Let’s get started and go deep into the tableau family products and what each product can do for you, personally I like tableau as its products are very user friendly even for non-geeks which will help you out in day to day Business Intelligence operation and reading those reports created by Tableau family of products, in this article I would like to break down each product of Tableau for you and describe each one of them what they do and how it can help you achieve your data analyses.

Tableau Desktop:

This is where we author and create all of our visualization and develop our reports, create charts and this is where we pull data in and play with the data to create robust reports and charts out of it, and finally this is the development environment for Tableau so if you you want to develop something in Tableau this is the product you need.

Tableau Reader:

If you develop something and you wanted to share this work with your other colleague or share with other department in the company Tableau Reader is must product to read the reports you created so think of this as a PDF reader where you can read PDF documents which is created by Adobe PDF Creator but this is for Tableau products to read the reports and analyses you developed, and it’s free to download and work with.

Tableau Public:

Thinks of this product as hosted version of Tableau Reader where you don’t need to have your own server to hos this and no infrastructure is required and the good thing is that it’s free to use but obviously there is some restriction where you can only share some amount of data I believe there is around hundred thousand row limitation but maybe in the future they increase that size to accommodate your need, this is a quick way of sharing your data without even worrying about online infrastructure or to install Tableau Reader locally to read those files you get but there is security issue here which means anybody can read the visualization and data you put in Tableau public.

Tableau Server:

Is an enterprise version of Tableau which you have to host this locally and manage it locally or you can install it in cloud and use it that way there is more security in this means you can always manage the security and control the access levels and also it’s scale-able you can scale this as much as you want with local hardware or buy more hardware in cloud, I will be writing more about this in the future articles to go through the installation and how to set up this locally.

Tableau Online:

Is an online hosted version of Tableau server where you can go easily sign up and start using it, this is for those small and medium companies where they want to use Tableau with minimum hardware infrastructure just sign up and start using your Tableau server online and I believe they are charging 500$ per user maybe they changed the price but that is what it was the last time I checked, and you can easily jump in to Tableau Server once you hit some certain amount of user basically they want to make it as easy as possible for you to use Tableau.