I think if you are a smaller operation and you have specific requirements that you've thought out and aren't covered well by basic tools, then getting comfortable with JS and SQL (or R or matplotlib or Jupyter or whatever) is going to be the best way.

I've spent too much time watching people spend months and tens of thousands trying to bend 12 different third party tools together when a developer could do the whole thing in a week and it would actually do what you want it to do.

Nailing down the actual requirements is the hard part of building your own dashboard, it sounds like you've done that. If your needs are stable-ish or you have consistent developer resources it's going to be hard to find a better fit than that.

For me the main point about Tableau is not building dynamic dashboards, but actually working with data interactively in an intuitive fashion.

It's for when you want to figure out what the data is telling you, and not how to wrangle the data into saying something.

This. Freelancing is the future. Hiring in-house developers, or better still, freelance programmers will ensure that you will have custom-built your maximum BI tools and with a reasonable price. Of course, finding and hiring good freelancers who are not only dedicated in their craft, but also reasonably priced is a bit involved task, but certainly doable.

>custom-built your maximum BI tools and with a reasonable price Have you ever really seen that happen? Not me.

That's why I was repeating the importance of him having some well thought out requirements. In situations where this is true (and it really happens sometimes), I've regularly seen good developers come in under budget and mediocre ones at least come close.

> Have you ever really seen that happen? Not me.

In 99% cases, that happens because your requirements change. If you hire a competent developer, the total cost of development is always a pittance compared to what you pay monthly/quarterly to a product based company.

> And I have to put stuff in SQL and do the plumbing if I need any meaningful preprocessing.

Actually, the plumbing isn't as difficult as most people make it out to be. Nowadays, its the era of abstraction and FOSS infrastructure tools like jQuery, Bootstrap and like you mentioned, Highcharts. I'm a freelancer who quite recently developed a Tableau replacement for one of my clients. This client realized that all he basically wanted from tableau was a chart and some basic data manipulation like sorting, filtering and grouping (count, sum, average, etc.). All the things needed to develop this little app already existed in the FOSS world:

1. Highcharts/jqplot for charting.

2. Twitter-Bootstrap for showing a professional front-page and UI elements.

3. jQuery and jQuery-ui for DOM manipulation, AJAX handling for SQL queries, enabling drag/drop, etc.

4. PHP/Mysql on the backend (which is needed in anycase).

As for plumbing, each of these tools is so well-documented and also a simple Google search will point to tons of StackOverflow links that happily provide an answer to any and every question you may have!

tldr; Library/Framework plumbing might seem complex initially, but for a practiced Web-Developer, its like a cake-walk!

Hey, question on how licensing for highcharts works as a freelancer. Do you have your client buy a single website license with you as the dev? Or you have a highcharts dev license? Or something else?

Nope, we went for jqplot (http://www.jqplot.com/), it is GPL. The client initially wanted to go with Highcharts, but when we found about its licensing, I started looking for a FOSS alternative and this was what I found.

rms_returns - are you interested in discussing a project I'd like to have a freelancer work on? You can reach me at http://www.simplelegal.com and my HN username.

Even better jqplot is dual license between MIT and GPL.

I'm similar, but use D3

jqplot is what I use extensively. I haven't used D3 yet, but heard that it takes a lot more initial coding to come up with even a basic line/bar chart.

Power BI is Microsoft's answer to Tableau. You can judge on how well it achieves this. There's a free (as in beer) standalone Windows desktop application, and an Azure-hosted collaboration and hosting portal.

There is Qlik and InfoCaptor

Qlikview is their main competitor.

Klipfolio?

Comparing Klipfolio to Tableau is like comparing Notepad to Visual Studio.