
Ask HN: Anything better than Tableau for data viz, dashboards? - datavizq
I am in charge of implementing a web-accessible dashboard to visualise some data we are collecting on behalf of a client.<p>I am currently planning to use Tableau. However, my (admittedly very limited) exposure to the platform has left heavily underwhelmed. Tableau dashboards appear expensive, slow, ugly, and completely lacking in statistical tools.<p>Can anyone suggest a platform that can improve on any&#x2F;all of these issues?<p>I am experienced with Postgres, JS, Ruby and Objective-C, and also with Stata and R, so I&#x27;m not afraid of some coding. But I am looking for something considerably quicker than coding the thing from scratch.
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click170
As someone who has multiple years of experience maintaining tableau, it is
laughably Ops unfriendly.

Want to change the email address that tableau sends reports to? Requires a
restart of a Tableau.

Want to update the ssl certs used in tableau? That's a restart.

Want to upgrade tableau to a new veraion? Get ready to uninstall and reinstall
the new version.

Of all of the servers and services that I manage, Tableau is my least
favorite. However, apparently its incredibly good at what it does. I say
apparently because I maintain it but I don't use it in day to day operations.

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learnyearn
If you want to leverage R, there is a web application framework called Shiny
that lets you build interactive apps from R analyses:
[http://shiny.rstudio.com/gallery/](http://shiny.rstudio.com/gallery/)

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gerpsh
If you're using more common visualizations (e.g. bar chart, line chart,
scatter plot, etc) there's an excellent js library called C3
([http://c3js.org/](http://c3js.org/)) that wraps charts implemented in D3
with a super-simple api. I'm a huge fan.

~~~
colordrops
I did a lot of test plots with several D3-based charting libs, and found
weirdness with C3, such as performance degradation over time, and oddities
like including the label for the data as the first entry in the array. NVD3
seemed to be the most mature and sensible of all the libs I tried.
[http://nvd3.org/](http://nvd3.org/)

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kposehn
I can't believe I'm going to say this, but tableau can easily be the right
solution.

So, if you're dealing with large datasets stored in multiple systems (like
Excel + MySQL + others) Tableau can be a boon.

The ability to use many different sources of data, create calculated fields
that merge/modify other fields, and then operate against them? Quite nice.

I especially am happy with how I can create larger visualizations that work
across different disparate datasets from many sources.

However, it does have quite a few issues in terms of UX, usability, etc. but
so far I've liked it. Your mileage may vary :)

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bmh100
If you want something with a lot of batteries included, extensive through
JS/HTML5, and fast, look to QlikView [1]. Message me (address in profile) if
you want someone to show you around the platform.

[1]: [http://www.qlik.com](http://www.qlik.com)

~~~
spaceactuary
In my (admittedly limited) experience, you'll probably run into some of the
same issues with QlikView being "expensive, ugly, and completely lacking in
statistical tools".

~~~
bmh100
I have deep experience in the QlikView (QV) platform, so I can address some of
the points in your experience:

> expensive

QV is not free, that's for sure. You'll be spending tens of thousands of
dollars for the one-time license fee, as well 20% yearly maintenance. On the
other hand, you'll be saving thousands of hours of engineering effort by not
reinventing the hundreds of wheels already in the platform. Don't succumb to
"not invented here" syndrome.

Check out a few dashboards I designed in just a day total [1], or the vendors
demos of Twitter data [2], HealthData.gov data [3], or Salesforce.com data
[4].

> ugly

If you are a first time user, the default visualizations are ugly, no doubt.
But for someone with design skill, the visualizations can be made quite
beautiful. For wanting more tools, just add your favorite JS library and HTML
to make a custom visualization.

> completely lacking in statistical tools

Fortunately, QV can link with R, allowing you to all the advanced capabilities
you need. Need something more specific? Throw a microservice REST API on top
of your desired application, and load that in through a GET request. There are
Hadoop connectors also built in.

One thing that people often don't realize when comparing Tableau and QV, is
that QV is a platform, as opposed to Tableau being just a visualization tool.
QV includes ETL, task scheduling, and an in-memory analytics database.

[1]: [https://imgur.com/a/3Tzni](https://imgur.com/a/3Tzni)

[2]:
[http://us-d.demo.qlik.com/detail.aspx?appName=Social%20Media...](http://us-d.demo.qlik.com/detail.aspx?appName=Social%20Media%20Buzz.qvw)

[3]:
[http://us-d.demo.qlik.com/detail.aspx?appName=Epidemiology%2...](http://us-d.demo.qlik.com/detail.aspx?appName=Epidemiology%20-Tycho.qvw)

[4]:
[http://us-d.demo.qlik.com/detail.aspx?appName=Salesforce.qvw](http://us-d.demo.qlik.com/detail.aspx?appName=Salesforce.qvw)

