Is Tableau Dead?

Our renewal got Shanghaied by an extremely greedy and over zealous sales rep who injected himself between us and our renewals reps, and wanted to turn a sub $80k renewal into damn near $200k this year and $300k next.<p>Needless to say it got nowhere fast and, by the time he gave up and threw us “back” to renewals, the damage had been done.<p>We elected to do what they thought was unthinkable and we just walked away.<p>My oh my, it was very, very good day, when I got to tell them to go f themselves.

I was a big Tableau champion at our org. Lots of dashboards, led a user group, was the go-to expert for a while (think 10 years ago). For us, what killed it was the pricing. They got very greedy very fast. Justifying a 4-digit license, per desktop, was the real killer. We just couldn’t, so the creation of dashboards became a tool of a “priesthood” of sorts. Everyone loved the way the dashboards looked and performed, but people very, very rarely used them. After years trying, I can remember ONE decision that was sorta-adopted based on a dataviz.<p>PowerBI are their lunch because it was “free” with the rest of our Microsoft stuff, so everyone could make the shiny dashboards no one uses instead of just a few.<p>In some cases we just wrote our own d3-based visualizations. It was easier than dealing with the constant licensing headaches Tableau brought.

I was an early Tableau adopter and promoter in my org many years back.<p>At the time the incumbent, Qliksense, was lagging badly and there was genuine grass roots support for Tableau as our next gen BI tool. Adoption grew significantly and people were happy...for a while. I remember reaching out the founder&#x2F;CEO at the time and getting responses back. It was great.<p>Fast forward today and its different, over time Tableau dissatisfaction grew, I think a lot of it was the fact that our use-cases got more advanced and performance dropped and not being able to understand the complex SQL it was generating didn&#x27;t help. Also Qliksense got noticeably better UX and importantly was cheaper. Today, MS PowerBI which came from left field, is really the front runner for us.<p>Parking this situation for a second I think the real issue is that people are getting a bit overwhelmed with dashboards. I have access to near 100 across the three platforms, they more or less do the same thing and are thus somewhat commoditized, I don&#x27;t feel passionate about any of them as I did back in the day with Tableau. Worse, I have to spend mental bandwidth figuring out which one I need to open to answer my query, then I have to spend time navigating the UX to get my answer so I can move on with the task in hand.<p>We don&#x27;t necessary need more dashboards, just faster ways to go from question to reliable answer where information can be pushed rather than pulled, especially if data points start looking anomalous over time.<p>Note - If your a startup in this field looking to upend the BI space reach out, I have spent a lot of time in this space over the years.

The five stages of grief<p>Denial: &quot;<i>Tableau will become a tool in the Salesforce toolbox that major players will continue to use.</i>&quot;<p>Anger: &quot;<i>Salesforce executives mentioning Tableau less than Slack or Mulesoft on their public calls ... Meanwhile, Microsoft&#x27;s Power BI is on a hot streak.</i>&quot;<p>Bargaining: &quot;<i>I believe it&#x27;ll be a consistent player at large institutions who typically go through complex project and procurement processes.</i>&quot;<p>Depression: &quot;<i>It will no longer be the hot new tool that will be embraced by SMBs. The community will not have the hope and excitement it had in the 2010s.</i>&quot;<p>Acceptance: &quot;<i>The magic is no longer there and that&#x27;s ok. Nothing lasts forever.</i>&quot;

I hate Tableau with a passion. The main bugbear is that viewers can&#x27;t see the SQL code the dashboards execute. I am no fan of Looker, but the &quot;Explore here&quot; allows other users to see the SQL and tweak it if needed. Most intermediate data stakeholders are confident enough to modify the where clause to suit their custom needs, allowing them to self-serve.<p>The licensing costs are prohibitive, too. It is almost unaffordable to share Tableau dashboards with your customers and, instead, have to send them static PDFs of your dashboard.<p>Beyond that, the Tableau infrastructure feels like something from the last century. Data is cached on the server using data extracts rather than following a more modern caching infrastructure.

