Splunk vs Tableau Online

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Our analysts compared Splunk vs Tableau Online based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Business Analytics Tools, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

Splunk Software Tool
Tableau Online Software Tool

Product Basics

Splunk is a leading platform for analyzing machine data. Gathering this data helps your business analysts recommend process improvements to save money and time. More than that, enterprises rely on it to stay on top of cybersecurity, including data breaches.

Collect process data and let your business analysts peek under the hood and identify risks in advance. Besides data ingestion, transformation, analysis and reporting are built in. Dashboards and reports provide interactive views.

It deploys wherever you need it — in the cloud, on-premise or as part of a hybrid setup. Pricing is complex but flexible and includes term and annual subscriptions.

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Tableau Online is a fully-hosted SaaS that enables users to perform self-service data analytics through the cloud from any device, anywhere at any time. It can create advanced visualizations that draw data from a variety of database sources and convert that data into understandable results. By creating and exploring interactive dashboards, users are easily able to discover insights and share them with others, empowering all members of an organization to make data-informed decisions.

Each deployment requires at least one creator membership, which includes the desktop version, prep builder and a creator license for online. Users can acquire additional licenses for explorers and viewers, with a minimum of five explorers or 100 viewers. Subscriptions are priced per user per month and billed annually. Enterprise pricing with volume discounts where applicable is also available. The vendor also offers a data management add-on that enhances data preparation and governance.
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$150/GB, Monthly
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$15/User, Monthly
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Tailored to your specific needs
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Product Assistance

Documentation
In Person
Live Online
Videos
Webinars
Documentation
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Live Online
Videos
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Email
Phone
Chat
FAQ
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Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support
Email
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24/7 Live Support

