Home > Business Analytics Tools > Tableau Online > Tableau Online vs IBM Watson Analytics

Tableau Online vs IBM Watson Analytics

Last Updated:

Our analysts compared Tableau Online vs IBM Watson Analytics 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.

Overview Pricing Benefits & Features User Ratings Analyst Summary Screenshots
Tableau Online Software Tool
IBM Watson Analytics Software Tool
Get Free Demo Demo    Request Pricing Pricing
Get Free Demo Demo    Request Pricing Pricing

Product Basics

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.
read more...

IBM Watson Analytics is a software platform that leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to empower businesses with data-driven insights for improved decision-making. It caters to businesses of all sizes and across various industries seeking to enhance their competitive edge. Benefits include optimized decision-making, increased productivity, cost reduction, and improved customer satisfaction. Popular features encompass predictive and prescriptive analytics, natural language processing, and data visualization. Pricing is determined on a per-user basis, taking into account the number of users, features utilized, and the chosen subscription plan. User experiences suggest that IBM Watson Analytics offers a user-friendly interface and robust capabilities, making it a valuable tool for businesses seeking to harness the power of data analytics. However, it's recommended to explore alternative options and consider factors such as pricing, features, and user reviews to determine the best fit for your specific business needs.

read more...
$15/User, Monthly
Free Trial is available →
Get a free price quote
Tailored to your specific needs
$500 Monthly
Free Trial is available →
Get a free price quote
Tailored to your specific needs
Small 
i
Medium 
i
Large 
i
Small 
i
Medium 
i
Large 
i
Windows
Mac
Linux
Android
Chromebook
Windows
Mac
Linux
Android
Chromebook
Cloud
On-Premise
Mobile
Cloud
On-Premise
Mobile

Product Assistance

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

Product Insights

  • 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. 
read more...
  • Enrich Data Interactions: Reduced reaction times give users nearly instantaneous access to data. The solution can be trained to prioritize common requests in order to optimize future interactions with users. 
  • Apply and Discover Data: Speedy data discovery helps process millions of data points in a timely manner to get on with the work that matters most. 
  • Anticipate and Prevent Disruptions: Identify potential issues in workflows that can cause long-lasting damage to an organization using AI and pattern identification. 
  • Detect and Mitigate Risks: Security measures like role-based access, single sign-on and advanced learning combine to create a secure system that protects data from theft and leakage. Train the solution to adapt to and follow the latest privacy regulations to preemptively discover compliance breaches. 
  • Democratize Access and Use: Foster data literacy throughout the organization by utilizing employee knowledge combined with industry teachings and empower the whole workforce through AI-augmented learning. 
  • Customize and Teach the System: It learns as it is used to adapt to individual user’s needs and habits through AI, NLP and machine learning. 
  • Gain a Competitive Advantage: Using the data already available to an organization, managers can predict the shape of future trends that will affect their business. It also positions businesses to remain agile in the face of changes. 
read more...
  • 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. 
read more...
  • Watson Discovery: Watson Discovery, IBM’s advanced AI, offers smart document understanding that lets users visually label text in documents and incorporate structured understanding. 
  • Simplified Predictive Analysis: Automated analysis techniques simplify the roles analysts must play in the data analytics process. Build advanced predictive models with the bare minimum requirements. 
  • Dashboards: Customizable dashboards let users interact with data in real time, as well as collaborate on visualizations. 
  • Speech to Text: Converts spoken words to text as well as written text to audio. 
  • Image Analysis: Analyze visual content such as video or images through machine learning capabilities. 
  • One-Click Visualization: Data discovery and analysis via visualization are accessible with single-click exploration. 
  • Natural Language Processing: Users can perform queries in plain English, and the system will carry on a natural language dialogue to facilitate intuitive searches. 
read more...

Product Ranking

#28

among all
Business Analytics Tools

#22

among all
Business Analytics Tools

Find out who the leaders are

User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 5306 reviews
Great User Sentiment 291 reviews
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.

84%
of users recommend this product

IBM Watson Analytics has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 84% when considering 291 user reviews from 3 recognized software review sites.

4.4 (962)
4.1 (141)
4.5 (1539)
n/a
4.3 (2474)
4.4 (89)
4.1 (331)
4.1 (61)

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

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.
Show more
User-Friendly Interface: It has an advanced, intuitive and user-friendly interface, as noted by 61% of reviewers who mention user-interface.
Integration: Around 70% of the users referring to integration state that it enables easy integration with various technologies and data sources.
Implementation: It has a quick and straightforward implementation process, as observed by 89% of reviewers who specify implementation.
Customizable Reports: All the users specifying reports state that it provides highly customizable reporting capabilities.
Show more
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.
Show more
Learning Curve: It has a steep learning curve for beginners, as noted by 50% of the users referring to the learning curve.
Customer Support: Over 60% of reviewers who mention customer support specify that customer support responses often get delayed.
Slow Performance: Some of its functions and features work slowly at times, as stated by 71% of the users who observe performance.
Show more

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.

Show more

IBM Watson is an open and multi-cloud platform that helps users automate their AI lifecycle and create powerful models. It is easy to implement and ensures a smooth customer experience through its advanced, intuitive and user-friendly interface. It offers comprehensive integration and reporting capabilities for achieving greater insights. Many reviewers have noted that it works slowly sometimes, affecting overall performance. Also, delayed responses from its customer service team and steep learning curve for beginners can be tedious.

Show more

Screenshots

Top Alternatives in Business Analytics Tools

ClicData
Cognos Analytics
Domo
Dundas BI
Entrinsik Informer
Grow
Halo BI
ibi
Infor Birst
InfoZoom
JReport
Klipfolio
Looker
MicroStrategy
Oracle Analytics Cloud
Orbit Analytics
Power BI
Pyramid Analytics
Qlik Sense
Reveal BI

WE DISTILL IT INTO REAL REQUIREMENTS, COMPARISON REPORTS, PRICE GUIDES and more...

SelectHub Products Reporting and Analytics
Build Your Requirements
SelectHub Products Cost and Pricing Guide
Get Your Free Comparison Report
Compare products
Comparison Report
Just drag this link to the bookmark bar.
?
    Table settings