Tableau Server vs Desktop

Question

I have a trial version of Tableau on my workstation. Currently I have built dashboards from Excel workbooks and published it to Tableau Server. My company is willing to pay for any licensing costs. But moving forward I am going to migrate all my excel data sources to a Microsoft SQL database. With the ultimate goal to build a data warehouse, build Tableau visualizations from that and publish the content to end users. End users will most likely only view and filter the Tableau dashboards. Furthermore, I plan to use SQL Server to import and update the data warehouse on a quarterly basis.

I think having Tableau Desktop on my workstation is all I need to publish dashboards for end users. There seems to already be a Tableau Server established. Additionally, I think if the end users simply have Tableau Reader that is all they will need.

Am I on the right track?

Answer 1

You may go ahead with Tableau Desktop. It in itself is very robust and would come at a cost slightly lower than that of Tableau Server.

Tableau Desktop gives you options to create robust dashboards and publish them. These dashboards might take some flat files as data source or a database / datawarehouse. Both works with equal ease. You can also schedule Subscriptions where registered users will receive eMail with the snapshot of the data in the dashboard at the time specified by the developer.

As such, there are no downsides of using Tableau Desktop over Tableau Server. There are a few functionalities that are only enabled in Tableau Server but absence of them won't cause any hinderance to your services.

On the other hand, if your organisation deals in B2B models, Tableau server gives you enough Security and better collaboration features. It has good visualisations on mobile devices.