Tableau has three deployment options with fundamentally different security, collaboration, and cost profiles. Choosing the wrong deployment creates either over-investment (paying for Server capabilities you do not need) or under-investment (using Public for content that should be secured). This guide clarifies the differences and the right choice for each context.
Tableau has three primary deployment options — Tableau Public, Tableau Server, and Tableau Cloud (formerly Tableau Online). The names suggest a spectrum from public to private, and that intuition is correct, but the differences go beyond access control. Understanding what each deployment provides — and what it does not — prevents the common mistakes of over-paying for capabilities you do not need or under-investing in capabilities you do.
Tableau Public: Free, Public, No Secrets
Tableau Public is a free hosting service for Tableau visualisations that are intended to be publicly accessible. Any Tableau Desktop user can publish a workbook to Tableau Public. Published content is visible to anyone who visits public.tableau.com or who navigates to the embed code. There is no access control. Content cannot be restricted to authenticated users.
**What Tableau Public is for**: journalistic data visualisation, educational showcases, personal portfolios, public-facing charts for websites that need no authentication. News organisations publishing election results, academics sharing research visualisations, and analysts building public-facing analytical work use Tableau Public legitimately.
**What Tableau Public is not for**: any data that should not be publicly accessible. Business operational data, customer data, employee data, financial performance data — none of this belongs on Tableau Public. The absence of access control is not a limitation to work around; it is the defining characteristic. There is no way to make a Tableau Public workbook visible only to authenticated users within your organisation.
**Data source limitations on Tableau Public**: Tableau Public workbooks cannot connect to live databases. They must use extracts. The extract data is stored on Tableau Public's infrastructure and is accessible to any user who accesses the visualisation. For any data that should not be publicly accessible, this is a fundamental barrier.
Tableau Server: On-Premise or Self-Managed Cloud
Tableau Server is the enterprise deployment option for organisations that host their own Tableau infrastructure. Tableau Server runs on servers in your data centre or in virtual machines in your cloud environment. You manage the infrastructure, including OS patches, Tableau Server version upgrades, backup and recovery, and scaling.
**Access control**: Tableau Server provides full access control through Active Directory integration, LDAP, or Tableau's own user management. Content can be restricted to specific users or groups. Row-level security can restrict what individual users see within a workbook. Content is served from your infrastructure and is not publicly accessible unless you configure it to be.
**Infrastructure responsibility**: with Tableau Server, your organisation is responsible for the infrastructure. This includes: server sizing and scaling (buying or provisioning enough compute for peak load), hardware/VM maintenance, OS security patches, network configuration, backup and disaster recovery, and Tableau Server software upgrades. For organisations with mature IT infrastructure, these are manageable responsibilities. For organisations without dedicated IT operations teams, they are a significant operational burden.
**Cost structure**: Tableau Server is priced per user on an annual licence. Infrastructure costs (servers, cloud VMs, storage) are additional. For organisations with large numbers of occasional viewers, the per-user licensing cost can be significant. Tableau Server's Guest User option allows embedded workbooks to be viewed without a per-user licence in some configurations.
**When Tableau Server is appropriate**:
- Organisations with data residency requirements that prevent storing data outside their own infrastructure
- Organisations with mature IT operations that can manage the infrastructure burden
- Organisations that need maximum customisation control over the Tableau environment
- Organisations that have already invested in on-premise Tableau infrastructure and are not ready to migrate
Tableau Cloud: Managed Hosting for Your Private Analytics
Tableau Cloud (formerly Tableau Online) is a Software-as-a-Service deployment where Salesforce manages the Tableau Server infrastructure and the customer manages the analytical content. Your organisation's users authenticate to a Tableau Cloud site that is logically isolated from other customers. Content is not publicly accessible — full access control is available.
**Infrastructure responsibility**: Tableau Cloud eliminates the infrastructure management burden. Salesforce handles server sizing, scaling, OS patches, Tableau Server upgrades, backup, and disaster recovery. Your organisation manages the analytical content: data sources, workbooks, users, groups, and permissions.
**Data location**: Tableau Cloud stores data in Salesforce-managed data centres. For organisations with strict data residency requirements (data must stay in a specific country or region), Tableau Cloud offers regional deployments in the US, EU, and APAC. For organisations with requirements that data never leave their own infrastructure, Tableau Server is required.
**Cost structure**: similar per-user licensing to Tableau Server, but without the infrastructure cost. For most organisations, Tableau Cloud is less expensive than Tableau Server on a total-cost-of-ownership basis when infrastructure management labor is included.
**When Tableau Cloud is appropriate**:
- Most organisations that do not have strict data residency requirements preventing cloud storage
- Organisations without dedicated IT infrastructure teams to manage Tableau Server
- Organisations migrating from Tableau Server who want to reduce operational burden
- New Tableau deployments that are not constrained by legacy on-premise infrastructure
The Migration from Server to Cloud
Salesforce has announced Tableau Server end-of-life and is driving customers to migrate to Tableau Cloud. The migration involves: migrating published data sources (with connection string updates for cloud-accessible endpoints), migrating workbooks, reconfiguring authentication (typically from AD/LDAP to SAML or OIDC), and migrating scheduled extract refreshes.
For most organisations, the migration is a significant project — 3–9 months depending on environment size and complexity. The primary technical challenges are: authenticating cloud-based extract refresh jobs to on-premise data sources (Tableau Bridge handles this for most cases), and migrating embedded authentication patterns in external applications that use the Tableau REST API.
Our Tableau consulting and managed BI services practice manages Tableau Server to Cloud migrations — contact us to discuss your Tableau deployment strategy.
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