Tableau vs ThoughtSpot

Tableau Desktop is a BI solution for data visualization, dashboarding and location analysis. In online reviews, users said they found its drag-and-drop charting a boon for creating charts and maps. Regarding customization, many users praised the platform for its various labeling and design options.I recently tried the Tableau Desktop 2024.1.3 version. The trial is only for 14 days and is enough for a sneak peek into Tableau’s dashboarding and data storytelling capabilities. For more straightforward use cases, Tableau is incredibly user-friendly and fast. Creating a new sheet gives you a canvas to create a visualization. Once you have the required sheets, combining them into a dashboard view is straightforward — select and add.My dataset included healthcare data, including details of patients, their hospital visits and insurance payer details. One use case was to find the total claim settlement amount. I dragged the Total Claims Cost and Payer fields to the column and row shelves, and Tableau gave me a bar graph. The toolbar had single-click options for sorting data from increasing to decreasing values or the other way around.To view the number of encounters by payer, I dragged the Payer field to the row shelf and used the SUM(ROW_COUNT()) function on the column shelf. The chart popped up with more visualization and layout options.I wanted an interactive filter to view the average claim cost by birthdate. I dragged the Birthdate field to the Filters shelf and right-clicked on it to set the end date as October 22, 1961. Selecting Show Filter added a slider conveniently to the right of my visualization. I could see the data for people born before October 22, 1961, and if required, I could change the end date.Another use case would be viewing the data by the type of hospital visits — how many people were inpatients, outpatients or those who needed emergency care. I dragged and dropped the Total Claims Cost and Payer fields into columns and rows, respectively. Similarly, I dropped Encounterclass into the Filters shelf and clicked on Show Filter to enable a checkbox on the screen. It had all the categories of visits, giving users the option to select the desired views.One-fourth of the users discussing adoption said there was a steep learning curve. Tableau relies on Python and R scripts for statistics in its visualizations. It's where the named licenses can prove to be a blessing, as you can opt to train upcoming Creators and Explorers. We recommend factoring in training if you want to hit the ground running.Some reviewers felt discounted packages for business editions should be available, similar to the free student licenses. At $70 per user, the Creator license can seem costly when compared to Power BI ($9.99 per user) and Qlik Sense ($30 per user).Here's the good news, though. Its built-in user management acts as a permissions layer for your organization - users can only access the relevant content. Plus, an organization will have very few Creators and a greater number of Viewers and Explorers, and the license fee reduces from Creator to Explorer to Viewer.We recommend opting for a wise license combination to get the most out of the product.On the upside, the vendor constantly releases new features, the latest one being Einstein CoPilot in beta.Overall, Tableau is a competitive BI solution, but if the pricing seems inflexible, quite a few other solutions offer live insights and advanced analytics out of the box.

ThoughtSpot is a powerful and reliable solution with the capability to deep-dive into data with an impressive level of granularity to perform business data analysis. With its AI-powered offering, SpotIQ, this platform enables easy data querying with intuitive drop-downs and suggestions to retrieve relevant business data for analysis and presentation. In addition, users can save and share their queries with other users with one simple click. In-memory data caching makes for faster data retrieval and creation of data visualizations on the fly, though some users feel that the platform should have more formatting options for better dashboard customization. With the capability to transform massive amounts of data sets into real-time analytics in seconds, this platform has a user-friendly interface that affords even non-technical users the autonomy to use data to discover anomalies and trends with minimal effort. Astutely recognizing the latency inherent in moving data between data sources and analytics platforms, the solution now offers direct querying into the in-cloud data warehouse Snowflake via its offering - Embrace. Users praise the pricing model of this tool since the cost incurred depends on the storage space consumed, not the number of users. The solution does have its limitations, though. Quite a few users say that implementing natural language processing (NLP) requires a lot of pre-work and that AI-powered searches can slow systems down. Data models have to be specifically tailored to the platform, which makes them inflexible for reuse. Though the tool is supported by all major browsers, users can face UI or performance issues with using it on Internet Explorer. As uploading Excel files is still the best way to push data into the platform, data import can be time consuming. Users feel that updated technical documentation and reporting tool tips for the dashboard UI could help shorten the learning curve. Deployment can be challenging for small businesses without IT support. Some users who reviewed it based on cost feel that this tool can be expensive for mid-level businesses. To summarize, businesses can leverage ThoughtSpot’s excellent AI-powered capabilities to share dynamic, real-time data analyses with employees and clients to drive effective decision-making within their organizations.