I might have taken it to the extreme (always a good discussion kick-starter), but aamof we did try Tableau an a range of other tools, and being a startup that uses data and most if not all of its people are OK with SQL we managed to be a lot more productive and transparent with re:dash.
There's a blog post about the motivations behind building it here - http://geeks.everything.me/2013/12/05/introducing_redash/