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Comment by babo | Hacker News Reader

Tableau is a great product but with a high price stigma. I really like it, when clients asking for recommendation my first answer is Tableau. They like the product and the features but the reaction is always the same: nice, but it's too expensive for us, we'll go with PowerBI. Competing with Microsoft is a tough game.

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It's not PowerBI they are competing with. It's Qlikview. Their biggest issue is that Qlikview is viral: you can use the evaluation version ("personal edition") for as long as you want, but it has restrictions. With Tableau, you get a 15 day trial. Consequently, it gets used in businesses for small data projects, gets seen to be really effective, then the business realises it's effective and buys licenses.

Tableau isn't SAP, it just isn't. If they want to really get into businesses, then they need to be sensible and give people the opportunity to use it and then get it into the businesses they work in.

For instance, I used Tableau to learn it for the 15 days they gave me, and I learned quite a lot as they have great documentation, but then after the 15 days I got no more opportunities to go through their tutorials. Partially I got busy on other things and wanted to revisit it after a few days, but I also setup SQL Server SSAS which took me a bit of time. I got a maximum of about 5 days usage, after that there's no point having it on my workstation as it's far too expensive for me to justify buying a copy.

If I could have had more time with the product, I guess I'd know how good it is so I can recommend it to the business I work at. Unfortunately, I can't without cracking their trial limit code, which I'm just not prepared to do. For now, I guess I'll be recommending Qlikview which is a known quantity and very good also, though nowhere near as intuitive.

This is definitely an issue. It's difficult to really sell a tool like this to your managers unless you can prove over time it saves you. With orgs I've been at the decision process was like

  - order 1 license to test it out
  - analyst gets order of magnitude work done more than co-workers
  - team manager buys 10 licenses and a tableau server

The price is expensive but if I'm charging $100 - $150 / hr and it takes me twice as long to do something in PowerBI that it does in Tableau, Tableau quickly pays for itself for the desktop software. Then you can multiply that across a team of experienced BI professionals and even the product team because they can easily view workbooks and give feedback. That would easily outweigh the costs of Tableau Server.

Looking at their pricing ($500/user/year) seems pretty reasonable for such a high-impact role. If you're at a company, the question is if it saves you ~5 hours in a year.

It absolutely does. I know what life was like before Tableau (MS Excel + webquery, custom highcharts, cobbling together graphs from multiple SaaS services, custom python+R code) and I can say it probably saves 5 hours in a day or two.

Pricing isn't dependent on how much it helps you, but on how much more than competitors and alternatives. Otherwise food would cost an arm and a leg.

That is not a adequate comparison. You aren't done after you bought the software. You need someone to set it up as week and that cost scales with the quality of the software you bought. You need to look at the cost you have once everything is said and done.

Tableau Desktop Professional is $1,999, as the regular has a limited connectivity this is version to get for an enterprise user.

It is expensive if you have a lot of people. Paying $2k for a license may be for two or three analysts is a good deal. Compare this to a start up like Looker which costs substantially more to get your foot in the door (last I checked, correct me if I'm wrong.)

IBM has chosen to display "Analytics" as a major piece of their company. Presumably they want investors to think this could generate billions of dollars in revenue yearly. Worst case scenario for me would be IBM to buy Tableau, but clearly for those of us who use it, Tableau is one of the best tools out there for what it does. Will it be able to keep its marketshare 5 years out? Who knows.

The low-price contender is Periscope (periscopedata.com).

For the record, Periscope has an incredibly poor UX. It suggests "run selected query" when you highlight a single column name... As if that's valid sql.

Are there other examples of poor UX? Overeager pattern matching alone wouldn't bother me, but if it's a sign of other inattentiveness...

Periscope is in a distinct, lower tier of usability. You write SQL. Or, put differently, the innovation of Tableau was so you don't have to write SQL for most visual encodings, even non-trivial ones.

