Tableau vs Toucan

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

Product Basics

Tableau is a data visualization and analytics solution for enterprises and individuals. A rich library of connectors helps you pull data from files, cloud sources and servers. A separate data management module, Tableau Prep, ensures your data is ready to transform when it comes into the platform.

Its latest features include AI with Tableau Pulse and the Einstein CoPilot.

Software, healthcare, manufacturing, banking and financial services, and retail companies will find it helpful. Whatever your domain, chart, plot and map data will give you a clear picture of business performance.

Besides, you can track daily operations and support line-of-business decisions with hardcore data. At the higher level, it boosts planning by giving senior management the freedom to dig deeper.

A Tableau Creator license costs $70 per user and includes Tableau Desktop and Tableau Cloud. Alternatively, you can deploy it on-premise and connect to the cloud using a bridge. A free trial of Tableau Desktop is available, and Tableau Public is always free to use.

Though it's a user favorite for data visualization, many users find it expensive and slow when handling large datasets.

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Toucan Guided Analytics (formerly branded as Toucan Toco) is a cloud-based platform consisting of two unified offerings that deliver data analytics and storytelling, as well as embedded analytics. Through data storytelling, it empowers businesses to explore their insights through visualizations and interactive dashboards. It centralizes information from disparate data sources and has a guided framework to help enterprises tell compelling stories with their data. Accessible to all, it encourages live collaboration throughout the analytics process to drive data-informed decision-making throughout an organization.

In its embedded analytics form, it allows customers to extend these accessible and actionable insights to their clients through an intuitive front-end experience.

Though it was built cloud-first, businesses can choose between the SaaS deployment via a private cloud, or an on-premise installation through Docker Image technology. It is suitable for small, medium and large businesses, and supports Windows, Mac and Linux.
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Accor
Allianz
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Carrefour
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Product Insights

  • Include Location Insights: Tableau scored a perfect 100 in our rankings with full support for geographical searches, geocoding and in-and-out zoom actions in maps. It stores the names of cities, countries, airports and zip codes, converting them to latitudes and longitudes. Already a user favorite for visual analysis, it wins the award for Best Geospatial Visualization and Analysis in our BI product directory.
  • Handle Data Queries: According to our analysis, Tableau got a top score of 99 and our best-in-class award for data querying. It allows automatic batch updates, while Power BI must rely on the bulk operations feature to update its underlying data, and Oracle Analytics doesn’t support batch updates at all.
  • Prepare Data: Tableau got a score of 100 in our assessment for its robust Tableau Prep module. It cleans and shapes data, allows forecasting models with R and Python scripts and accepts unstructured content, provided you convert it into a standard format first.
  • Manage Access: The Tableau Blueprint involves assessing if your organization’s data architecture is ready to adopt the platform. As part of this exercise, you can opt for one of three governance models — centralized, delegated or self-governing — with varied access permissions for different roles. Such a level of detail gets Tableau a top score of 100 in our analysis.
  • Visualize Your Metrics: Tableau earns the top score of 100 in our rankings and wins our analyst award for dashboarding and data visualization. It surpasses Power BI with dashboard starters, animations and auto-refresh capabilities. Plus, it can switch to use extracts when live connections aren’t necessary.
  • Track License Usage: View license information in detail, such as the number of active licenses and the last used date/time. Once you’ve configured the registry key on every computer with a Tableau Desktop instance, it’ll start sending usage reports to the Tableau Server.
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Platform

  • Centralize Business Data: Helps teams get on the same page by creating a single source of truth. Connects to the cloud, on-premise databases, spreadsheets and more to collect all of an organization’s data into one centralized hub.
  • Speed Up Queries: Optimize data processing by minimizing queries through cache engines and custom indexes that accelerate webpage performance.
  • Automated Reporting: Takes the heavy-duty work of development, design and maintenance out of data analytics with automatically updated data and scheduled reports. 
  • Ease of Use: Explore and understand business insights through an intuitive UI – without requiring training, tutorials or coding experience. Caters to people who may not have the technical knowledge or programming skills to handle a more complicated BI tool.
  • Accelerate Adoption: Educates and guides teams on how to create compelling data stories. Encourage autonomous, skilled data analysis with self-learning tools such as a glossary and contextual tips that help in data comprehension.
  • Improve Data Literacy: Makes information accessible by displaying it visually, enabling transparency across departments and empowering all stakeholders to take BI into their own hands.
  • Made for Collaboration: Interact with other teams and share power in decision-making through workspaces. Improve communication between departments and help them align with each other by annotating, discussing, exporting and sharing dashboards. 
  • Never Say “So What?”: Support decision-making through data-driven strategies with built-in calls to action and adaptable recommendations. 
  • Fast Implementation: Save more time and resources for analysis and data storytelling by accessing on any device through the web – nothing to install.
  • Security: Protect data through no-code row-level security, custom user filters and granular permissions management for apps, dashboards, stories and datasets. The solution is hosted in a private cloud with SSL Grade A+ security certification and an infrastructure compliant with all RSSI expectations and RGPD standards. 

