Tableau
Shares rank 3 of 4 business intelligence tools by recommenders
Recommended as a great UI for grammar-of-graphics charts, and available on-prem with good pricing on large contracts. Critics cite high license costs and limited chart flexibility.
Recommended as a great UI for grammar-of-graphics charts, and available on-prem with good pricing on large contracts. Critics cite high license costs and limited chart flexibility.
19 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 7
- criticize it
- 12
- approval share
- 37%
Recommended in 5 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 7 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 0.5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 5 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Great UI for grammar-of-graphics charts
“Like how Tableau is a great UI for grammar of graphics”
Comment from 16 Mar 2026 in “Mod sources warn Palantir role at heart of government is threat to UK security” “Tableau is a great UI for grammar of graphics”
Comment from 16 Mar 2026 in “Mod sources warn Palantir role at heart of government is threat to UK security”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Expensive licenses and aggressive upselling
“they only were pushing to buy top tier support package, but never fix anything”
Comment from 13 Aug 2026 in “Ballet – Workflow automation that writes integrations against any API” “the $100k Tableau license your company purchased after their sales guys showed”
Comment from 15 Apr 2026 in “5NF and Database Design” “expensive subscriptions (Tableau/PowerBI costing $70+/mo)”
Comment from 7 Dec 2025 in “Show HN: Morph-AI-Era – Turn CSV files into interactive dashboards instantly” Simple charts are hard to build
“make drawing something simple, like a histogram, near impossible”
Comment from 31 May 2026 in “Domain Expertise Has Always Been the Real Moat” “Years of tableau/looker have atrophied my creativity a bit”
Comment from 9 Mar 2026 in “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)” Weak version control and SQL guardrails
“Typically these types of analytics (PowerBI, Tableau) require an iFrame so that's not manageable via git.”
Comment from 1 Oct 2026 in “From Embedded Dashboards to Programmable Analytics” “Tableau doesn't have great guardrails on the SQL that gets issued to the database.”
Comment from 30 Jan 2026 in “Database Benchmarks Lie (If You Let Them)”
Other business intelligence tools people recommend
The three most recommended other business intelligence tools, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Metabase | 16 | 10 | 62% | 8 | — | — |
| Microsoft Power BI | 9 | 10 | 47% | 6 | — | — |
| TableauThis page | 7 | 12 | 37% | 5 | — | — |
| BitBoard | 7 | 0 | 100% | 1 | — | — |
What people said
19 of the 20 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Add Tableau to this list.”
“Typically these types of analytics (PowerBI, Tableau) require an iFrame so that's not manageable via git.”
“they only were pushing to buy top tier support package, but never fix anything”
“Goodbye Salesforce Tableau”
“make drawing something simple, like a histogram, near impossible”
“Tableau server can also deployed on prem with all the features and there's definitely good pricing available on larger contracts”
“the $100k Tableau license your company purchased after their sales guys showed”
“Like how Tableau is a great UI for grammar of graphics”
“Tableau is a great UI for grammar of graphics”
“PowerBI/Tableau are free and do much more.”
“Years of tableau/looker have atrophied my creativity a bit”
“where they run some simple calculations”
“Tableau doesn't have great guardrails on the SQL that gets issued to the database.”
“they were acquired by Salesforce and became enterprise software”
“why are you making Tableau do this themselves?”
“expensive subscriptions (Tableau/PowerBI costing $70+/mo)”
“hell Tableau, Matlab, JMP, Prism and even Excel are all better in many cases”
“Tableau needs to be disrupted”
“A screenshot of a Tableau dashboard is possibly the most dangerous form of internal data communication there is”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.