Product Insights

  • Maximize ROI: Design tailored campaigns and realistic budgets. Get a combined view of buyer and usage data from social media, email and web analytics tools, thanks to its data ingestion ability.
  • Predict Sales: Convert more visitors with targeted email campaigns or ads that remind them about specific products they viewed. Predict sales trends accurately by gathering market data from different sources.
  • Delight Customers: Keep buyers happy by solving their issues in the first call using personalized insight and product data, thanks to improved processes.
  • Boost Efficiency: Stop scrambling to fix unplanned downtime. Schedule predictive maintenance with sensor data from machines. It forecasts potential issues before they happen.
  • Support Finance: Combine your on-site and cloud data for a unified view. It acts like a real-time financial dashboard, giving you a clear picture of market activity and automating tasks to manage risk and save time.
  • Scale Seamlessly: Handle enterprise workloads efficiently by scaling vertically and horizontally. It scales by adding nodes, CPUs and data storage to ensure fast results even when dealing with a lot of information.
  • Manage Resources: Identify blockers and gaps in business processes. Monitor system usage with logs and dashboards and get notified when resource consumption exceeds limits.
  • Monitor Performance: Track everything from applications to hardware and get alerts if anything goes wrong. Splunk Observability acts like a watchful eye on system health.
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  • Harness the Cloud: Accessible any time, anywhere and from any mobile device or internet browser. Easily share analytics with others both inside and outside of the organization, enhancing collaboration.
  • Ease of Use: Analyze data through a user-friendly UI, intuitive drag-and-drop actions and natural language processing. 
  • Fast Implementation: Skip the long setup that comes with an on-premise solution like Tableau Desktop and get started right away. Ready to roll out in hours and doesn’t require server configuration, IT intervention, upgrades or any other administrative tasks.
  • Scalability: Provides the flexibility for companies to buy exactly what they need and scale up or down with licenses as needed.
  • Tailored To Your Team: Empower everyone to do their jobs better with the proper access to data according to their role and license. Organizations pay only for the functionality they want.
  • Data-Informed Decision Making: Uncover trends and patterns in data through artificial intelligence and machine learning and highlight it for analysts to examine. Discover insights visually and make decisions backed by data. 
  • Self-Service BI: Drive data literacy throughout an organization. Everyone gets more from their data through a self-service model — drill-down, filter and blend data through interactive dashboards to dig deeper for answers.
  • Everything in Real-Time: Set data to refresh manually or on an automatic schedule to ensure that all information is up-to-date. Share insights with others at the click of a button, keeping everyone in the loop. 
  • Direct Web Authoring: Provide analyst teams with a centralized workspace and enable those without Tableau Desktop to create data visualizations based on data source connections. Grant administrators extensive projects and content permissions to ensure strict data governance.
  • Hassle-Free Upkeep: All updates roll out automatically, ensuring everyone has the latest version and features. Provides data security and IT staff to maintain the servers, saving valuable time and money by taking care of all hardware and maintenance. Reduces the number of computers and Tableau Desktop deployments a business needs to manage.
  • Free Trial: Try out any of Tableau’s deployment options, including Online, through a free 14-day trial that includes the data management add-on. 
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  • Data Integration: Pull data from on-premise, cloud, streaming sources and machines. Include relational databases using Splunk DB, an add-on module. Splunk doesn’t support SQL databases otherwise.
  • Device Diversity: Gather user and system data from personal and network devices, servers and IoT sensors. Access reports and dashboards on a web interface from iPads, TVs and phones.
  • SPL: Search, filter and analyze data with a powerful query language. Boost adoption with natural language commands using Splunk AI.
  • Interactive Dashboards: Create custom KPI displays using the dashboard editor. Click on visualizations to link to other dashboards, drill down and run new searches.
  • Reporting: Understand data using statistics and create advanced reports using the existing BI tech stack. Calculate typical values in a dataset using averages and medians. Measure how each value differs from the mean and each other.
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  • Data Connectivity: Browse published data sources on the organization’s Tableau site, upload Excel or text-based data sources directly to browsers, use connectors to connect to data in a cloud database or server, or make use of dashboard starters to connect to common enterprise solutions.
  • Dashboard Starters: Instead of creating data visualizations from scratch, connect accounts to Tableau and in just a few clicks, retrieve data from enterprise solutions already in use to automatically populate pre-designed dashboards. Currently provides Dashboard Starters for Salesforce, Oracle Eloqua, Marketo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator and ServiceNow.
  • Tableau Site: Supplies a private workspace on the web to publish workbooks and collaborate with colleagues. Tableau sites integrate with Tableau Desktop; publish insights directly to the site from desktop at any time to share with others. 
  • Role-Based Permissions: Managers can set role-based access to individual dashboards or the system as a whole. Keep tabs on access to the site, views and dashboards based on license type, site role and content permissions. 
  • Web Authoring: Explorers — create and edit workbooks directly on the website, utilizing published data sources to generate and tailor views, dashboards and stories. Creator licensees, do even more — connect to new data sources, prepare data and use Ask Data and Dashboard Starters to jumpstart analysis. 
  • Ask Data: Quickly build data visualizations by typing analytical questions in natural language; interact with data and receive answers in the form of automatically generated graphics. From there, customize and adjust the fields and visualization types as needed.
  • Geo Visualization: View data geographically to gain location-based insights and improve transparency into business operations. Connect the solution to Google Maps for exact positioning or utilize its built-in geographic features to plot data on a map.
  • Multi-Table Data Analysis: With Relationships, combine data from multiple tables for analysis. Unlike joins, relationships ensure more accurate analysis by preserving values and the native level of detail in data, instead of duplicating it. Automatic, dynamic and context-aware, relationships create custom, flexible data sources that can be easily defined, changed, used and reused for data visualizations or analytic flows. 
  • Data Exploration: Dig deeper into data; drill down, focus on particular regions of dense data or hone in on a group of outliers and view underlying data sources. Hovering over selected marks triggers tooltips that offer more options for those data points. 
  • Present Data Your Way: Communicate data insights in any way, through any kind of data visualizations. Customize and format almost every component of a workbook, build an interactive dashboard or create a story sheet that tells a visually compelling narrative. 
  • Metrics: Create metrics that track changes to data over time and monitor KPIs like daily sales numbers. 
  • Share Content: Share projects, workbooks, views, flows and more with others directly through the Tableau site or by sending a direct link to the content. Embed a view into a web page or for offline usage, download a view as an image, .csv file, PDF, PowerPoint or Tableau workbook. 
  • Updates by Email: Subscribe to a view or workbook and receive an emailed image or PDF snapshot at regular intervals, without needing to log-in to the platform. Set data-driven alerts that trigger and send an email notification if data reaches certain defined conditions or thresholds. Tableau Online checks these alerts every 60 minutes. 
  • Comments: Engage in conversation about insights with colleagues through @mention tagging and interactive snapshots.
  • Tableau Catalog: Automatically indexes all content on a Tableau site, gathering metadata and enabling quick search of all data. Identify stale or deprecated data, better understand the data that powers published visualizations and trace the source of data and impact of changes to that data.
  • Developer Resources: Extend the capabilities of Tableau with resources from the Developer Portal, including APIs, data connectors, documentation and examples, as well as discussions on the Tableau developer community forums.
  • Mobile App: Get a personal window into the organization’s Tableau site via a native mobile app for iOS and Android systems with controls optimized for touch. Through curated data headlines, always see the most significant KPIs first. Offline sync keeps data visualizations up-to-date, even on-the-go. 
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Product Ranking

#3

among all
Business Analytics Tools

#28

among all
Business Analytics Tools

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User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 2623 reviews
Great User Sentiment 5306 reviews
88%
of users recommend this product

Splunk has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 88% when considering 2623 user reviews from 4 recognized software review sites.

