We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos and Tableau based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: In this comparison, IBM Cognos comes out on top. Users are happier with the support than Tableau users are, and IBM Cognos users also report an ROI.
"In terms of stability, I think that Cognos is more stable than Tableau and Power Bi because of its framework manager concept that allows us to import metadata and store it in the framework manager."
"Comparing IBM Cognos to other applications, once a person is trained on it or they have developed a skill set to operate the application, it is best in its category."
"Mapbox integration for geospatial analytics down to longitude/latitude layers."
"If they want dashboarding, storytelling, and analyzing why KPIs are met or not, then Cognos is a better candidate than Qlik Sense."
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"The correlation analysis is excellent. It's one of the best that I have used to date."
"IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team."
"The initial setup is quite straightforward."
"Technical support has been responsive."
"Tableau's most valuable feature is its ability to connect with various data sources and display real-time data on three different dashboards."
"It's very easy to visualize data with this product. The visualization maps of and frames that we have been able to cross-reference has been excellent."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of use."
"While using this solution I have found the valuable features to be ease of use and the visualization. It is a complete solution."
"The Web Editing capabilities allow us to grant end users enough capabilities for them to do self-serve discovery without the added cost of needing to get everyone desktop licenses."
"It is easy to adapt visualizers to have interactive conversations among decision-makers."
"Tableau has many different connectors for different databases. It's very easy to connect to MySQL, SQL Server, Amazon EMR, Presto, Redshift, BigQuery, and so on."
"The data uploads that we do, such as Excel files, have a lot of restrictions. If we can make it a bit more user-friendly, allowing us to have more flexibility it would be a great help."
"There are a lot of limitations with the out-of-the-box tool."
"We need more predictive analytical functions, not only diagnostic or decryptic analytics."
"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"We would like to see development of the product's UI function, to make it more of a UI tool that can be configured as required."
"I would like for the platform to become more standard. If we make a development on our report and our dashboard, it will not be used in another solution. That means there is no portability for the developers."
"The high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."
"IBM Cognos's error messages seem to be a bit ambiguous. An error will be encountered and a message will be sent out very ambiguous and after investigating the error message it could be any number of issues. There was never a direct answer to the question or a direct answer to the error messages. Sometimes it would be a generic error message for 21 different solutions. It wasn't very specific, which required a lot of digging around and trial and error trying to fix the problem. The messaging in their error messaging is something needing improvement."
"The extraction, transformation and loading of data in Tableau takes a lot of time and we do not have confidence that Tableau is showing all the data we need."
"I would like Tableau Prep to be integrated with Tableau Desktop. I would also like more customizations for tables."
"I take a long time to process the hundreds of thousands or millions of records that must be processed every day."
"We need big servers to perform the operations that we are doing. They should probably relook at its architecture."
"If they could add global filters in the stories, more chart types, and default colours, it would help."
"It would be nice to include more features on each dashboard."
"It's not an aesthetic platform at the moment."
"In the cloud sometimes the performance is a little bit slow."
IBM Cognos is ranked 7th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 132 reviews while Tableau is ranked 2nd in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 293 reviews. IBM Cognos is rated 8.0, while Tableau is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of IBM Cognos writes "Improved the quality of our KPIs, while reducing calls to the IT department". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Tableau writes "Provides fast data access with in-memory extracts, makes it easy to create visualizations, and saves time". IBM Cognos is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Oracle OBIEE, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, Oracle Hyperion and Amazon QuickSight, whereas Tableau is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Amazon QuickSight, Domo, SAS Visual Analytics and QlikView. See our IBM Cognos vs. Tableau report.
See our list of best BI (Business Intelligence) Tools vendors and best Reporting vendors.
We monitor all BI (Business Intelligence) Tools reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.