It's a pretty good product but everybody and his brother sells analytics and visualization tools, most of the companies that have been around a while sell a few different tools since they've grown by acquisition.
Tableau is more differentiated than it looks, but it doesn't look very differentiated. If Microsoft ever gets around to making many of the "smart" features in Excel actually work (i.e. csv import and automatically choosing what kind of graph to make) they will have nothing to stand on.
I'm just waiting for the street to realize that Hortonworks and their competitors also have zero moat, and if anything, a GUI interface for a Hadoop cluster is value subtraction in the age of devops.
Honestly I have never used anything similar to Tableau in the balance of "straight-forwardness" and quality of results.
My use case is: here's some data, let's take a look at it and make some decent graphs including any sort of comparative analysis.
Excel is... well, Excel. The kitchen sink bundled in it contains pivot tables. Graphs are hideous out of the box, and very limited.
Apple Numbers makes cute looking graphs, but is extremely basic.
Viz toolkits in JS make you code for stuff that should be straightforward, at different levels of abstraction (Highcharts -> D3). And I have to put stuff in SQL and do the plumbing if I need any meaningful preprocessing.
Self-proclaimed "business intelligence" tools don't really target this use case. They solve enterprise problems like connecting to MDX sources that are not there for me.
I think if you are a smaller operation and you have specific requirements that you've thought out and aren't covered well by basic tools, then getting comfortable with JS and SQL (or R or matplotlib or Jupyter or whatever) is going to be the best way.
I've spent too much time watching people spend months and tens of thousands trying to bend 12 different third party tools together when a developer could do the whole thing in a week and it would actually do what you want it to do.
Nailing down the actual requirements is the hard part of building your own dashboard, it sounds like you've done that. If your needs are stable-ish or you have consistent developer resources it's going to be hard to find a better fit than that.
This. Freelancing is the future. Hiring in-house developers, or better still, freelance programmers will ensure that you will have custom-built your maximum BI tools and with a reasonable price. Of course, finding and hiring good freelancers who are not only dedicated in their craft, but also reasonably priced is a bit involved task, but certainly doable.
That's why I was repeating the importance of him having some well thought out requirements. In situations where this is true (and it really happens sometimes), I've regularly seen good developers come in under budget and mediocre ones at least come close.
In 99% cases, that happens because your requirements change. If you hire a competent developer, the total cost of development is always a pittance compared to what you pay monthly/quarterly to a product based company.
> And I have to put stuff in SQL and do the plumbing if I need any meaningful preprocessing.
Actually, the plumbing isn't as difficult as most people make it out to be. Nowadays, its the era of abstraction and FOSS infrastructure tools like jQuery, Bootstrap and like you mentioned, Highcharts. I'm a freelancer who quite recently developed a Tableau replacement for one of my clients. This client realized that all he basically wanted from tableau was a chart and some basic data manipulation like sorting, filtering and grouping (count, sum, average, etc.). All the things needed to develop this little app already existed in the FOSS world:
1. Highcharts/jqplot for charting.
2. Twitter-Bootstrap for showing a professional front-page and UI elements.
3. jQuery and jQuery-ui for DOM manipulation, AJAX handling for SQL queries, enabling drag/drop, etc.
4. PHP/Mysql on the backend (which is needed in anycase).
As for plumbing, each of these tools is so well-documented and also a simple Google search will point to tons of StackOverflow links that happily provide an answer to any and every question you may have!
tldr; Library/Framework plumbing might seem complex initially, but for a practiced Web-Developer, its like a cake-walk!
Hey, question on how licensing for highcharts works as a freelancer. Do you have your client buy a single website license with you as the dev? Or you have a highcharts dev license? Or something else?
Nope, we went for jqplot (http://www.jqplot.com/), it is GPL. The client initially wanted to go with Highcharts, but when we found about its licensing, I started looking for a FOSS alternative and this was what I found.
rms_returns - are you interested in discussing a project I'd like to have a freelancer work on? You can reach me at http://www.simplelegal.com and my HN username.
jqplot is what I use extensively. I haven't used D3 yet, but heard that it takes a lot more initial coding to come up with even a basic line/bar chart.
Power BI is Microsoft's answer to Tableau. You can judge on how well it achieves this. There's a free (as in beer) standalone Windows desktop application, and an Azure-hosted collaboration and hosting portal.
Microsoft now has PowerBI in its Office suite that is pretty powerful. Its a Tableau competitor that I believe is a big reason that their stock is falling. It integrates with Excel, Access, etc. and a ton of different other non-Microsoft services.
I'm not sure about the Desktop app, but the web app should work in any modern browser today. Features are generally prioritized using user feedback, and this is one of the top suggestions on the ideas site:
The free version of the service is too limiting to be very interesting to us. However, it is available from Microsoft resellers as a standalone for about $10.00 per month per user with no contract.
The free desktop version is not limited. It's very powerful. The growth rate is astounding. We get significant new features every month, sometimes weekly.
If you compared PowerBI to Tableau 6 months ago (or even 3 months ago) you are out of date. Its data model capability is far superior to Tableau. The formatting and graphics capability is catching up quickly. The intuitive UX is first rate.
Zeppelin is really neat, but still quite early stage (I can't even export notebooks :( ). For day to day use & teaching I've had good results with Jupyter + Spark
I'm still amazed that csv is still so poorly implemented in excel. Especially since its such an easy fix to honor byte order marks and default delimiters. I have to assume "sorta works" is the strategy. We all know how well that worked out for internet explorer.
Tableau is more differentiated than it looks, but it doesn't look very differentiated. If Microsoft ever gets around to making many of the "smart" features in Excel actually work (i.e. csv import and automatically choosing what kind of graph to make) they will have nothing to stand on.
I'm just waiting for the street to realize that Hortonworks and their competitors also have zero moat, and if anything, a GUI interface for a Hadoop cluster is value subtraction in the age of devops.