87%
of users recommend this product

Tableau Online has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 87% when considering 5306 user reviews from 4 recognized software review sites.

4.3 (410)
4.4 (962)
4.6 (227)
n/a
n/a
4.5 (1539)
4.4 (1526)
4.3 (2474)
4.4 (460)
4.1 (331)

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Data Visualization: About 92% of users mentioning dashboards praised its rich displays and many options to create custom views.
Functionality: Around 84% of users reviewing capabilities praised its rich feature set.
Ease of Use: Almost 65% of users citing user-friendliness praised the platform for making log analytics accessible.
Deployment: About 61% of users reviewing deployment said the system was easy to set up.
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User-Friendly: The platform is intuitive and user-friendly, according to 85% of users who mentioned its ease of use.
Sharing and Collaboration: About 80% of users who mentioned sharing said that the platform enables enhanced collaboration and work distribution through its sharing capabilities.
Data Connectivity: Of the users who mentioned its data integrations, approximately 80% expressed satisfaction with its ability to connect to a variety of data sources and consolidate data in one place.
Data Visualization: It holds a high satisfaction rating with users reviewing it for data visualization, with over 90% of users praising its interaction dashboards and drag-and-drop capabilities.
Accessibility: All users who reviewed this feature said its accessibility from browsers and mobile devices was a major plus.
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Pricing: Around 96% of users mentioning cost found it expensive.
Learning Curve: Deep learning is required to use the platform, approximately 77% of users referencing training said.
Performance: About 61% of users reviewing performance said it slowed down when handling complex queries.
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Speed: This solution struggles with performance issues, with over 76% of users that mentioned system speed reporting problems with it lagging or loading slowly.
Data Refreshes: Around 92% of the users who reviewed this feature cited its slow manual data refreshes as a pain point for them.
Price: Over 85% of users who reviewed its pricing said that licensing is both too expensive and restrictive, with purchases requiring a large number of licenses.
Learning Curve: Though relatively easy to pick up, the platform requires somewhat extensive training to make the most of its capabilities, as noted by about 83% of users reviewing its learning curve.
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Splunk is a robust security and incident-monitoring platform for operations support. Event logs, alerts, security management and KPI tracking make it a robust enterprise solution. Search, storage and analysis are its strong points.We referenced online reviews for the past 18 months for this synopsis.About 92% of data workers said its incident review dashboard enables easy system monitoring. The capability to design dashboards with the option to drill down into data is an asset. Some users said they would like to have more visualizations.It garnered high praise for real-time incident monitoring. During our research, an oft-repeated sentiment was that users would not want to revert to previous tools.About 84% of knowledge workers reviewing functionality said the solution had substantial data collection and analysis capabilities. Around 65% of reviewers reported it was easy to use and had a readable log format.About 96% of the users citing pricing said it was costly but praised it for delivering on its promise and worth every penny. It can be complex to learn, and there’s a significant learning curve, according to around 77% of data workers who mentioned adoption.Slow loads and delayed responses were at the top of the minds of around 61% of users when discussing performance. According to Enlyft, mid-sized enterprises form a large chunk of the user base, and understandably so, as its steep price can deter small players.

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Tableau Online is a strong BI offering that serves as one of several options from Tableau, well known for its powerful data visualization tools. Many users would agree with this sentiment, citing its drag-and-drop capabilities, customization options and wide range of visualization options. Its intuitive UI invites users of all skill levels to analyze and work with data, though additional training is necessary to make use of the platform, with dashboard customization being one example where many users said they needed IT support. It establishes a private workspace on the web for users to analyze and work with data, with most users agreeing that it empowers cross-departmental collaboration, allowing for smoother communication between analysts and end-users. Accessible from both web browsers and mobile devices, it moves data analysis away from the desktop and enables users to bring their data wherever they go - a feature highly praised in recent reviews. Data source connectivity also rated highly with users who found it easy to connect to major data sources, though some noted that connections to unsupported sources were tricky. The most significant issue for most Tableau Online users is data refreshes - users said that they needed to publish new data to their site manually in order to refresh the information, a process that was both time consuming and damaging to data accuracy. For these reasons, Tableau Online struggles with real-time data and is better suited for historical data analysis, according to several reviews. In addition, the platform experiences performance issues, loading slowly when users filter or refresh data in particular. Others express concern that its licensing model is too restrictive and cost-prohibitive, requiring a minimum of 100 licenses for certain roles; several reviewers said that the ROI is simply not there for smaller to mid-sized businesses. Overall, Tableau Online offers many features that can help companies spread data literacy throughout their organization with relative ease of use, but may not be a good fit for all user needs.

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