Tableau Server Information Reviews & Insights

Score7.6 out of 10

878 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Tableau Server are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Business Problems Solved

Tableau Server has become an essential tool for organizations across various industries, offering a wide range of use cases that have proven valuable to users. Its ability to transform complex data into user-friendly visualizations has been particularly beneficial in emergency preparedness analytics within the healthcare sector. Additionally, dedicated analysts have utilized Tableau Server to create and deploy dashboards that are accessible to all employees, serving as the main repository for reporting needs. This versatility extends beyond healthcare, with organizations from IT to Human Resources leveraging the platform to address key issues such as device availability, performance tracking, and enterprise reporting.

Marketing teams have also found value in Tableau Server, using it to gain a better understanding of their customer base and track product ownership and usage trends. The platform's storytelling approach has been especially valuable for data scientists who use Tableau Server to present data to managers and executives, facilitating understanding and supporting decision-making processes. Furthermore, Tableau Server has been integrated into third-party applications and platforms such as Microsoft SharePoint, making it a convenient one-stop-shop for reporting needs.

Tableau Server's ease of maintenance from an administrator level and seamless integration with Active Directory for user permission management have made it a preferred choice for many organizations. It fosters secure and controlled sharing of work done by Tableau Desktop analysts and developers, enabling real-time data visualization and monitoring across the organization. This has led to increased adoption and expansion of its usage in various departments such as Finance, Supply Chain, and HR.

Overall, Tableau Server's ability to store, visualize, and share information effectively has provided organizations with leverage over other systems. Its versatility and ease of use have made it a trusted platform for reporting and analytics needs across different industries, enabling self-service analytics, cost savings through improved tracking capabilities, enhanced customer experience operations, and centralization of reporting.

Reviews

21 Reviews

Information

Tableau Server is a great tool for small, medium, and large companies

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

March 6, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Tableau Server is being used across our entire organization. Every employee at Qualtrics has a Tableau Server user, and we use Tableau Server authentication to display reports and dashboards in our company portal. Tableau Server is used heavily within each department, with dedicated analysts for each team creating and deploying dashboards for all employees to consume. Sales leaders view dashboards regularly to track the progress of their teams, and individual contributors view dashboards frequently to track their own progress.

Pros

Tableau Server is extremely well at providing a stabile system for us to host data sources and dashboards
Tableau Server is great at managing permissions for users, data sources, workbooks, and dashboards

Cons

Tableau Server has had some issue handling some of our larger data sets. Our extract refreshes fail intermittently with no obvious error that we can fix
Tableau Server has been hard to work with before they launched their new Rest API, which is also a little tricky to work with

Likelihood to Recommend

Tableau Server is extremely well suited for a company with a few dedicated analysts creating dashboards and reports for a few stakeholders. It is also great at handling a large amount of report viewers, but it is more expensive because you have to pay for each user.

Jacob Rasmussen

Data Engineer in Engineering at Qualtrics (Computer Software, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

View profile

Tableau Server is an absolute must for getting the most out of the Tableau Platform.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

January 28, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Tableau Server is used in my company as our primary method for sharing business insights. We build visualization dashboards in Tableau Desktop, then publish them to project folders in Tableau Server so that the appropriate teams can access their near real-time metrics.

Pros

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

Cons

I think the UI of how projects and folders within projects are managed could use some improvement. The organization is pretty straightforward, but it's designed for a large amount of content. Accessing a simple dashboard from one published workbook requires clicking into a Project then clicking into the dashboard to actually see the content. It's hard to describe without seeing it, but it always feels like there was an extra, unnecessary click. Seems minor, but this is an annoyance I and my colleagues face many times through the day.
There seems to be some formatting issues between what's built in Tableau Desktop (TD) and Tableau Server (TS), e.g., if I format some filters over a background in TD, they show up very legibly with the background as white against the color background. But when published the same filters could have the color of the background and no way to change it to white, and the font has less contrast for some reason. Seems minor, but it wastes a lot of time retrying then re-publishing just to get something to work as expected. The view in TD should be exactly the same as TS.
As far as I can tell, there's no way to put a clone of a certain dashboard into multiple projects/folders and have any updates propagate to those clones. Also as far as I can tell, there's no feature that tracks where the same dashboard has been published in multiple places. That means if I have a dashboard that I need to show in multiple places so those teams can access it in their native location with their other content contextual to them, I have to maintain a record of all the places I've published and re-publish to all whenever updates are made. And if it turns out the solution is there in the product, then the UI is clearly pretty dense because I haven't found it whereas this was an intuitive setting to find on a competitor BI tool I have used. I think this should be improved in the product since it's often necessary to manage the same content across multiple locations so various teams are accessing their single location relevant to them.

Likelihood to Recommend

The scenario where you need Tableau Desktop is if you need to share the content of workbooks across a broad audience, and access it through an on-demand web interface. The alternative being downloading a workbook from some shared drive and opening it in Tableau Desktop. I suppose the latter could work in small team environments, but that would be very tedious for anything beyond a small project.

