You can see Top 10 BI tools for Small and Medium Businesses and Top 3 BI Tools for Small and Medium Businesses to look into details.

Tableau a business intelligence platform for small business founded in 2003, it raised $254 million in IPO and has raised the bars for a BI solutions because of its visual-based data discovery. It has been entitled as the fastest growing business intelligence and software vendor of 2013.

It offers all the core features required in a Business Intelligence System. Its user interface is easy and can be accessed even by the non-experts. It allows you to drag and drop data so that you can analyze it the way you want to. Users can easily connect to data and create dashboards quickly. It follows a new approach to BI so that you can produce fast analysis and insights from data. It allows you to combine data from different sources and use it as input, which makes it more than 10 times faster than its competitors.

Tableau is designed to meet the requirements of anyone who needs to analyze and explore business data, be it an executive, analyst or manager. It can support a wide range of industries like manufacturing, real estate and lot others. It has spent years of research to implement the best practices for the solutions. It is a highly featured software and includes a shareable dashboard, interactive reports, and scalability.

Editions and Pricing

Tableau offers three products for BI solutions, Tableau Desktop, Tableau Online and Tableau Server.

Tableau desktop comes in two editions, personal and professional. The personal edition is only for data stored in files, it is available at $999 USD per user while the professional provides BI solutions for any data, but it will cost you $1999 USD per user.

Tableau Online is a hosted version of Tableau Server, it is available at $500 USD per user for one year.

Capabilities and Supporting Set of Features

Data visualization

The data visualization offered by this tool is way ahead of all of its competitors. The tableau was one of the first companies to introduce intuitive, drag and drop features that enable business users to perform complex data visualizations. Another important feature is that Tableau can automatically recognize whether a user is using a mobile app, so it makes the adjustments automatically. This is the reason Tableau has a much higher percentage of mobile BI users compared to other vendors.

Integration

Tableau provides an impressive integration with most data types, especially with big data platforms like Hadoop. It integrates with R,  preferred by many data scientists to get deeper insights into statistical and advanced BI analytics. The tableau is especially preferred by organizations to generate detailed analytics as it supports Google BigQuery API. Data experts can easily visualize data using this tool.

Implementing and Upgrading

Tableau gets a thumbs up for its easy implementation. About 90% of its users have access to the latest release of the software, so it can be easily concluded that it is easy to upgrade too.

Customer Support

Tableau has customer support services for all the products. You can download the ‘Quick start guides’ that address a number of fundamental issues. There is a Desktop Kick-start service in which you can have a consultation session with an expert on any subject of your choice, it is a one-time service. Also, you can have online as well as in-person training sessions with an instructor or you can do a self-study online. They have a really engaging community to make sure all your queries are resolved.

Pros and Cons of Tableau

Pros

• Intuitive user interfaces and drag and drop features.
• Dashboards can be created quickly and easily.
• Efficient and readable format for mobile devices.
• Powerful data visualization.
• Data blending feature allows joining of datasets from different databases.

Cons

• OLAP calculations have issues while working with Teradata.
• Navigation amongst features is difficult.
• Not compatible with Macs.

You can refer the detailed BI Tools product reviews for TIBCO Spotfire and Pentaho for a quick comparison.

Read Also: Best business intelligence software product review – Unity reports

Differentiator

Tableau a business intelligence platform makes it easy for non-experts to create and access dashboards. Its innovative data visualization tools are often emulated by other companies. It has satisfied a large number of customers and keeps working towards improvement of the product. You can do a lot of amazing things with your Excel or CSV file which is somewhat freeing from the IT department, but you still need someone to write the SQL query to create the dataset. Tableau’s capabilities reflect the views of a visual thinker. It allows users to easily follow potential patterns by clicking through visuals. It removes all complexities related to creating a dashboard.

Users can conveniently share information from anywhere as it is totally compatible with all the mobile platforms and tablets. You can clearly view them as you would on a PC. You can strengthen your analysis by adding additional layers of data and incorporate multiple sources of data to utilize as much data as possible. It keeps getting ranked as one of the leading software for providing business intelligence solutions. It is a great option for small and medium enterprises.

For more details, please visit: Tableau website.