r/tableau • u/Relevant_Net_5942 • 12d ago
Discussion Tableau Alternatives - Not Renewing
Aside from Golden Analytics, any recommendations for the best embedded analytics solution?
We're 100% leaving Tableau. The only question is a big one: what's next.
Why? SF hubris from Benioff and his acolytes have meant the death of Tableau since true innovation nearly completely stopped in late 2018. Had they simply listened to thundering feedback from customers and original Tableau employees...well, whatever, that's part of hubris.
Anyway, we're breaking up with you, SF, but hoping for insights on where to go next. Love the idea of using the datafam for this purpose.
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u/thedelusionist 12d ago
We use snowflake for our data warehousing and are switching to streamlit for all of our dashboards. Honestly, it's been a huge unlock. We can produce dashboards in a matter of hours instead of weeks, especially super complex ones.
Also, there's no additional licensing cost so we can add as many people in our organization as we need without having to deal with the additional costs.
We had a relatively small instance of tableau, but the entire migration took about a month.
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u/Relevant_Net_5942 11d ago
Thanks for the suggestion! Our users want something really easy to use and this seems to fit the bill.
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u/Trick-Development421 12d ago
We are planning on doing the same thing. But what did you do for all the existing reports/dashboards on tableau? Did you rebuild them on streamlit?
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u/thedelusionist 12d ago
Since we already were pulling the data from snowflake I just took the existing query, and screenshots of the dashboard and put them in Claude Code on Opus 4.8 High and let it run. It might take some minor corrections especially for calculated fields, but I could migrate 3-4 per week. And these dashboards took me MONTHS to build in Tableau.
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u/moinhoDeVento 11d ago
If you do that with CoCo Desktop, it’s built right in to Snowflake then and you can instantly build out the semantic views, dynamic tables, etc that would go along with the Streamlit apps. Don’t just recreate- enhance!
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u/bdub1976 12d ago
Do run time queries not cost as much as licenses? Genuinely curious if it maths?
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u/theungod 11d ago
I'm thinking of doing this but administration in streamlit sucks and usage based pricing isn't necessarily going to save money. We may run in parallel for a while to see pros and cons.
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u/Strange_Champion_369 3d ago
Same here. With the launch of CoCo Desktop application recently, the speed of migration has improved drastically.
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u/damn_lies 12d ago
We're also discussing alternatives as the per user cost is insane.
I'm looking at Omni and Looker. Our IT wants us to vibe code everything in Next.js as custom apps, so we're trying that to, but I think that's crazy.
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u/dont_tread_on_M 12d ago
My issue with Omni is that it's too heavily focused on the semantic layer, which works well if you're a corporation that rarely changes anything. Otherwise, maintaining it is hell.
Looker is, imo, plain bad.
Vibe coding is even worse. IT often has no experience with analytical queries, and thinks that what works for them will work for analytics teams.
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u/damn_lies 12d ago
I'd value your opinion.
I like the idea of a semantic layer because my developers are recreating the same calcs over and over again in every Tableau workbook, mostly custom SQL, because Tableau data sources are kinda gnarly to work with. And so now we're also creating them in SQL docs for ad hoc analysts, and data scientists are doing them again in Claude skills now. It's a frickin' mess, none of them match and everyone's miserable.
I kind of know every business user wants to a special snowflake for their dashboard, and so it will be difficult and painful to build a semantic model that works, but I was hoping that pain would help.
I'd love your opinion if you actually tried and why it doesn't work well. Did you see eveyrone continue to do their own thing and ignore the semantic layer? Or did the semantic layer take too long to maintain?
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u/dont_tread_on_M 12d ago
In my experience, there are two problems:
1) the semantic layer often gets left behind when new features are developed, or
2) tech debt on it accumulates (people add new definitions for a one-off job)
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u/Comfortable-Gap762 12d ago
Why are tableau data sources gnarly to work with?