Verified User

Program Manager in Customer Service (Computer Software company, 10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Getting up and ready with a great data visualization platform in a few days with Tableau Server

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

January 24, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Tableau is being used mostly by marketing to get a good view of their customer base. It covers the present footprint in terms of product ownership and the trend in usage of services.

Tableau is used by data scientists to present data to managers and executive. It has a storytelling approach that facilitates the understanding of data and eases the decision-making process.

Pros

Tableau server's portal and general look is really convenient and pretty. Users feel comfortable using it.
The learning curve of Tableau Server from an end-user perspective is really short. For the creator of content, it is a little more complex but easy to learn. Tableau has really succeeded in creating a user-friendly software.
From an administration point of view, Tableau is great. Installation and housekeeping are really easy and quick.
Visuals are really appealing and will help "sell" your presentations.
Tableau allows connectivity to a huge selection of data sources and data formats.
Online training for software is free and of very good quality.

Cons

Tableau doesn't (at least when I used it) have custom widgets or elements in the creation of dashboards. Its main competitor, Power BI, allows this. Because of that, some visualizations are challenging and need the use of advanced tricks that most users don't know about.
Tableau logs a lot of information, and sometimes, getting the right information from these logs when something goes wrong is challenging.
Tableau support is not the quickest. This sounds bad, but I have to specify that I very rarely had to contact them. However, when I did, the answer took a few more days than with other providers.

Likelihood to Recommend

Tableau Server should be considered in organizations where you have several consumers of data and fewer creators. The licensing of the server will make you save and allow you to have some governance over your dashboards.

In an environment where you have a lot of creators, the use of a server might not bring a lot of benefits, because creators using the desktop version can open and modify other people's dashboards.

Mathieu Gaouette

Consultant BI senior/Administrateur - spécialité SAS in Information Technology at Prospective MG inc. (Telecommunications, 10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

Tableau Server is the best of the best

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

October 30, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it across the organization, but I only manage 1 or quite a few. It is the trusted platform for visualization across the organization.

Pros

User management; you have a plethora of options built in (LDAP, Domain, SAML, etc.) for SSO and user management.
Dashboard Hosting; you have the option to host your dashboard in a few different ways. You can embed it as part of a larger web page, have it emailed automatically, or view it directly on the server.
Web Editing; while not as robust as a full fledged desktop I can see that it is edging that way. The web editing is great for fast, small, on the fly edits during a working session with a customer.

Cons

Installation; the latest iteration was an absolute nightmare to install. It failed to install several times.
Web Editing; while it is okay at small edits it would be a very nice feature to have an integrated solution that is as robust as desktop.
User Management; in certain aspects user management could use a small boost. Have a setting that allows Active Directory / LDAP based users be removed/deleted from the server automatically instead of forcing a script be written and deployed. If the user no longer exists in the AD or LDAP group they should be removed vice set to inactive as an option.

Likelihood to Recommend

Server is appropriate anywhere really, but it comes down to cost. If you are a small org, say 20 people, that cost is going to be $16,800 per year. That is a steep price and other options might be more cost effective. Additionally, large high availability Tableau clusters increase the costs.

Justin Pulley

Data Engineer in Information Technology at Amazon (Internet, 10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

Amazing product for sharing actionable insights!

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

October 30, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Tableau Server is being used at Ellie Mae as a platform for not only sharing enterprise level Tableau dashboards created by our BI developers, but also as a location to host business specific data sources for end users to create their own ad-hoc visualizations.

Pros

Allows for easy sharing of data and actionable insights with an extremely user-friendly visual interface
Acts as an environment to implement and enforce data governance with centralized and certified data sources
Easy to deploy, scale to our specific needs, and monitor

Cons

Enterprise level implementation is very pricey
Dashboard layout changes if the screen resolution of the Tableau developer is different from the end user's screen resolution
Embedding is limited and difficult

Likelihood to Recommend

If you want a BI tool with the capabilities to create and share rich, vibrant reports with advanced data visualization options, Tableau can’t be beat. It’s easy to implement and has a very active and helpful online community. If, however, you are looking for a more affordable option, it’s better to look elsewhere.

Shoaib Yari

Sr. Data Informatics Analyst, Lead in Information Technology at Ellie Mae (Computer Software, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

View profile

Tableau as an embedded reporting solution

Rating: 4 out of 10

Incentivized

October 30, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is used in a single product using the in-line version in a web application. It is a huge selling point to the application suite as it allows the users to see the effectiveness of using the application. The visualizations are powerful.

Pros

Powerful visulizations that can be customized with the desktop suite.
Can be scheduled for emails or exported to PDF.
Supports many different charts graphs and has plenty of filtering options.

Cons

Default dates parameters do not work.
Not a lot of room for custom queries to the end user.
Desktop customization software is buggy.

Likelihood to Recommend

Quickly getting a reporting solution integrated.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (Telecommunications company, 501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Data consolidation and visualizations done right

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

October 19, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

With the growth and expansion of our company into the overseas markets, we felt a need to be able to collaborate better on our projects and provide management with tools to get better insight into our Key Performance Indicators. We first on boarded our marketing and sales departments to the Tableau Server. Now we have dashboards being used by the implementation and engineering departments as well.

