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 visualizations on your Tableau Public profile. You can download from Tableau Public and reverse-engineer visualizations 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

  • Organizations looking to broadcast public information or embed public visualization 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

  • Analyze 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 A checkmark indicating which features apply to each version of Tableau Desktop A checkmark indicating which features apply to each version of Tableau Desktop
Save visualizations locally A checkmark indicating which features apply to each version of Tableau Desktop A checkmark indicating which features apply to each version of Tableau Desktop
Autorecovery A checkmark indicating which features apply to each version of Tableau Desktop A checkmark indicating which features apply to each version of Tableau Desktop
Unlimited storage A checkmark indicating which features apply to each version of Tableau Desktop A checkmark indicating which features apply to each version of Tableau Desktop
Publish or embed visualizations on other public sites A checkmark indicating which features apply to each version of Tableau Desktop A checkmark indicating which features apply to each version of Tableau Desktop
Download or copy published workbooks A checkmark indicating which features apply to each version of Tableau Desktop A checkmark indicating which features apply to each version of Tableau Desktop
Publish visualizations to Tableau Public A checkmark indicating which features apply to each version of Tableau Desktop A checkmark indicating which features apply to each version of Tableau Desktop
Infrastructure deployment A checkmark indicating which features apply to each version of Tableau Desktop

(Infrastructure available at no cost)

Self-hosted on premise

(Role-based licenses)
Share visualizations to Tableau Cloud or Tableau Server

An x icon indicating which features don't apply to each version of Tableau Desktop

A checkmark indicating which features apply to each version of Tableau Desktop
Live data refresh

Limited data refresh

(Google Sheets only. Data is refreshed automatically once every 24 hours)

 A checkmark indicating which features apply to each version of Tableau Desktop
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)

 A checkmark indicating which features apply to each version of Tableau Desktop

(Can connect to all data sources)
Data source row limit 15M rows Unlimited
Monitoring and metrics Limited monitoring and metrics A checkmark indicating which features apply to each version of Tableau Desktop
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