I don&#x27;t know jack about Tableau, but if the alternative is Power BI, I got a feeling they may be safe.<p>My current company sells telephony and call-center analytics for MS Teams using our software, and during pre-sales meeting, one of the staple questions is &quot;So we can avoid Power BI entirely?&quot; followed by a minor thanksgiving ceremony and presentation of credit card. I get a feeling it&#x27;s not too dear to the hearts of its users.

There seems to be a lot of shade here at Power BI. Forgetting Microsoft’s dominance in the market, I’ve much appreciated Microsoft’s approach to data visualization which is soft on the visuals, but gradually improving them and hard on the programming aspects, such as Power Query or “M” and Data Analysis Expressions (“DAX”). The former they have opened to anyone to create via Power BI visuals SDK.<p>The reason I say this is because something that would take me hours to do in Tableau maybe only take a few minutes with Power BI’s mashup language (Power Query) and the Functional Language DAX. The ability to create temporary tables on the fly and utilize variables and the hundreds of other things you can do with DAX to create complex measures, calculated columns, etc. feels empowering. Most people I’ve spoken to who’ve gone away from Tableau to Power BI and used it long enough start to really appreciate it for the vast capabilities.<p>Additionally, the latest Power BI visual calculations feature released has made the learning curve a lot shorter for those newer to DAX and all our lives much easier.<p>On the visuals side there has been a lot of entrepreneurship to create custom visuals with the SDK to do a lot of visuals that just weren’t available in Tableau. So many that I have a hard time going back to Tableau because its missing a visual I need.<p>Lastly, not many talk about the fact the IT loves it in that its got so many capabilities for providing data governance and security through its various features.<p>Update and one final thought: there is some genius to me in how Microsoft seemed to have created an abstraction that allows the platform to grow independently and greatly on so many fronts - DAX with new functions and features, the Power BI Visuals and their SDK to do more and keep in with user interface changes, and their BI model approach (which now allows GIT versioning with readability changes).

I use tableau for scientific, engineering and operations data visualization and it’s a breath of fresh air compared to my years spent writing pages of MATLAB&#x2F;matplotlib&#x2F;seaborn&#x2F;bokeh&#x2F;plotly code just to get something presentable. For many use-cases it’s even better and faster than JMP’s graph builder, and that’s saying something. The major missing feature is stats tooling (t-tests and CI-based error bars), but the number of use cases that don’t require these is large and the time saved from Tableau’s “immediately presentable” defaults is huge.

My limited experience with Tableau is that it felt like Excel on speed. And heavily burdened by legacy (just like Excel or any Microsoft product is by the way).<p>While what we wanted was something that was SQL-native.<p>Back in the days we opted for a tool called Chartio which was later engulfed by Atlassian&#x2F;Jira. Not sure what happened to it after, but it suited our purpose fine enough. Just line-charts and easily editable SQL.<p>I have some experience with Superset, but it was not really built for customer facing dashboards. Mainly useful for internal use.<p>Blazer as someone else posted sounds interesting. May check it out.

&gt; Is Tableau dead?<p>Yes, Salesforce consumes companies whole. Just like they did with Heroku and others.

