Tableau Desktop and Tableau Desktop Public Edition Feature Comparison
This guide provides an overview of the differences between Tableau Desktop and the free Tableau Desktop Public Edition.
Tip: Visit the Tableau Desktop pricing page to learn more about pricing options for Tableau Desktop
Both Tableau Desktop and Tableau Desktop Public Edition allow you to publish and showcase your visualisations on your Tableau Public profile. You can download from Tableau Public and reverse-engineer visualisations in the Desktop application.
Who should use Tableau Desktop Public Edition?
Important: Tableau Desktop Public Edition is not for commercial use.
Individuals seeking to learn how to use Tableau
Individuals looking to tell data stories using public datasets by publishing to Tableau Public
Organisations looking to broadcast public information or embed public visualisation on their own sites
Who should use Tableau Desktop?
Individuals or businesses that need to:
Connect to Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud
Connect to data sources that aren't supported by Tableau Public
Analyse data with more than 15M rows
Work with live data other than Google Sheets
Comparison guide
Features and Capabilities | Tableau Desktop Public Edition (free) | Tableau Desktop |
Privacy and security | ![]() | ![]() |
Save visualisations locally | ![]() | ![]() |
Autorecovery | ![]() | ![]() |
Unlimited storage | ![]() | ![]() |
Publish or embed visualisations on other public sites | ![]() | ![]() |
Download or copy published workbooks | ![]() | ![]() |
Publish visualisations to Tableau Public | ![]() | ![]() |
Infrastructure deployment | ![]() (Infrastructure available at no cost) | Self-hosted on premise |
Share visualisations to Tableau Cloud or Tableau Server | ![]() | |
Live data refresh | Limited data refresh (Google Sheets only. Data is refreshed automatically once every 24 hours) | ![]() |
Data sources | Limited data source options (Google Sheets, JSON files, Microsoft Excel 2007 or later, OData, PDF, Spatial files, Statistical files, Text files and more with Web Data Connector) | ![]() |
Data source row limit | 15M rows | Unlimited |
Monitoring and metrics | Limited monitoring and metrics | ![]() |