Tableau Products and its discription in breif

Tableau offers 7 products which can be broadly categorized into:

1.       Tableau Development Tools

a.       Tableau Desktop Pro      b. Tableau Personal        c. Tableau Public

2.       Tableau Servers

a.       Tableau Server (Enterprise)        b. Tableau Online (Cloud)             c. Tableau Public

3.       Tableau Reader

Tableau Development Tools:

All your reports/dashboards development are done here. From creating reports, charts, formatting them, putting them together as a dashboard all the work is done using any of the Tableau report development tools.

Tableau Desktop Pro: This is fully-featured development tool with access to connect to most the available data-sources. Tableau has its own set of drivers for major data-sources, however, they do provide access to make ODBC connections to connect to the data-sources which are not listed in their pre-defined connection list.

It allows us to save the dashboards locally or publish to Tableau Server, Tableau Online or Tableau Public server to share and collaborate.

Tableau Desktop Personal: Like Tableau Desktop Pro, this too has all the development functionalities except, it allows connection to only file-based data sources and to save the dashboards locally. You cannot publish the dashboards/reports on servers.

Tableau Public: This is a free product from Tableau. It too has all development functionalities but it won’t allow you to save the dashboard locally. Visualization Enthusiast can play with data using Tableau Public. It has its limitation. You can only use limited data(1 million row or 4 GB), can only connect excel or text file (no database connectivity) & anything you save in Tableau Public will be saved on Tableau Public Server which anyone can download (no confidentiality). You need to have a Tableau Public server account and publish the dashboards under your account on cloud.

Tableau Server: The dashboards you create are shared with other users using Tableau Server. When you upload (publish) a Dashboard to Tableau Server from Tableau Desktop, other users can access those Dashboards by logging on Tableau Server.

Tableau Public: It's a free product from Tableau. Visualization Enthusiast can play with data using Tableau Public. It has its limitation. You can only use limited data (no. of rows), can only connect excel or text file (no database connectivity) & anything you save in Tableau Public will be saved on Tableau Public Server which anyone can download (no confidentiality).

Tableau Online: It's an alternative to Tableau Server in which the servers are on Cloud. Servers are not maintained by users but by Tableau guys. Needs subscription fees.