There are 6 major products: Tableau Desktop, Tableau Prep, Tableau Server, Tableau Online, Tableau Reader and Tableau Public.
- Tableau Desktop is the developer tool, all development work is done on Tableau Desktop from creating reports, formatting and combining them together in a dashboard. Every student and faculty can request a free Tableau desktop license through Tableau Academic Program. It is also available for use in the Digital Studio.
- Tableau Prep is a data preparation tool that empowers the user with the ability to cleanse, aggregate, merge or otherwise prepare their data for analysis in Tableau.
- Tableau Server is a sharing tool which can be used to share and create visualizations for organizations. Users in the organization can view the visualizations from a web browser.
- Tableau Online is also a sharing tool which has the same functionality of Tableau Server but the different is that Tableau online server is hosted in Tableau Clouds.
- Tableau Reader is a free desktop application that enables users to open and view visualizations that are built in Tableau Desktop. But users can’t edit the dashboards in Tableau Readers.
- Tableau Public is the free version of Tableau Desktop with limited functionalities. Users can only save the visualizations in the Tableau Public site which can be viewed by anyone.
Tableau Desktop has the most fully featured development environment and allows for data source creation, so it is the most popular tool among all Tableau products.