~~~
chris_wot
I have to agree with this assessment. Qlikview does ETL very well.

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hobbe80
I like periscope.io myself, although I haven't done an in-depth comparison
between the current options.

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travisoliphant
You might take a look at Bokeh
([http://bokeh.pydata.org](http://bokeh.pydata.org)) and either the PyData
stack or R (Bokeh can be used from R as well:
[https://github.com/bokeh/rbokeh](https://github.com/bokeh/rbokeh)). Bokeh
inside a Jupyter notebook with widgets and/or emerging "Bokeh Apps" is a
powerful application stack. Anaconda is a single download that can help you
get started with all the tools (including R):
[http://continuum.io/downloads](http://continuum.io/downloads)

It still requires some coding but it is very powerful. There are a lot of
examples in the Bokeh gallery and in examples directory:
[https://github.com/bokeh/bokeh/tree/master/examples](https://github.com/bokeh/bokeh/tree/master/examples)
.

There are several devs on Bokeh mailing list eager to help and the company
behind Bokeh ([http://continuum.io](http://continuum.io)) can provide more
significant help if you need it.

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jkaykin
I quite like BIME
([http://www.bimeanalytics.com/](http://www.bimeanalytics.com/))

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Afton
Disclaimer: I work at Tableau, but I don't claim to represent them, and I'm
not in tech support or sales.

Two things that are likely: If you think the statistical tooling is limited
you may not be aware that Tableau offers R integration built in. So if you're
comfortable in R you can probably build what you want.

[https://www.tableau.com/new-
features/r-integration](https://www.tableau.com/new-features/r-integration)

If you find it slow, it may be something that tech support can help out with
(changing config settings, or reworking your dashboards to be more
performant). You should email whoever manages your account, or hit up
[https://www.tableau.com/support/request](https://www.tableau.com/support/request)
and include your contact info.

You can also email me (email in profile) and I'll get back to you from my work
account with the right contacts.

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mclemme
I've used Dashing quite a bit, for relatively simple data, demo here:
[http://dashingdemo.herokuapp.com/sample](http://dashingdemo.herokuapp.com/sample)

official page: [http://dashing.io/](http://dashing.io/)

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tixocloud
It really depends on what your use case is. There are still many unknowns
related to implementing a web-accessible dashboard to make a decision.

What does your client intend to do with the dashboard? How much interactivity
do they want in place? Is the data real-time? What sort of advanced
statistical analysis does your client want to run?

Having answers to those might help guide you toward or away from Tableau. As
an everyday user of Tableau with a solid technical background, there are some
things that Tableau does well and there are some that it doesn't.

I love Tableau because it allows me to join many different data sources
together quickly so I can analyze the data. I can easily drag-drop and
visualize my data in many different dimensions. That said, sometimes the
analysis is basic and it runs slower when there's a huge dataset.

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buu700
For Cyph, I initially looked into Tableau and various analytics platforms like
Mixpanel, then ultimately realised that Google Analytics (which we were
already using) had an events API that worked fine for our needs.

See:
[https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...](https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/events)

And this is what our dashboard looks like:
[http://i.imgur.com/F8g8Hxq.png](http://i.imgur.com/F8g8Hxq.png)

It's fairly basic when it comes to visualisations, but thought I'd throw it
out there in case it's helpful.

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jboggan
I don't know about built in statistical tools beyond the basic aggregates
available in SQL, but we (Fullscreen) have been using Chartio and are really
enjoying it. I'd say it does great for 95% of the dashboards and
visualizations we need (custom d3.js for the rest) and it plays well with our
data sources. Particularly coming from Redshift data I found Chartio a lot
snappier than equivalent charts in Tableau, especially for large data sets.