Embedded Analytics

  • Build Once, Deploy Anywhere: Design one app for all devices and deploy anywhere to anyone in minutes, whether on the standard platform or as an embedded analytics product.
  • Preserve Brand Identity: Maintain business branding through full customization and white labeling options, while offering the power of data storytelling and analytics to clients. 
  • Multi-Tenancy: Handle who can see what by managing access to each embedding with granular control.
  • Focus On What Matters: Saves the company time and money by helping teams focus dedicated efforts on products, alleviating the burden of developing analytics from scratch.
  • Empower Non-Technical Teams: Build and deploy apps with a guided framework, even without coding experience.
  • No On-Boarding Necessary: Boost adoption and customer retention through a client experience that feels familiar, with access to actionable insights from day one.
  • Accelerate Time to Value: Empowers businesses to roll out robust solutions to clients in just two weeks. 
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  • Connectors: Combine data from various sources by choosing from a wide range of connectors — no need to spend on expensive third-party data integration tools. Tableau Bridge connects private networks to live data sources via Tableau Cloud.
  • AI: Tableau now offers AI capabilities thanks to Einstein Analytics.
    • Tableau Pulse: Explore data independently and ask questions with AI analytics. Tableau Pulse is available with Tableau Cloud and Embedded Analytics.
    • Explain Data: Understand the displayed insights with natural language explanations of data points.
    • Einstein CoPilot (Beta): Close the gap in understanding data with AI insights. Discover hidden trends by asking follow-up questions without losing context, thanks to generative AI. Einstein CoPilot is available with a Tableau Cloud subscription.
  • Tableau Prep: Clean and transform data of all types, including survey results, feedback data and social media posts. Shape and combine it with Tableau Prep, which is available with the paid edition only.
  • Data Stories: Convey your message with compelling narratives to get stakeholder buy-in. Drag and drop sheets onto the storyboard to show the growth, decline or stability of critical metrics.
  • Animations: Explain how data changes over time with animated charts and customize them to include graphics, labels and colors.
  • Filtering: Focus on the data that matters; it’s as easy as dragging and dropping desired fields to the Filter shelf. Specify a value range, set a condition or choose the top values to display.
  • User-Based Licenses: Explore cost-effective license combinations that work for your team.
    • Creators can build dashboards, permissions, and governance rules, and establish connections to new sources. They’re content authors who transform and analyze data. This license is available at $70 per user monthly, billed annually. However, they can’t control the Tableau Server or Desktop environment.
    • Explorer licenses are suitable for line-of-business users whose role requires independent data exploration. They can author content but within a governed ecosystem. Each Explorer license costs $42 monthly, billed annually. They can’t connect to new sources, modify data, or use the Tableau desktop or custom SQL.
    • Viewers can interact with data, apply filters and follow pre-decided workflows. This license is available for $15 per user monthly, billed annually. Viewers have limited rights and can’t create and edit visualizations and the underlying data.
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  • Connect Any Data Source: Connect to cloud and on-premise databases, cloud data warehouses, third-party BI solutions and REST APIs via over 100 built-in connectors, or create custom ones with an open-source library. Easily set up connectors to data sources, no programming knowledge necessary. Some supported connections include SAP, MicroStrategy, Google BigQuery, Oracle, SQL Server, Google Analytics, Salesforce and more. Pull data from CSV, Excel and static files to transform it into dynamic data.
  • Keep Data Up-To-Date: Refresh data on demand, automatically on a regular basis with a scheduler, or request it in real time. Define which sources to refresh and how often to refresh them through batch processing. Blends live and loaded data sources, tracking changes and debugging datasets with its Storytelling Tracker.
  • Integrated ETL: Extract, transform and load data, collecting it in an embedded data lake and cleaning it up before integrating it into the solution. Query data on the fly with Weaverbird, the vendor’s built-in, open-source no-code visual query builder. Integrates with existing ETL tools such as Talend, iPython, Notebook, Dataiku, Denodo and more, and is designed to be compatible with all information systems. Perform joins, slices, pivots and melts seamlessly, without the need to code. Supports ad-hoc transformation for evolution computation, date aggregation and other critical statistics.
  • Interactive Dashboards: Display KPIs in the form of an interactive story with the aid of graphic messages on ergonomic dashboards. Add additional context through comments, sources, captions, glossaries and more.
  • Toucan Toco Studio: Focus on the data story rather than design mechanics. Create charts, layouts and stories faster through guided design without needing technical skills. Add context and generate visualizations with a few clicks, all the while becoming more data-literate.
    • Data Visualization: Highlight key-value elements and add color and context to information through visualizations. Display data in visually appealing ways by creating more than 20 kinds of charts and graphs. Give context by including definitions and data sources in visualizations and annotating specific elements. Collaborate with others within the platform or in tools like Slack and MS Teams. 
    • App Gallery: Jumpstart the business by building dashboards in minutes from pre-designed templates. Choose from a gallery of ready-to-go applications; preview apps with a single click, then use as-is or customize as needed. Leverage sample data to view what the final product will look like, then download and populate data models with custom data. 
  • Collaboration: Drive action by continuing the conversation through annotations and comments on dashboards, and exchange ideas with others through the live chatbox. Ensure privacy by making direct comments visible to specific groups only. Export and share insights with others inside and outside the organization through tools like Slack and Teams.
  • Calls to Action: Decide exactly what to do with proprietary information through a built-in decision-support system that gives relevant recommendations, links to relevant insights and proposed next steps. 
  • Alerts: Add, edit and configure rules and conditions for email or push notifications through a dedicated notification environment.
  • Presentation Mode: Empower data-driven meetings by sharing insights with others in a presentation format. Schedule presentations with calendar events and invite people from anywhere to follow the data story. Identify metrics and interact with the dashboard in the presentation mode, and create a dialogue with the presenter through a chat box. 
  • Role-Based Administration: Maintain granular control of permissions across the organization. Ensure that roles and responsibilities are clear by defining roles like App Builder, App Validator, Viewer, Data Manager, Full Administrator and more. 
  • Mobile Access: Access proprietary information on any device — even on those that aren’t connected to the internet, thanks to an offline mode. With a mobile-first strategy, the vendor prioritizes the mobile version of a site and then adapts it for larger screens.
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Product Ranking

