At high level, there are two types of Tableau extensions:
- Dashboard Extension: Do things you wish Tableau did easily but does not and those features are developed by 3rd parties:
- Sandboxed: Tableau hosted, run in a protected environment without access to any other resources or services on the web (Safe to use)
- Network: Anyone can host, dashboard data has to be sent to the hosted server (not safe to use)
- Data Story (the implementation is the same as an extension)
- Analytics Extension
- TabPy
- RServer
- Einstein Discovery (not very useful yet)
- Analytics Extension API
From data security perspective, make sure you are fully aware of the followings:
I do recommend to make all Sandboxed extensions available on your server and site as those are safe to use.
Why Sandboxed extension is safe? By design, Sandboxed extension never sends dats out of your Cloud site or server.
Is Sandboxed extension free? Pretty much all free
This is my recommendation for Extension Config for your site.
Since Extension is also available on Desktop, the default Tableau Desktop setting is very good: It does not turn off Network Extension completely but does give pop-up warning before any Network Extension can be used.
