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.
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Tableau Server Reviews
55 Reviews
Enterprises (1,001+ employees)
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Tableau Server is generally used when we done with all our visual presentations making, data analysis, making dashboards and now some other persons wants to edit in this by giving access or to present or share online with some other persons. It is very easy to share your work like all the charts, tables, that you worked on and need some suggestions or edits or present to clients you can do anything with this. I have done some projects also in Tableau Desktop, Public and Tableau Server and it is great to share that on Tableau Server with easy links and access without any data loss .
Pros
To convert raw datasets into powerful reports, dashboards, presentable form .
To easy share your work with anyone with easy access without any data loss .
A database that stores all your works without any space in your devices and keep safe your data, dashboards etc up-to when you in need to use .
Cons
Auto- scheduling for backups data in large data sets.
More technical updates in coming versions .
Speed to upload and opening files
Likelihood to Recommend
I have done many projects on Tableau Desktop, Public and need to share a large data sets or completed projects with clients so i just shared on Tableau Server and provided links to see or approve without any data loss and security provided to our data . Little bit need some technical training to get used to of it, it has great features and options to get your work easily done if you are well trained.
Tableau Server is an online platform to host and hold all the tableau workbooks, data sources, and related tableau data. Users should have a license in order to use Tableau server and its features. creating security, folder setup, automation, data refresh are some of the best features Tableau servers provides. Scheduling the data extracts and dashboard refresh is the main scope of our project
Pros
Security
extract refresh schedule
subscriptions to workbooks & Dashboards
download data in crosstab
download workbook as image, pdf, twbx
Cons
permissions should flow from primary folder if changes are made later.
download pdf content doesn't have scroll bar it just takes snapshot leaving some data
data cache issues should be resolved
Likelihood to Recommend
Ask data is one of the new and good feature that is available in tableau server. 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 visualization tools is outstanding.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)
Tableau Server is actively used in my organisation for connecting to different data sources and viewing different visualisation for deriving insights from them.
Pros
Connection to different data sources
Creating meaningful visualization
Advanced Analytics
Cons
Tableau server can incorporate more AI visualization
Errors in visualization can be highlighted quickly
ETL capabilities can Ben enhanced
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau [Server] is a user friendly tool and is applicable for any areas where KPI can Ben understood by just dragging and dropping the visualization objects.
VU
Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)
It is being used across the organization. It helps us visualize business trends in a nicely presented format which can be easily used by all levels of management. Currently we use it for our sales projections, marketing analytics, finance analytics and other business analytics. It is also used to analyze monthly results across different KPI's
Pros
Visualization of data in multiple formats
Concisely present information in a dashboard
Allow multiple users to access the same reports simultaneously
Cons
Sometimes the functionality related to formula entry is difficult
You have to create multiple data sheets to create one dashboard
Likelihood to Recommend
It is well suited where data is clearly arranged in a particular format and is less useful if the data is not in the format usable by tableau The formulas are sometimes difficult to enter into tableau and that restricts some analysis to be performed. Visualization within tableau is the best but the trend line graphs are not great
VU
Verified User
Analyst in Finance and Accounting (1001-5000 employees)
Tableau is being used as one of several reporting tools. Its primary use was for creating dashboards that could be leveraged by a large segment of the company. The web enablement allowed for broader user adoption than other tools adopted at the time of implementation. Navigation of the workbooks was also more palatable to users vs running individual reports.
Pros
Visualizations.
Simple deployment method.
Easy to navigate interface.
Cons
Server administration is cumbersome.
Recent changes (after 10.x) have required rewriting of admin scripts.
Cumbersome licensing management.
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau may be well suited to non-Microsoft shops. Its methodologies, internal management, and overall approach seem geared more toward Oracle/Java shops. It also does require a decent amount of care and feeding. Backups, upgrades, etc., tend to be cumbersome and require some level of IT knowledge, despite how the product is often sold. Smaller shops that wish to pursue Tableau may be better off leveraging their SaaS offerings.
VU
Verified User
Professional in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)
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.
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.
VU
Verified User
Program Manager in Customer Service (10,001+ employees)
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.
I used Tableau as another BI tool, by the client where the Tableau server installation was used and most production reports were accessible here. Tableau has proven to be a great tool for the collection of data from multiple data sources, with varying complexity -- we used spreadsheets, SQL tables as well as Google Analytics connection. The tool was a standard platform in a multinational organization and was used for years, so the data was already linked, including the local eDWH solution, providing support for regular as well as ad-hoc reports.
Pros
Many available plugins, incl. the one I have used for regional analysis (data enriched with addresses / GPS attributes)
Narratives (story building) is a great tool for creating and sharing your analysis with your audience
Data visualization is one of the best you can get today
Supports mobile usage
Cons
Connection to SQL database: by connecting it to a database, one has to employ an SQL specialist to write the script
No autosave function
No automatized notification feature (e.g. alert based on value out of range, in a report)
Very expensive solutions
Likelihood to Recommend
If you have to quickly explore a large volume of unknown big data (really large tables), then Tableau is a great choice. It is a great tool for any ad-hoc analysis that has to deliver an interactive story to management (client), it will not only deliver nice visualizations, but will also allow for drill-downs to the primary data and proof for your audience that your numbers in the presented graph are correct
Tableau provides agile, easy to use, and effective ways to visualize data. We have used Tableau visualizations to inform decisions regarding our strategic goals. It took very little time for our data analysts to become familiar with the Tableau toolset. We had several data dashboards up on day one of our implementation.
Pros
It's extremely intuitive to use the visualizations. Users can manipulate and construct meaning and additional questions from the data quickly.
Tableau is very flexible -- it's completely data source agnostic. It will take data from any source.
Our development team learned it very quickly.
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
Tableau is a fully agnostic tool for simply representing complex data. If thought is given to the design of the visualizations, they are very powerful and intuitive to use. We recently used Tableau to go deeper into our staffing. We looked at various demographic profiles of attendance centers to see which ones should receive more FTE. This would have taken much longer and been much less insightful without Tableau.
VU
Verified User
Executive in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)