I&#x27;ve been using Tableau since 2013 to deploy dashboards, which in my case are front ends to ML model output. (for me, I used it as a Streamlit before Streamlit existed)<p>People think of Tableau as a dashboard tool, which it is. But it&#x27;s also a great tool for doing EDA (exploratory data analysis) on multidimensional data. Instead of writing lots of seaborn&#x2F;ggplot code (and having to remember the syntax), you can just move things around in Tableau in a fraction of the time.<p>The downside of Tableau is that you have to have a strong relational database way of thinking to use it effectively. You have to think in terms of aggregations, and occasionally in terms of window functions (Table calculations in Tableau). Tableau was (is?) a much more powerful tool than Power BI (at least this was true in 2019 when I last used PowerBI).<p>Tableau has never been a simple tool by any means. I was a scientist but I used to run Tableau training in my workplace, and I could see how long it took for things to click for most folks. Once you got beyond a few bar charts, things got really complex (partly because you were unlocking a lot of power through relational operations -- in data analysis, there&#x27;s rarely power without complexity)<p>Relational thinking is a very powerful way to think about (and execute) computation on large-scale data in a performant way -- it is after all the algebra of dataframes -- but I&#x27;ve come to appreciate that it is beyond most people. Even software engineers struggle to think relationally -- many still think in for-loops.<p>Also, things that were seemingly easy to do in Excel -- like doing a row and column cell calculation -- were very difficult. You had to think about the corresponding SQL manipulation and then reproduce it in Tableau....<p>... but I think most people just want to plot nice graphs from their Excel data and show it to their bosses. (which they can do with Tableau, but so can they with Power BI)<p>Side note: I have a copy of Tableau 2023 but it seems to have reached a feature plateau -- it is barely different from the Tableau of 2020.

Apache Superset is a good option if you are ok with open source.

I&#x27;ve never used Tableau, but heard a lot of hate about it. However, in my previous role, we were big fans of Metabase (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;metabase.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;metabase.com</a>). You can also self-host it, which was a huge win for us.

I’m not sure this is totally on Salesforce as the Tableau product has gotten so sluggish and inflexible. At my last job I started dumping data from Tableau to CSV (don’t get me started on the crap CSVs that Tableau generates) and importing to R for analysis. Good riddance.

Considering that when I asked about basic features, and bring told that the people interested&#x2F;working on those left once Salesforce came in... Yeah.

The place I work at uses Tableau, and it is thriving there. If it was up to me though, we&#x27;d move to some open source BI tool - but in the end, we&#x27;re paying for Tableau for three reasons:<p>1) Premium (24&#x2F;7) support if needed.<p>2) In-house tableau consultants.<p>3) Too many production reports have already been written in Tableau.<p>With that said, I&#x27;ve experienced some frustration with Tableau. Want writeback combability? That&#x27;ll be thousands (if not tens of thousands) of *dollars per year* in additional license fees.<p>Want some other feature, same deal.<p>With that said, the licenses have grown so much in the past few years that our stakeholders have started asking around for analysts to check out competitors and OS tools.

I&#x27;m currently doing BI evaluation for improvement of the current toolkit, so I might use this comment section for some BI experts&#x27; advice.<p>We mostly use Looker Studio + Metabase currently.<p>Investigating Tableau, Looker, PowerBI, Sisense, Omni currently. PowerBI is great, but BigQuery integration seems to be lagging. Is there a way to get such a tool without paying $50K a year? Everything so far is only a &quot;nice to have&quot; upgrade over our mostly free toolkit. We also care about good geospatial visualizations and embedding reports for users without requiring a login.

The best part of these dashboards is when the Big Four consultant creates The Perfect Dashboard, then asks to embed that nested unresponsive iframe mess into a web app. &quot;Why it&#x27;s so tiny, fonts are unreadable, and it&#x27;s packed with scrollbars?!&quot;

When I played around with Tableau it felt much more intuitive and easy to use than PowerBI. But I guess since people already had a contract with Microsoft for whatever product, adding PowerBI there was easier than pitching an entirely new contract for this product that ticked similar feature boxes. I am sad because I would very much prefer Tableau could exist for many years as a reasonable competitor otherwise I predict Power BI will just stagnate.

SMBs = small-to-medium businesses

A customer of ours at ToolJet, specializing in service-based offerings, traditionally used Tableau for their analytics needs. They decided to give us a shot and started moving some of their customers over to ToolJet, taking advantage of our Plotly-based chart component for visualizations. While the initial lift to replicate their Tableau setups in ToolJet is non-trivial, the value proposition is turning out to be significantly more compelling. They&#x27;re now confidently migrating more customers.<p>They&#x27;re aware that our platform might hit some snags with the more complex use cases but most of their customers have similar use cases that are less complex.

I think Tableau is still pretty popular in the consulting world where they use it to prepare slide decks for presentations.

lost me at basketball analogies