Tableau

Tableau was really cool 10 years ago when they went to market with a product that was really easy to use (drag-and-drop fields to easily create reports) and very shiny charts and chart types. However, after the salesforce acquisition the product got in a stall mode, probably due to all the internal chaos that such an acquisition means. When you need to do something more meaningful you would need to get into calculated attributes, lots of them and the many settings that you can use to create reports and dashboards. At one company I consulted for, I saw so many amazing dashboards that I can only imagine took months to develop. One thing that I have always criticized about Tableau is that the reports are really nice and shiny as long as your data is not big, but as soon as you start working with bigger data than 10MBs speed is an issue, in refreshing reports, updating them, and then you have to get into things like Extracts which are quicker but then you have to manage them. Connectors to other DBs are mostly all very slow if you have a lot of data. There is no direct connection, it is always via JDBC or ODBC which by nature is slow. For Dashboards there is no function to refresh dashboards automatically, which makes the case for real time dashboards practically unusable or you have to go and use external plugins which could also be a problem in my mind. Tableau Server is a good product but it requires a lot of resources, a small server wont do, that for me is a disadvantage.