When comparing Tableau vs Google Charts, the Slant community recommends Tableau for most people. In the question“What are the best reporting and business intelligence (BI) tools?” Tableau is ranked 3rd while Google Charts is ranked 15th. The most important reason people chose Tableau is:
If you want to start using Tableau at your company, you don't need huge IT resources or start a big BI deployment. Just purchase the software, install, and you're ready to go. Maybe you don't need ANY IT help at all.
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Pros
Pro No complex installations / IT approvals needed
If you want to start using Tableau at your company, you don't need huge IT resources or start a big BI deployment. Just purchase the software, install, and you're ready to go. Maybe you don't need ANY IT help at all.
Pro Powerful
Tableau makes it easy to SEE your data and make business decisions based on it.
Pro Appealing visualizations
Hard to compare with what you have to code by hand (Shiny)
Pro Great support
Both Tableau's support team AND the user community are super helpful and enthusiastic about the product.
Pro Easy to learn
You don't have to be super techy to understand it. You can learn how to use Desktop over the course of two days.
Pro Easy to use
Google Charts has a large selection of chart types to get started with and have up in running in very little time. It uses sensible defaults, but has flexible options to allow for customization when needed. Better than most other free to use Chart APIs and has great documentation provided by Google.
Pro Supports multiple Y axes
Important for trend correlation, eg. comparing number of clicks to sale amounts. Not same scales / units.
Cons
Con Some simple tasks are sometimes not easy to calculate.
Con Addictive
Once you start using Tableau you don't want to use any other software anymore. So if your manager is obsessed with e.g. Excel, you may have issues.
Con Cannot self-host
Google does not allow you to save or host the code yourself.