You can either use their UI to make charts, or write pure SQL, or my preferred
method of making most of the functionality in the UI and tweaking the SQL for
the last few details if you need something bespoke.

~~~
JPKab
Chartio looks awesome, but I'm unable to get any pricing information from
their site. Care to elaborate on the cost for a small shop to leverage this
for a few dozen users?

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ryanatallah
Argo ([https://argo.io](https://argo.io)) is a web-based tool that enables
fast, natural-language based question asking and visualization of data. It's
designed to be used by a non-technical user, so you can share dashboards and
visualizations with people, and they can ask their own questions.

Under the hood, Argo uses advanced search processors to turn natural language
queries into SQL, optimized for visualization.

You can request a demo on their website: [https://argo.io](https://argo.io)

Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder and CTO of Argo

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ecyrb
Kibana / ElasticSearch? It's limited, but pretty and interactive, and gets you
a bunch with very limited up-front work. I'm sure you can find some better
demos, but here's one:
[http://parlement.letemps.ch/](http://parlement.letemps.ch/)

HUE is a similar but different alternative. The "search" tab has some great
demos, but appears to be down atm:
[http://demo.gethue.com/](http://demo.gethue.com/)

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akg_67
Though Tableau is incredibly expensive, I haven't yet found anything better
that Tableau for web dashboard and visualization. Tableau is strictly a
visualization tool and not statistical analysis tool. Tableau expects you to
perform all the calculation on the back-end and send it the final data for
visualization. I have also used Shiny, D3, Flot, Highchart, Chartio, Spotfire,
Bime, FusionCharts,Qlickview and nothing comes close to Tableau.

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gt565k
I'd suggest you use a JS library like HighCharts or D3JS (or both). All you
need to do is format your JSON on the back-end in the correct format and throw
it into the chart's configuration.

HighCharts has an amazing API, documentation, and examples.

[http://www.highcharts.com/](http://www.highcharts.com/)

[http://d3js.org/](http://d3js.org/)

~~~
panorama
What's your opinion on Highcharts usage longterm? I find it's great to get
something up and running, but I've found myself hitting limitations,
especially when it comes to custom design. But it's possible I may just be
using it ineffectively. I always assumed that one day I should port my
company's charts over to D3 if we wanted to be _serious_ about our data
visualization (which makes up a big part of our site).

In other words, is it like Bootstrap in that it's a useful starting tool, but
doesn't really scale well if you want to have full design control in the
longrun? Do you happen to know any notable sites using Highcharts? Thanks in
advance.

~~~
gt565k
You can style almost anything on the chart with CSS and HTML I believe. Custom
tooltip templates, etc

The API docs are just fabulous, with examples for everything :)

[http://api.highcharts.com/highcharts](http://api.highcharts.com/highcharts)

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MrApathy
QlikView is similar to Tableau, though more powerful and with a steeper
learning curve. But if Tableau is too expensive, likely that QlikView is, too.

Another option is Looker, a relatively new product that relies more heavily on
existing transaction/DW infrastructure. Dashboards are not ugly.

You can also look at d3, though by comparison development time will be much
slower than the other two I've named.

~~~
chris_wot
If you've got SQL experience it's actually very easy to learn Qlikview
scripting language. I recently finished a gig where the CEO retrenched all the
IT staff and didn't bother to have any of the Qlikview dashboard processes
updated. I had to pick up Qlikview in a few days, and had it all worked out
pretty fully within 2 weeks. Learning "set-analysis" took me few days to get
up to speed.

It's honestly not that hard to understand. The difficulty as always is putting
together a sane data model.

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chahex
You might want to try out Tibco Spotfire; it is similar to Tableau and Qlik.

They do provide some statistical tools (I personally don't know much about
it). And they do have a WebPlayer to view the dashboards online.

