Are you in search of the best Tableau alternatives for you and your company?

Since its establishment in 2003, Tableau has emerged as one of the globally recognized and reliable tools for Data Visualization and Business Intelligence. It empowers users to generate dynamic and interactive visual representations based on extensive data analysis. While Tableau’s visualizations are accessible across various screen sizes and devices, showcasing its versatility as a potent Data Visualization tool, it may not be the optimal choice for every business, especially smaller ones with limited resources. Additionally, Tableau falls behind its competitors in tasks beyond Data Visualization. To address these considerations, we recommend exploring alternatives to Tableau.

In this article, we have curated a list of the finest Tableau alternatives, offering you a variety of Tableau alternative options to consider. Thoroughly explore these alternatives, and choose the most suitable one based on your specific business requirements.

Note: The report and dashboard examples in this article are all built-in templates made by FineReport, the leading BI reporting tool in the Asian-Pacific region.

An Overview of Tableau and Tableau Alternatives

Tableau stands as a widely adopted and favored choice among businesses for its remarkable capabilities in data visualization and business intelligence. Introduced in 2003, Tableau has played a pivotal role in accelerating analysis processes and fostering data-driven decision-making across various industries. It encompasses a range of functionalities, including efficient data extraction and processing, empowering users to generate insightful reports and visually compelling dashboards.

With its intuitive graphics and visualization tools, Tableau enables businesses to effectively present and communicate their data findings. The platform also prioritizes flexibility, security, and reliability, further enhancing its value to organizations.

Tableau boasts several noteworthy features that set it apart from other data visualization tools:

1. Versatile Dashboard: Tableau offers an advanced and user-friendly dashboard that allows users to deploy interactive report models, work with multiple formats, and easily transfer elements between workbooks.
2. Data Extraction: Tableau provides extensive data source functionalities, enabling users to connect and import data from various external sources such as Big Data, Relational Databases, Cloud Data, and Excel Spreadsheets.
3. Seamless Data Integration: Tableau allows users to perform cross-data join and union operations, eliminating barriers and simplifying the process of working with multiple data sources.
4. Enhanced Collaboration: Tableau facilitates effective collaboration by providing web editing, authoring tools, and data source recommendations. Publishing dashboards on Tableau Server or Tableau Online enables shared insights, questions, and collective decision-making within organizations.

Why Need Tableau Alternatives?

While Tableau stands as a highly sophisticated tool for Data Visualization and Business Intelligence, certain limitations may prompt you to explore Tableau alternative options. Here are some of the limitations worth considering:

• Costly Investment: Although Tableau is not the most expensive Data Visualization software available, it does come with a significant price tag compared to its counterparts. The licensing fees can be prohibitive for small to medium-sized businesses, making it a major drawback for Tableau. Additionally, deploying, implementing, maintaining, and training staff on the software incur additional expenses. Consequently, Tableau is primarily adopted by large corporations.
• Lack of Scheduling Support: Tableau lacks an automatic report update feature, leading to manual efforts required from users to update data at the backend. The absence of scheduling functionality can be cumbersome for users seeking streamlined and timely data updates.
• Security Concerns: As Data Visualization solutions often handle sensitive data, robust security measures are paramount. Despite Tableau’s commitment to data security, it lacks centralized data-level security. It only offers row-level security, necessitating individual user accounts. The proliferation of user accounts increases the vulnerability of the system to potential breaches.
• Absence of Version Control: Older versions of Tableau lack support for Revision History, making it impossible to roll back to previous states of dashboards and reports once published to the server. Recovering deleted data or reverting to earlier data levels is not feasible in Tableau.

While Tableau excels in many areas, being aware of these limitations can help you explore Tableau alternative solutions that better suit your specific needs.

Top Tableau Alternatives List

1. FineReport

We will compare Tableau and FineReport, along with other tableau alternatives, from the perspective of demand to help customers find the most suitable alternative to Tableau.