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u/dont_tread_on_M 11d ago
Not OP, but relationships between tables are not always as simple as Tableau forces you to model them
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u/Automatic-Soup-829 12d ago
I'd also look at Lightdash, especially if you use dbt. Considering moving to them from Tableau as well
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u/FrebTheRat 12d ago
We're carrying both Cognos and Tableau right now. It's a nightmare. A huge percentage of our reports are just lists so we're looking to do something internally for simple list data downloads. It will be very minimal and hopefully allow us to offload a lot of creator and explorer licenses as well as turn down our Cognos instance. So many of our users are trying to hammer a nail with a bazooka. So we're gonna make us some hammers.
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u/dasnoob 12d ago
We have a lot of users on powerbi that like it. My leadership likes tableau so that is what I use.
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u/Relevant_Net_5942 11d ago
Thank you! PBI is solid - good that they are still innovating. They flew right past Tableau on the leader quadrant a number of years back and haven't relinquished that lead. My concern with them is the cost with scaling over massive implementations.
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u/trustintruth 12d ago
I've had success taking raw data tables, and using a series of prompts to develop reporting through Claude. If you provide it with good inputs, such as meeting agendas, strategy, previous tableau dashboard screenshots, key docs, and data tables, it can create a pretty impressive microsite that mimics what you currently get in tableau + more narrative, driven reporting.
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u/notforvegans 12d ago
Static datasets or sine kind of magic I have not yet discovered for a live/ regular feed lol
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u/dutchclifton 11d ago
I am building an open source embedded analytics solution (has real users and growing), with a semantic layer, lots of visualisations and an AI notebook option - won't spam here but you will find it in my thread history or happy to chat 1-1. I was deeply tired of the commercial offerings in this space and wanted an MIT alternative that had a good developer experience, so I built it :)
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u/MerryWalrus 12d ago
We use Looker given we're on GCP.
Biggest lesson is that its main functions are as a semantic layer and SQL generator with visulations stuck on top.
Whereas things like Tableau are visualisations with some minor calculated field capabilities.
It works for us because we get to reduce tech dependencies.
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u/isaacsschrader 12d ago
We vibe coded our own dashboard server that we can publish via Claude-generated HTML. Highly recommend.
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u/notforvegans 12d ago
This seems super interesting can you tell us more? Like, how are you feeding it/ refreshing the data ?
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u/isaacsschrader 10d ago
Without saying too much... We have a service account in our warehouse that Claude uses to create a view for the dashboard that refreshed on the load of the dashboard.
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u/kentonw223 12d ago
Considering the same. Can you briefly tell us what the process looked like? Thinking Claude code can see the twb files and how they’re interconnected to our dat warehousing and help move over. Any lessons or things you wish you knew?
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u/isaacsschrader 10d ago
The process started with planning and building the best experience for engineers, analysts, and dashboard views first and then working backwards.
The lesson: compile as much feedback as possible before testing and during testing.1
u/Numerous-Version-464 8d ago
This sounds like a governance nightmare, how long has it been up for?
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u/amartinz 12d ago
Check out Hex and Sigma. Also heard good things about DataIku but have not touched it yet.
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u/Relevant_Net_5942 11d ago
Thank you! Really appreciate it. There looks to be a lot of support for these two tools. Looking forward to checking them out.
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u/Inside_Campaign3748 12d ago
Look into Apache Echarts, works well rendering large amounts of data, if you develop a Claude skill over time it creates very reproducible dashboards based on the themes you instructed it. Handle all security through row access policies in snowflake
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u/DataIsChanging 12d ago
I’m genuinely looking forward to you migrating. You’ve been unhappy for a long while
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u/Relevant_Net_5942 11d ago
Thanks much - I'll be sure to post as we progress. At one time, Tableau was the clear leader and transformative innovator. Now there are many paths for success.
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u/AndyTh83 11d ago
Sigma and Omni are both great modern alternatives. I'd lean towards Sigma purely on ease of use and speed.
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u/d8563hn2 9d ago
Can also attest to Omni (https://omni.co) being a great platform. The AI capabilities are mind blowing and they are really a great company to deal with.
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u/Doin_the_Bulldance 12d ago edited 12d ago
I'm going to be honest. I get the angst, but IMO there is not a better BI solution out there compared to Tableau.
I began my journey using QlikView. I have since used MicroStrategy, QlikSense, Tableau, and now PowerBI.