However that does limit you a bit when wanting to do deeper analysis. Looker/Periscope are tools for analysts who know and are comfortable with SQL. (Disclaimer- no affiliation, just trying to build a desktop tool that sits in the spectrum between Tableau and Jupyter Notebook)

You can still write SQL in Tableau, that's table stakes.

Funny to me: it took years for Heap to introduce that.

Edit: we use and help customers with IPython/zepellin etc, but that doesn't change that these things are 10 years behind as IDE/visual interfaces. Adding charting & drilldowns is much harder than a button to turn a table into a line graph, and analysts are wasting a lot of time due to this.

Yes, completely agreed. There's a continuum of UX between BI tools like Tableau/Qlikview and the interactive prompts used by most data scientists (mainly around the non-interactivity of display)- it's sad that an 80 character static tty display is still the state of the art in that space. While I'm very comfortable in ipython/terminal I often wish I could easily pop up a Tableau interface on top of my pandas analysis. Jupyter is getting there slowly but the widgets people are building are still more geared toward display than interacting with data (both original and derived) directly. Even the new set of SAAS BI tools (Looker, Mode, etc) leave interaction as a secondary concern. I think that's the main difference between tools geared towards reporting/publishing (most of the BI world) and tools geared toward data analysis (R, python, etc). As you point out, the tools for data analysis are years behind the BI tools in terms of UI/UX (or their focus is more on IDEs for developers rather than analysts).

As a side note, I've been following your work for a while now (both Superconductor and Graphistry) - mind if I shoot you a few questions privately?

Of course, always happy to help! Leo@g....com

I am stuck with SAP Business Objects (Crystal Reports) at my company. It is ok, but the features of Tableau look like they blow it out of the water. I've tried to get discovery projects started up to look at other options for due diligence. However no one seems to go for it. Oh well :/

SAP have been gutting Business Objects for some time now. I know someone who is fanatical about Business Objects Universe Designer, but they tried to use the later version and they found that a lot of features were stripped away, so she went back to the older version and refuses to upgrade until she's certain the new versions are on par with the old one.

MS SQL server is very expensive, especially thanks since their recent license changes. Microsoft BI (PowerBI, etc) is to lock you in to their ecosystem (MSSQL, Excel, SharePoint/Office365, Windows Servers/Azure cloud).

The thing is, if you already decided on MS SQL Server, why buy Tableau? The company I work for has both, and Tableau is the most likely to be dropped of the two.

Hello? The MS SQL Server license has been changed to be per CPU core. Consultants want you to create a seperate MS SQL Cluster (serveral bare metal servers with many CPU cores). So MS BI will be a lot of more expensive as you first think. Most see just the Tableau is more expensive than BI and decide for MS BI just to find out MS SQL is rather expensive. Also you need at least MS SQL Server 2014, despite dark pattern speak (lies) about that 2012 may work too. Oh and don't forget they will mention that you will need a seperate SharePoint cluster (web and app servers) to run Excel webservice and the SharePoint based dashboards. Oh and you will need to upgrade all your clients with Office 2013. And they will invite your CTO to an Windows 10 event and give away some WinPhone10 and tablets. And then you will have to figure out how to comply to local state law by upgrading to the expensive Windows Enterprise LTSB license.

So what is cheaper?

At least in the case I'm describing, the company already has an expensive MS SQL Server 2014 license (Core licensing) which allows for an unlimited (ok, something like 50) amount of VMs, and they already have the expensive bare metal servers, so that's not a concern, since it's a sunk cost.

All clients are already on Office 2013, so that's not a concern either.

The Sharepoint cluster probably is a concern, but that's about the only thing, I'm pretty sure it'll be cheaper than Tableau.

I wish they'd invite the CTO to a Windows 10 events and give us some giveaways :) . No local state laws, this is for an insurance company in South America btw :)

Edit: the opinions are strictly my own, I'm not involved in any decision making sadly (no Windows 10 giveaways for me :P ), etc.

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