FineReport is a BI Real Time Reporting Software that has been honorably mentioned by Magic Quadrant for ABI Platforms in 2023. You can download FineReport for free and have a try!

1.1 Learning Path

Tableau, along with a higher-level internationalization, has a limited interface, and the secondary development can only look for the original factory or designated foreign Tableau partners. With the Desktop CS architecture, Tableau runs more smoothly in the design of business analysis. It suits IT staff and business personnel.

FineReport, considered among the best Tableau alternatives, is an excellent alternative to Tableau, particularly well-suited for IT staff. Its low coding mode makes it easy to get started, and the already organized Help Documents and user-friendly interface contribute to a robust ecosystem. FineReport provides valuable resources to address issues. Doesn’t that sound cool?

1.2 Pricing

Tableau

• Personal use: $70 a month (payable annually) 
• Commercial version: depending on the user’s permission level, Creator$70, Explorer$35 (you need to buy at least 5), Viewer$12 (you need at least 100) 

FineReport

• Personal use: free for a long period
• Commercial version: flexible pricing schemes based on users, functions, services, etc    

1.3 Data Management

Tableau

There are specialized modules to manage metadata. With security and credibility authentication, Tableau is reliable.

FineReport

When organizing data management, we may face data source replacement. In SQL, the data source table name needs to be changed. An error message will then be presented if the field (syllable) is different.

1.4 Report and Dashboard

Tableau

In Tableau, charts and series are separated, and users can customize the related attribute operations and adjust the series in the layout whether it is a mobile reporting terminal or PC terminal, so the customization of the dashboard layout is relatively strong.

The component settings of the dashboard are very powerful. You can make changes to data and graphs or even data points directly on the chart.

FineReport

• Stronger report layout capability
• Support complex report
• Stronger cell multi-format configuration

1.5 Data Source Integration

Both Tableau and FineReport support the majority of commonly used data sources. However, there are differences in data source integration between the two:

Tableau does not support APIs and built-in datasets. It supports relational data (cross-data source) and enables data from different sources, including direct connections, to be associated through relational datasets. It can only create merged wide table relational models.

FineReport supports APIs and server-built datasets as well as report-built datasets. It also supports associating data from different sources, including direct connections, through relational datasets. It can create merged wide table relational models and allows the use of parameters to control the results of relational datasets.

Overall, FineReport offers higher flexibility and greater scalability in data source integration.

1.6 Data Entry and Reporting

Tableau does not have this feature.

FineReport’s data entry feature allows for the design of web and app-based input forms that can write data back to relational databases such as MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and more.

Furthermore, the data entry process in FineReport supports a variety of form controls, including prompts, adding and deleting data, importing data from Excel, offline data collection, data validation, multi-level reporting, scheduled reporting, and more. Excel plays a crucial role in scenarios such as data batch entry and reporting in enterprise data collection and submission.

This is a significant advantage of FineReport as it fully meets the user’s needs for data input.

1.7 Deployment and Integration

Tableau only supports deployment through its built-in Tableau Server as a standalone application server.

FineReport supports standalone deployment and embedded reporting deployment (with mainstream Servlet application servers). It allows the integration of reports into customers’ applications through IFrame integration. FineReport also supports seamless integration with IIS and Tomcat by masking the server port and supports seamless single sign-on and single sign-out integration with CAS servers.

Overall, the flexibility of deployment and integration is one of FineReport’s significant advantages.

1.8 Data Visualization

Both Tableau and FineReport offer a wide range of charts for users to utilize, but there are differences in the design of certain special charts and styles:

Tableau does not support 3D charts, heat maps, vertical titles, or title rotation, and does not allow maximizing individual components.

FineReport includes 3D charts and heat maps and can be expanded with plugins to incorporate new chart types.

Overall, FineReport provides a slightly wider selection of chart styles.

1.9 Mobile Experience

Tableau focuses on presenting information analysis content and does not support QR code login or annotation functions. It only supports sharing dashboards via email and does not support sharing to social applications like Line or WeChat. It also lacks security settings.