#1

among all
Business Intelligence Tools

#98

among all
Business Intelligence Tools

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Analyst Rating Summary

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Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

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Advanced Analytics Augmented Analytics Data Management Data Pre-processing Data Transformation Data Visualization Embedded Analytics Capabilities Geospatial Visualizations And Analysis Mobile Capabilities Platform Capabilities Reporting 95 32 100 95 90 100 93 96 95 96 100 0 25 50 75 100
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User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 10554 reviews
Excellent User Sentiment 178 reviews
88%
of users recommend this product

Tableau has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 88% when considering 10554 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

97%
of users recommend this product

Toucan has a 'excellent' User Satisfaction Rating of 97% when considering 178 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

4.5 (18)
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4.4 (2083)
4.9 (84)
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5.0 (8)
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4.7 (23)
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3.5 (1)

Awards

SelectHub research analysts have evaluated Tableau and concluded it earns best-in-class honors for Advanced Analytics.

Advanced Analytics Award

Toucan stands above the rest by achieving an ‘Excellent’ rating as a User Favorite.

User Favorite Award

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Data Visualization: Almost 98% of users who reviewed its visual capabilities praised the platform for its dashboards and the freedom to play around with data and modify charts as desired.
User-Friendly: According to 93% of users who mentioned ease of use, it makes data accessible with its easy user actions and handy tooltips.
Data Connectivity: About 92% of users who discussed data sourcing praised its ability to pull data from disparate systems.
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Data Storytelling: Almost 96% of the users who mention data visualization say that they can create high-quality, interactive dashboards seamlessly.
Integrations: All users who discuss the tool’s integration capabilities say that it connects seamlessly to tools in their existing tech stacks, including cloud databases.
Ease of Use: The software’s intuitive interface offers an excellent user experience for report builders and consumers alike, according to all users who review its ease of use.
Support: Technical support is responsive and competent, as discussed by all users who mention support services.
Functionality: Around 56% of the users who review the solution’s capabilities say that it reduces the time to insight and embeds into enterprise applications seamlessly.
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Pricing: Around 90% of the users citing cost found it expensive.
Speed: About 71% of the users who discussed performance found it slow when processing large data volumes.
Onboarding Woes: Approximately 67% of the users who reviewed the platform's adoption said there was a steep learning curve.
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There are no cons for this product at the time of publishing this review synopsis.
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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.

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Toucan Toco is a cloud-based data communications tool that provides analytics and storytelling capabilities to enterprises. All users who discuss integration say that the tool aligns with their organizations’ cloud-first strategies, integrating with their existing tech stacks with ease. All users who review accessibility are unanimous in their reviews that its user-friendly interface provides an excellent user experience. All of the users who say they’ve contacted customer support say the team’s quick and informative responses are a plus. Almost 96% of users who review dashboarding say that they can create interactive and easy-to-understand data stories through its visualization module, Toucan Studio. 56% of the users who mention functionality say that the solution has a rich feature set and the vendor releases weekly updates, astutely incorporating users’ feature requests. In summary, Toucan Toco helps businesses increase revenue opportunities for businesses to differentiate themselves in the market through data visualization.

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