• Limited connections - can't connect to SQL databases to ingest data (must be through CSV, Access, TDE, or text files)

Incentivized

• Sometimes the percentages in Cyfe seem off. We'll review the numbers month over month in Google Analytics and the same numbers are pulled into Cyfe, and yet Cyfe reports a different percentage
• It would be nice if Cyfe had more styling and layout choices to brand it more to our company's style and look

Incentivized

It's free, right? I'll keep using the free version. So the real question to ask is this? Will I pay $999 for the Personal version or $1,999 for the Professional? Yikes! That is a big stretch. I'm not sure about that. The product comparison chart is at: http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/comparison

It has become a part of our internal tools so unless a competitor comes out with similar functionality as a similar price point it is unlikely that we would not renew. One area that would cause us not to renew would be if a competing service came out with more third-party integrations that match our needs. Price at this point is no longer an issue as it would allow us to automate a somewhat manual process that we have now connecting Cyfe widgets to Google Sheets.

Tableau public is a great training tool to understand the basics of Tableau before buying it. A great tool to extend Excel's visualization and to publish data for others. Not useful for anything you need secure. No ability to access databases. Static information only.

I gave it a rating of 7 because it does a good job at what it does, but there are missing that are missing which I would have benefited from. For instance, if I was able to drill down more on the specific metrics I was able to see, that would have been helpful.

Incentivized

I have not yet required to contact support as the documentation and help i found online has always worked so far

Incentivized

Because I had a very minor question and I was able to speak directly to the founder through LinkedIn and through email. I know that as they grow this may not always be an option but the fact that he made himself available to answer my questions said a lot about his passion for the product.

I found it sufficient, and fast. I could easily "kick the tires" with Tableau on my data so I got up and running fast.

Start at the end and work backward. Identify the business case / issue and questions the end users have, then identify the data needed, and where to get it.

Incentivized

Cyfe is a 15 minutes implementation, then some time to get your data sources created. This is an easy one person job that will not result in down time or unnecessary wasted man hours.

Tableau public is Free and no subscription is required whereas Tableau Desktop is a paid subscription. if there is no private or confidential data it's easy to Tableau public and share reports with people. Tableau public has same features and options same as desktop. its easy for students or beginners to signup and start learning/build reports.

My company already subscribed to Cyfe when I began, so for me there wasn't any shopping around. While Cyfe does pull straight from the "back end" side of many social media platforms, or from Google Analytics for websites, the benefit is that you can see all the stats in one place rather than having to log in to so many other platforms to grab those metrics.

Incentivized

• We have saved costs on Dashboarding tools thanks to the free tools within Tableau Public
• Streamlined reporting
• Time saved with easier data preparation features
• Professional looking dashboards and visualisations

Incentivized

• Cyfe allows us to provide real time data to our clients
• Cyfe allows us to provide detailed analytics to our clients showing actual results
• Cyfe reduced our need to provide monthly "reports" to our marketing clients
• Cyfe allows us to have better situational awareness and know what is going on throughout our multiple organizations