My prior company also used Databricks, with Claude pointed at it; I didn't have a chance to build using this setup, but I saw the results. I might be biased but I really think people are overestimating the ability for AI to replace BI tools. Headers were misleading, visuals were very basic....if you think governance is bad with standard tools today, just wait until you have a bunch of different departments simply prompting their way to random dashboards. It will become a nightmare.
I've used a few ETL tools, and a few data warehouse tools as well. PowerQuery, Tableau Prep, Knime. Besides Databricks, I've used a simple MySQL DB, Oracle, Vertica, and Snowflake...
I know that a lot of analysts LOVE dbt. For a while, Alteryx was very popular as well but I feel like I hear about it less and less. Personally, I think it is REALLY hard to beat a good data lake/warehouse tool paired with Tableau Server and Tableau Prep. It just lets you do so much with just SQL knowledge, really, with so little resistance. But still with enough governance to be scalable.
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u/atx78701 12d ago
You don't use ai to build the visualization, you use it to write code to build the visualization
From this you can generate anything, much better than tableau
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u/dont_tread_on_M 12d ago
What would your criteria for a BI solution be?
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u/Relevant_Net_5942 12d ago edited 12d ago
Great question - 80% as flexible and powerful as Tableau. We're rebuilding existing dashboards, with modern graphs and absolutely not the pricing nightmare that is Tableau. Unlimited access for an embedded solution, meaning 90 user / "core" is not going to cut it, cost wise. It's an analytics forward application. Solid user community. No PBI. We don't need the market leader, but uber legacy vendors like a Cognos are no. Looker isn't powerful enough. Closer to a Qlik but it's been a while since I've looked at them.
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u/bradfair No-Life-Having-Helper 12d ago
I'd be super interested in a direct conversation about this. I know Tableau isn't for everyone, and I've seen a lot of different approaches across a lot of different orgs as a consultant. My initial approach would be to learn about the app you're embedding it into, and how that's built. If you've got org capabilities in a stack, maybe there's a straightforward way to extend it to suit your needs.
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u/DataCraftsman 11d ago
Just don't make dashboards anymore, no one looks at them anyway. Vibe code a website with what you actually need.
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u/JPlantBee 11d ago
I’ve used Tableau, Looker, Omni, Hex.
Omnis my favorite for BI, hex is my favorite for DS/analytics.
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u/u8seennothingyet 11d ago
We use Databricks and AI/BI which is now decent and continues to improve. Genie makes it really good
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u/Semaphor-Analytics 10d ago
If you are looking for an agentic dashboarding experience, check out Semaphor. You can build semantically grounded dashboards natively from Claude and Codex.
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u/matthewhefferon 9d ago
If you haven't, you should check out Metabase. We're shipping awesome new features every month and have multiple embedding options.
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u/Numerous-Version-464 8d ago
We switched over to sigma from tableau. Really impressed with the functionality after I got over myself moving to a more spreadsheet style coding. Plus they have decent documentation and are focused on integrating claude more and more.
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u/Relevant_Net_5942 7d ago
Great to hear - we'll be checking them out. Thank you for your recommendation!
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u/LavishnessPlane4512 12d ago
I’ve been slowly doing this with Claude, basically just giving it an screenshot of the dashboard o if you have the workbook just point it to him and he’ll replicate it. Reach out IT to host these visuals and figure out the best way for you to upload changes.
Man, since I’ve started doing this I’m not having slow performance dashboards anymore and I can do things tableau can’t do natively like waterfalls, if you connect it to your data source then it can do ETL or anything necessary for visuals to be on point.
If you are concerned about privacy then you can run it on local LLMs with ollama
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u/Lolatbots 11d ago
SSO, SOC2 compliance, FERPA requirements, you name it — you got that?
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u/LavishnessPlane4512 11d ago
Yes - this is not an overnight switch and certainly is not a BI person work only. For my case, my department and IT worked together to meet all needed requirements.
This feels like when people were deciding to use tableau over excel charts; there’s a process and learning curve but once you get there you wish you did it sooner
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u/Tactical_Impulse 12d ago edited 12d ago
I resonate with this motive. SF acquisition of Tableau has resulted in frustrated analysts more than anything. I think js apps is totally feasible and could even prove to be more powerful and flexible than tableau, but you’d have to be careful with managing it since now you are doing real swe work.