Tableau’s Strengths
Tableau is a data visualization tool for reporting purposes, it has extensive charting functionalities.
Tableau’s weaknesses:
- For Big data use cases, Performance are weak in tableau compared to KAWA, the performance can be 10x to 100x for some use cases.
- Tableau has a very poor grid (it is a basic pivot table) it lacks the capability to display row-level data limiting the granularity of analysis and users can’t add all the columns at once, they have to add them manually one by one:
- Tableau has poor no-code filtering as it requires complex scripting making tasks like Year-to-Date (YTD), Year-over-Year YTD, and group-level filters difficult. In KAWA, these tasks become as simple as clicking a button.
- KAWA provides Excel-like formulas and Blockly for ease of use, whereas Tableau relies on scripting in its native language for formulas.
- There isn’t any advanced alerting functionality in Tableau to stay informed about significant events or anomalies in the data.
- Column-level security features are missing in Tableau
- Collaboration is poor because of:
- Tableau is a closed framework: Clients IT teams cannot add custom features like connectivity to internal API through a python script ( like in KAWA)
→ Ex: script for YTD filter in Tableau:
→ One click in KAWA:
Lack of self-service because it is producer/consumer model : the IT and data engineers build everything and they publish it as a dashboard to the end user ( business user) , so the end user can only filter on the dashboard but he cannot do new exploration.
Summary:
Feature | Tableau | KAWA |
Access to row level data | ❌ | ✅ |
No-code filtering (e.g., YTD or YOY YTD) | ❌ (Scripting required) | ✅ (One-click button) |
Group level filtering | ❌ (Scripting required) | ✅ (met one-click button) |
Alerts | ❌ | ✅ |
Excel-like formulas and Blockly | ❌ (Scripting required) | ✅ |
Column Level Security | ❌ | ✅ |
Collaboration | ❌ (Producer/consumer model) | ✅(Self-service capabilities) |
Custom Actions | ❌ | ✅(IT team can extend KAWA’s capabilities in Python to interact with any internal API) |