FineReport supports QR code login, annotation functions, and sharing via email and popular communication tools like WeChat. It offers various security settings such as device hardware address verification, support for HTTPS, VPN, single sign-on, password protection, and more. Additionally, FineReport supports more interactive configurations, allowing for features like photo capture, data reporting, and compatibility with various types of reports on the platform, making mobile BI implementation effortless.

Overall, FineReport offers more features for mobile devices.

1.10 Others

Here are some unique features of FineReport

FineReport

• Support the addition, deletion, and modification of database data
• Various data-entering controls
• Multi-source data enter
• Multiple submission methods
• Support Forced submission
• Data verification
• Offline data enter
• Support the import of Excel data to the report preview page
• Allow file upload and download
• Color highlight of the current line available

2. PowerBI

Power BI, an open-source alternative to Tableau, creates unique data experiences, with memorable reports personalized with your KPIs and brand. Owing to AI-powered answers to your business questions, Power BI can be an ‘encyclopedia’.

In addition, it gains insight from your largest BI deployments. By utilizing big data investments by connecting to all your data sources, Power BI upgrades insights across your organization.

Moreover, safety is the least issue that worries you as it better meets privacy and regulatory requirements with oversight of sensitive data through BYOK.

If you want to know more about PowerBI, you can check out the article: Power BI Alternative.

3. Domo

With the catchword ‘Modern BI For All’, Domo aims to unlock the value of data by putting it in the hands of everyone across your business and ecosystem. As a tableau alternative, Domo enhances internal data utilization by improving your existing data warehouse. Automated insights and augmented analytics are also viable alternatives to Tableau.

Meanwhile, Domo grows external data value. It will send data analytics dynamically to customers and partners, enabling them to integrate data from both two sides, along with customized experiences.

4. Qlik Sense

Qlik Sense is another Tableau alternative that we recommend.

Launched by QlikTech in 2014, Qlik Sense is an interactive business intelligence (BI) solution, representing an advanced evolution from QlikView. Offering a broader range of functionalities and a more user-friendly experience, Qlik Sense stands out as one of the top tableau alternatives.

Unlike QlikView, it places greater emphasis on the concept of ‘BI for everyone,’ facilitating easy exploratory self-service reporting analysis for all employees in the organization. Qlik Sense provides robust support for various analysis scenarios, fostering self-service analysis through a user-friendly interface. With customizable visual reports and extensive self-service analysis capabilities, users enjoy the freedom to tailor their analytical experiences according to their preferences. Qlik Sense proves to be a compelling alternative to Tableau, delivering enhanced features for a comprehensive BI experience.

If you want to know more about Qlik Sense and QlikView, you can check the article: QlikView vs Qlik Sense.

5. Sisense

Sisense is a powerful business intelligence tool that empowers users to analyze large datasets and gain valuable insights driven by artificial intelligence (AI). It is also a competitive Tableau alternative.

With over 100 data connectors, including Apache Spark and Azure products, Sisense ensures seamless integration and utilization of your data.

The intuitive drag-and-drop interface of Sisense allows for the effortless creation of personalized dashboards. Its interactive visualizations facilitate a deeper and more intuitive data analysis experience.

Additionally, Sisense offers advanced capabilities like forecasting and natural language queries, leveraging Actionable Intelligence.

Sisense provides a fully functional free trial. Furthermore, it offers tailored solutions to fit your company’s specific needs and budget.

Summary of Tableau Alternatives

Tableau, undoubtedly, is regarded as a reliable BI tool in business. However, considering the diverse needs of users, exploring Tableau alternatives such as FineReport, Power BI, and Domo is worth a shot. These Tableau alternatives offer unique features that cater to different customers. Here, we provide a channel for you to learn about these alternatives to Tableau, helping you find the best fit for your business needs.

Feel free to make an appointment for a live demo with our product experts. We will be more clear about your needs and see how FineReport can help you and your organization transform data into value.