Alternatives to Tableau? | Hacker News Reader

Alternatives to Tableau?

After four months of training our data analysts how to use Tableau Server, I've just now found out Tableau won't let me serve Tableau content from our Tableau server without jumping from a $6k/year spend to a $72k/year spend, just to enable the "guest" viewer account to view the visualisations.

Has anyone run into this, or had a good experience with an alternative to provide something similar? Else we will be begrudgingly reverting to Highcharts, Indiemapper and SAS/Graph.

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so I hear a few things from you, also based on your comments in the thread so far. You're using Redshift as your DW, and you want to:

- find a (cheap) alternative to Tableau for data viz

- allow basic self-service analytics for your team

- embed charts into applications

- provide a professional growth platform for data engineers

It sounds a bit like you're trying to build what the folks at Clearbit covered in a blog post:

http://blog.clearbit.com/enterprise-grade-analytics-for-star...

Some suggestions (a few of these tools have been mentioned already):

Data viz:

- Metabase

- AirBnB's Superset http://airbnb.io/projects/superset/

those two are open source products; not that the PM on superset used to work at Tableau... just sayin'...

for data viz & embedding charts:

- Mode Analytics

- Looker

- Periscope Data

- grow.com

- reflect.io (highly recommended, built just for that purpose, but I think they want $60K / year too...)

shoot me a note at lars at intermix dot io - we have a spreadsheet with all the data viz tools out there, a list of some 40+ tools....

Not sure if this is what you're looking for, but I've been loving Metabase, and it's free! http://www.metabase.com

That is extremely helpful, thank you! One quick question, is iframe the only way to embed content in a third-party app? I couldn't see any other formal way to serve content without going directly to the Metabase instance.

You can generate a public link which exports the question result in CSV / JSON / XLSX format ;)

Very interesting. Thanks, I need to dig into the docs for a day or two, but this all looks very promising.

Another vote for Metabase. I used it every day in my last role and would do so again although I don't think it's quite Tableau-level in terms of its analysis and reporting capabilities.

Anything seriously missing, or more bells and whistles?

Off the top of my head, I couldn't tell you. I am sure there's a reason the data guys stuck with it but Metabase did absolutely everything I needed and a little more.

You can try us out.

https://www.holistics.io

Some benefits:

- Designed with the analysts who's comfortable with SQL in mind, thus extremely flexible.

- Extra visualizations catered for product/marketing analytics: Conversion Funnel, Cohort Retention

- We have in-built ETL that helps analysts load data from Excel, CSV, Google Sheets to your reporting DB without bugging engineers

Give Microsoft Power BI a shot. It has a free desktop tool to explore your data quickly, author reports,visualizations and Models and publish them to powerBI service. But you can also leverage Power BI embedded or Power BI as a service to share your reports. an on-premises version is also introduced recently. Research the licensing carefully. https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/

There is a free course on edx Analyzing and Visualizing Data with Power BI https://www.edx.org/course/analyzing-visualizing-data-power-...

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/

Yikes. I have a lot of my clients who are using Tableau, now moving to Power BI. PBI's got all the functionality in one product so no integration issues. It's cheaper than Tableau but cost is only part of the equation. It's the ability to connect to older on-premises systems like SharePoint 2010 is huge for many that aren't in the cloud or are hybrid. Also, the integration with Microsoft Flow is very attractive. You can kick off Flows from Power BI automatically, when a metric crosses a threshold, making BI self-escalating. I think it's easier to learn Power BI if you know Tableau as well. Lastly, Power BI Mobile is included and is the fastest growing area of use. Executives want everything on their phones and Apple watches. Hope this helps.

https://quicksight.aws/ ?

Trying not to be totally locked in to AWS, although that's where we are for Redshift so it may be much simpler, but heck if I can get their page to work. These auto scrolling pages... I can get to two sections of their page but the rest doesn't work or auto scrolls past where I want to look. I could CTRL A and paste into something else to read it, but man that's annoying to work with. Thanks for the link, I'll circle back to it.

It's super cheap--worth a look. The useful links are

https://quicksight.aws/resources/

You can connect directly to Redshift.

Using Power BI you can offer BI with rich visualization, mobile enabled with ability to connecf to multiple data sources, enrich your data with 3rd party data, provide row level security and publish the same on pbi.com. Cost USD9.99 per user. We can do embeded analytics, on prem bi, integrate powerbi to your SSRS comes available with ylu sqlserver EA. Need help reach out to us nagarajs@orioninc.com phone 7324220084. Orion systems integrators microsoft Gold Application Development, silver cloud platform, silver data analytics

I'd recommend RStudio. They have a server edition and R is extremely powerful for data crunching. The two downsides are that you'll have to re-code all your dashboards/reports, and R isn't as user friendly as Tableau. This will kill your productivity when switching, unless your analysts are already proficient in R.

https://www.rstudio.com

We tend to attract the SAS crowd, I've been trying to get more R in the company but it's not as prevalent as I'd like. That said, this is a useful link, thanks!

In the stats world, SAS users are like Mac toting hipsters that have enough spare money to pay extra for a product that "just works." R users are more like the Linux types that grumble about how enterprise products are ruining the world and you can get the exact same capability from free software. They never mention that the learning curve is more like climbing a sheer granite rock face.

If your analysts don't have scruffy beards and stains on their T-shirts then you should stay away from R.

Duly noted :o)

There's

https://spotfire.tibco.com

They have different licensing prices for the different types of users. For example, the web consumers, that use the templates created by others, are much cheaper than the the full analytics license. Scripting in IronPython, custom visualizations in d3.js and .net extensions. Custom data sources in .net.

SAP Analytics Cloud (which I work on), combines BI, Planning and Predictive.

My company uses qlikview.

http://www.qlik.com/us/

Not privy to prices but I would be surprised if it's less expensive than tableau.

Depends what you are looking for exactly and what skillset you have. When I was using it jasper reports now owned by tibco had free options.

Mainly looking to 1. empower the analsyts to publish without having to talk to engineering to get an app/site/charting created 2. Bring some commonality to interrogation and reporting across different business lines/staff cohorts 3. Make sure we are providing attractive jobs by providing attractive, CV-building tools/skills 3.14. Expose minimally-interactive reports to execs and customers, something above a routine PDF but below a full on data query interface

How did that happen? Wasn't their pricing for viewer accounts from their website at $35/viewer/mth?

I spent an hour on the phone with them yesterday, there are no viewer accounts. Basically I have Server, but it needs a named license to view. Named licenses are 1k down, $200 per year. To get a viewer account or to embed the content elsewhere for viewing I need a different kind of Tableau Server (core-based), of which there is no mention on the sales or pricing pages, but it starts at 72k/yr (non-profit pricing).

My completely misguided understanding was that I would pay for Desktop for the analysts, and Server was where folks could view the stuff. I was wrong. So everyone is now double-licensed, Desktop to do their work, Server to publish their work, and no-one but the very same analysts can actually look at the dashboards unless I add $1k licenses for everyone who needs to see data.

Hmm, the $1000/$200 was their old pricing.

How did they explain the difference between your pricing and what's on their website that says Tableau server is priced for $35/user?

https://www.tableau.com/pricing

I feel your pain. We're running into that issue and it just absolutely blows my mind why they have this pricing model in place especially when all people care about is data - be it on Tableau Server or through email.

I'm a fan of Kibana

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