Tableau Public
Free data visualization platform from Salesforce. Drag-and-drop charts, maps, and dashboards — but every viz you publish is visible to the entire internet, including the underlying data.
What should journalists know about Tableau Public?
Tableau Public is the most powerful free data visualization tool available — and the most dangerous one for journalists who don't read the fine print. The power is real: multi-view dashboards, calculated fields, map layers, drill-down interactivity, and a massive community of examples to learn from. Nothing else free comes close for complex, multi-dimensional data exploration. The danger is equally real: by default, anyone can download your entire underlying dataset — every row, every column — by clicking a button on your published viz. You can disable downloads in viz settings, but the visualization itself is still public and indexable. There is no private mode on the free tier. Period. For published stories using public data (census, budget, election results), it's excellent. For anything pre-publication or sensitive, use the desktop app for local analysis only and never hit publish. The learning curve is steeper than Datawrapper or Flourish, and embeds load noticeably slower — Tableau's JavaScript payload is heavy. But for genuine data exploration (not just charting), Tableau Public has no free competitor.
Exploratory data analysis during reporting. Publishing interactive dashboards alongside stories. Complex multi-dimensional datasets that need filters, drill-downs, and multiple linked views. Building a public portfolio of data work. Working with large datasets (up to 15M rows) that would choke simpler tools.
Sensitive, unpublished, or pre-publication investigative data — everything published is public and downloadable by default. Simple charts for articles (Datawrapper is faster and embeds lighter). Narrative-driven scrollytelling (Flourish is purpose-built for that). Embeds on pages where load speed matters (Tableau's JS is heavy). Anything requiring GDPR/CCPA compliance with personal data. Stories where the underlying dataset should not be exposed.
Security & Privacy
Data is scrambled while being sent to their servers
Data is scrambled when stored on their servers
Where servers are located — affects which governments can request your data
Privacy policy summary
Salesforce's privacy policy governs. All published visualizations and their underlying data are publicly accessible and indexable by search engines. By default, anyone can download the full dataset (.twbx workbook file) from any published viz — you can disable this per viz, but the viz itself stays public. Salesforce collects account information, usage analytics, and all data you upload. Deleted workbooks may not be immediately purged from caches or CDN. Uploading PII, confidential business data, or pre-publication investigative material violates both common sense and likely GDPR/CCPA if personal data is involved.
How to protect yourself:
Never upload sensitive, unpublished, or personally identifiable data to Tableau Public. Use the desktop app (Tableau Public Edition) for local-only analysis — it works offline without publishing. Disable workbook downloads in viz settings before publishing to prevent raw data extraction. Aggregate or anonymize data before upload. Remove unnecessary columns. Review the underlying data tab before publishing to confirm nothing unintended is exposed. For investigative work, keep all analysis local until the story publishes, then publish only the data you're comfortable making fully public.
Salesforce enterprise-grade infrastructure protects the platform itself — encryption in transit and at rest, SOC 2 compliance, regular audits. The real risk is not a breach. It's the design: everything you publish is intentionally, irrevocably public. Underlying datasets are downloadable by default. Journalists have accidentally exposed source identities, pre-publication data, and PII by not understanding this. Adequate for published, public-interest data. Do not use for anything you wouldn't print on the front page.
Who Owns This
Known issues
Embeds are JavaScript-heavy and slow to load compared to Datawrapper or Flourish — complex dashboards can take 5-10 seconds on average connections. By default, underlying datasets are downloadable by anyone viewing a published viz (disable in settings, but many users don't know this). No private mode on free tier — zero exceptions. Limited to static file data sources (CSV, Excel, Google Sheets); no live database connections on Public. 10GB total storage per profile can fill up fast with large extracts. Tableau AI features (Agent, Pulse, predictive modeling) are not available on Tableau Public — they require paid Tableau+ Cloud subscriptions. The desktop app (Tableau Public Edition) can save locally but has fewer data connectors than paid Tableau Desktop. Mobile responsiveness of embedded vizzes is inconsistent. Salesforce's aggressive enterprise push means Tableau Public gets fewer feature updates than the paid tiers.
Pricing
Tableau Public is free. All published visualizations are public. 10GB total storage per profile, 15 million row limit per workbook. Paid Tableau Creator (Desktop + Cloud) is $75/user/month. Explorer is $42/user/month. Viewer is $15/user/month. Enterprise tier runs $115/$70/$35 respectively. All billed annually. Tableau+ bundle adds AI features (Tableau Agent, Pulse) at additional cost.
This is an editorial assessment based on publicly available information as of 2026-04-02, using our published methodology. Independent security review is pending. Security posture can change at any time. This is not a guarantee of safety.
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