Pros

One of the main features of this product is the ease of generating reports. Dashboards can be shared among team members instantaneously.
Scheduling and alert notifications can be easily configured to help managers find out critical information in a timely fashion.

Cons

Some of the reports and dashboards generated by Tableau Server are not fully mobile responsive.
We have had several issues with Tableau being unable to communicate with other data sources and servers, possibly arising through some authentication failures.

Likelihood to Recommend

In the few years that we have been using Tableau Server, we've had good success in utilizing it as the single point of data access and visualization.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (Computer Networking company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Experience with Tableau

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

September 7, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

When I started with GOGO, Tableau was one of the BI tools used across the company, where we have distributed usernames to multiple people for their development or usage. I played a key role to enable Tableau as an Enterprise tool with AD Authentication (OKTA Integration,) which helped hugely increase traffic to the Tableau Server.

Most of the departments like Finance, Supply Chain, Airline customers, etc., use Tableau. The only department that I see we are lagging in is HR. HR is looking forward to automating the dashboards, but due to connectivity issues with Workday (as Tableau doesn't have a Workday connector,) we are unable to automate the dashboards.

The Supply Chain department is very much impressed with the tool, as they have had a lot of work reduced at their end. Also, they have better tracking of the vendor details & gap analysis of the stock purchase, which saves a good amount of money for the company by avoiding penalties for late delivery.

Pros

Saves plenty of time in Development Work.
Better Visualization
Flexibility to connect to plenty of databases, if not create your data set, using WDC functionality
Easy Server maintenance & very quick releases by Tableau.

Cons

Workday connectivity will help easy integration for HR department & this will encourage more usage in our company
Enabling the XML format of the dashboard will help easily share the dashboard, like in COGNOS

Likelihood to Recommend

There used to be a lot of limitations in the past for Tableau to integrate with various databases. Now most of the time, if we are not able to find the connector, we are encouraging users to provide the source of data and we are automating using R script to download the dataset on the server and utilize it from the server This is what's happening in our situation where we help users to automate the reports. Tableau is flexible in these situations.

As HR data is a larger chunk of data, we are unable to automate using R Script and have security issues with Workday. This would be a scenario where we'd have to look into alternatives.

Sandeep Munagala

Sr Business Intelligence Developer in Information Technology at Gogo (Telecommunications, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

My experience with Tableau Server

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

September 3, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Tableau is being used across the whole organization as a reporting and business intelligence platform.

Pros

Quick development time.
Easy to administer.
Lots of options for authentication.

Cons

It's slow to start/stop the server components, which results in more downtime during upgrades.
Hard to kill a data refresh manually.

Likelihood to Recommend

Great for publishing dashboards within the company.

Verified User

Engineer in Finance and Accounting (Computer Software company, 501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

Big data management across multiple platforms made easy!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

August 17, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Tableau server across the entire organization. All departments are using worksheets and data sources to answer day-to-day business decisions. It is our go-to business intelligence platform and is heavily used.

Pros

Controls over who can see what report
One place for everything
Custom controls over various datasources

Cons

Better mobile
Updates are hard, but we try to wait until data source first couple after release, always end up getting connection issues back to our servers
A user activity dashboard - more than what data sources

Likelihood to Recommend

Suited
Any type of BI, metrics, easy to use, fast, robust.

Not Suited
This may start to cross over into general Tableau use itself, but we are always fighting using the right tool for the right job, we have tried to use tableau to adjust data much the way Alteryx or Tableau prep can be used.

David Brotton

Vice President Marketing in Marketing at Purple Wave (Internet, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

View profile

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Tableau Server is an absolute must for getting the most out of the Tableau Platform.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

January 28, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

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

Cons

I think the UI of how projects and folders within projects are managed could use some improvement. The organization is pretty straightforward, but it's designed for a large amount of content. Accessing a simple dashboard from one published workbook requires clicking into a Project then clicking into the dashboard to actually see the content. It's hard to describe without seeing it, but it always feels like there was an extra, unnecessary click. Seems minor, but this is an annoyance I and my colleagues face many times through the day.
There seems to be some formatting issues between what's built in Tableau Desktop (TD) and Tableau Server (TS), e.g., if I format some filters over a background in TD, they show up very legibly with the background as white against the color background. But when published the same filters could have the color of the background and no way to change it to white, and the font has less contrast for some reason. Seems minor, but it wastes a lot of time retrying then re-publishing just to get something to work as expected. The view in TD should be exactly the same as TS.
As far as I can tell, there's no way to put a clone of a certain dashboard into multiple projects/folders and have any updates propagate to those clones. Also as far as I can tell, there's no feature that tracks where the same dashboard has been published in multiple places. That means if I have a dashboard that I need to show in multiple places so those teams can access it in their native location with their other content contextual to them, I have to maintain a record of all the places I've published and re-publish to all whenever updates are made. And if it turns out the solution is there in the product, then the UI is clearly pretty dense because I haven't found it whereas this was an intuitive setting to find on a competitor BI tool I have used. I think this should be improved in the product since it's often necessary to manage the same content across multiple locations so various teams are accessing their single location relevant to them.

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Program Manager in Customer Service (Computer Software company, 10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience