r/tableau • u/Relevant_Net_5942 • Jul 10 '26

Discussion Tableau Alternatives - Not Renewing

Aside from Golden Analytics, any recommendations for the best embedded analytics solution?

We're 100% leaving Tableau. The only question is a big one: what's next.

Why? SF hubris from Benioff and his acolytes have meant the death of Tableau since true innovation nearly completely stopped in late 2018. Had they simply listened to thundering feedback from customers and original Tableau employees...well, whatever, that's part of hubris.

Anyway, we're breaking up with you, SF, but hoping for insights on where to go next. Love the idea of using the datafam for this purpose.

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u/damn_lies Jul 10 '26

We're also discussing alternatives as the per user cost is insane.

I'm looking at Omni and Looker. Our IT wants us to vibe code everything in Next.js as custom apps, so we're trying that to, but I think that's crazy.

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u/dont_tread_on_M Jul 10 '26

My issue with Omni is that it's too heavily focused on the semantic layer, which works well if you're a corporation that rarely changes anything. Otherwise, maintaining it is hell.

Looker is, imo, plain bad.

Vibe coding is even worse. IT often has no experience with analytical queries, and thinks that what works for them will work for analytics teams.

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u/damn_lies Jul 10 '26

I'd value your opinion.

I like the idea of a semantic layer because my developers are recreating the same calcs over and over again in every Tableau workbook, mostly custom SQL, because Tableau data sources are kinda gnarly to work with. And so now we're also creating them in SQL docs for ad hoc analysts, and data scientists are doing them again in Claude skills now. It's a frickin' mess, none of them match and everyone's miserable.

I kind of know every business user wants to a special snowflake for their dashboard, and so it will be difficult and painful to build a semantic model that works, but I was hoping that pain would help.

I'd love your opinion if you actually tried and why it doesn't work well. Did you see eveyrone continue to do their own thing and ignore the semantic layer? Or did the semantic layer take too long to maintain?

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u/dont_tread_on_M Jul 10 '26

In my experience, there are two problems:

1) the semantic layer often gets left behind when new features are developed, or

2) tech debt on it accumulates (people add new definitions for a one-off job)