See demos here:
[http://spotfire.tibco.com/demos](http://spotfire.tibco.com/demos)

~~~
doctaj
I use Spotfire regularly, and it's a pretty good tool. I highly suggest
getting professional training, though, because our team didn't and it just
took FOREVER for everyone to get in the swing of things.

It's really good for allowing your end users to explore data - it just
requires a lot of development time to make really usable (ie: to make it more
than "just a dashboard").

It has been built with R in mind from day 1. They have their own "Tibco
Enterprise Runtime for R (TERR)" which I don't get to play around with much,
but it's an obvious place to start for advanced predictive stuff, machine
learning, and general data manipulation. Using the "RinR" package, you can
pretty much do anything that R can.

My only absolute HATE with it is the LACK OF FREE SUPPORT/Community. Even
though they have a nice "tibbr" (Facebook for businesses, basically)
especially for Spotfire support, it's all behind a login wall, so it's not
indexed by Google at all and it's not very searchable in my experience. In my
opinion, this is a fatal mistake with their entire solution. Forums are
amazing. Forum posts stay around forever. Very rarely do you want "the newest"
forum post. You usually want a SPECIFIC forum post - making tibbr an awful
user experience for support.

Additionally, their OLD forum/community IS indexed by Google, so you'll end up
at dead-ends (404s with the exact information you want, conveniently
highlighted in Google just before the answer is presented). Only a few people
have blogged about it in the past, and even those are usually old versions.
Also, basically no one talks about it on StackExchange. So, I just find it
really hard to find answers to specific questions - like you might naturally
do when programming to get a problem fixed quickly.

That said, it's super flexible and might be worth a look. I have very limited
experience with Tableau and Power BI, but those lacked some of the convenience
features I was used to when I used them. Personally, I wish I were forced to
just program all my data visualizations in R or Python, haha.

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jastr
VQL is a gui for really quick analysis and plotting. It’s mostly for non-
technical people, but we’ve had data science teams that use it to explore
their data before breaking out IPython or Tableau.

I’m the founder of VQL. Nothing on our site yet, but happy to send a
demo/instance. My email is jstrauss (then an @ sign) getvql.com

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civilian
One candidate is [http://redash.io/](http://redash.io/) My team has a backlog
task to set it up. We use bigquery to hold onto our data, and redash can work
with that.. It's open source, so it's free (except for one server) and looks
good.

~~~
jhorman
We use redash for some basic reporting. It is nice, and development is active.

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asdfprou
My favourite right now is Looker. Dashboards are beautiful and ad hoc query
creation is dead simple and on point. You will save yourself many "oh could
you re-run this data but split it out by device type?" moments because your
clients should be able to do it themselves extremely easily.

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thorin
Jasperserver with jasper reports has dashboards and is much improved now with
visualize js. The dashboarding is only in the free version i think and not
sure how the cost compares to tableau. It's much cheaper than business objects
or oracle bi publisher etc though.

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q2
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FusionCharts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FusionCharts)

EDIT: This seems to be heavily used in industry as well as in Federal IT
dashboard...etc. So it appears to be a good choice.

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dedalus
Interana ([http://www.interana.com](http://www.interana.com)) which is a YC
S12 company sounds like your best bet.

Whats your scale? how many events per day/month etc?

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dreaminvm
D3.js or even Google Charts will get the job done for most visualizations.

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bra-ket
Pentaho, Saiku, or plain D3.js on the front end with your own middle layer

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apurvadave
A new product you could take a look at is
[http://www.jut.io](http://www.jut.io). It's in beta / free for anyone.

It's a streaming analytics development environment, and uses d3 for
visualization. It ingests both events and metrics.

It's based on a high-level dataflow processing language that allows you to
process your data flexibly (moving window analytics, anomaly detection,
general statistical processing). you can build interactive apps & dashboards
and control which facets users can manipulate.

aaand here's the disclosure - I work at Jut and run customer success.

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whatok
Demoed Tableau at work a few years back and it was lacking in real-time
visualizations. Is that still the case? If so, anyone have any
recommendations?

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slake
I'm a user. I haven't found something as good.

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drewrv
Clicdata is user friendly and affordable.
[http://www.clicdata.com/](http://www.clicdata.com/)

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alison985
Looker. Looker is the best. It's an upfront monetary investment, and the
language you most need to know is SQL, but I love it dearly.

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mstkrft
[http://www.bimeanalytics.com/](http://www.bimeanalytics.com/)

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marianoguerra
take a look at [https://event-fabric.com/](https://event-fabric.com/) we
didn't officially launched the saas version but I can set up an account for
you to try it for free of course.

