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.
"We are able to generate quality reports easily which allows us to decrease response time."
"A positive feature is Report Studio, where we create beautiful, complex reports."
"For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent."
"Using custom controls, it is possible to extend the application with even more functionality and make the application intuitive and attractive."
"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."
"If they want dashboarding, storytelling, and analyzing why KPIs are met or not, then Cognos is a better candidate than Qlik Sense."
"When it comes to decision-making, the product is very useful and used in many departments since a lot of people prefer the reports to be generated by IBM Cognos."
"Self-service is possible through the use of dashboards, which are also very intuitive. Stories can be used to pin snapshots, tell the story for meetings, etc."
"The solution makes for very productive and really informative decision making. It can lead the whole business and build a strategy across whole working departments."
"It's very easy to use and users don't need any IT support to access it as the information is right there."
"The solution offers very good reporting."
"Tableau is highly scalable. Now that they've introduced Hyper, you can create an extract of more than 5 million rows in minutes and then do your analysis."
"You can create attractive dashboards that inform users using Tableau."
"It is easy to adapt visualizers to have interactive conversations among decision-makers."
"This service is the combination of very pleasant, interactive graphical visualizations along with the application of advanced statistical models (in some cases)."
"The number one thing was just the ease of getting something up quickly. The other thing that was good about it was that it was fairly fast for decent-sized data sets in terms of performance and run time."
"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."
"It would be nice to offer free online training on the tool for end-users."
"It could have more options for themes."
"I would like them to reinclude PowerPlay. One thing that I am missing in the current Cognos is what was formally named PowerPlay. They have basically removed PowerPlay from it, which is something that I fail to understand because it was the most wonderful tool for business intelligence that I've ever used. As far as I know, they don't provide this functionality anymore, so this is one thing that I dislike about Cognos."
"This product could use improvement in terms of usability for those with less technical know how."
"I think the GIS pieces maybe not as good as we would like."
"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."
"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"SAP BusinessObjects has some semantic layer designs that give the flexibility to do ad hoc reporting or dashboard designing. If that can be brought into Tableau, it would be great. We have the data in the database, but we should also be able to bring something between the database and the dashboard and do some semantic layer modeling for ad hoc reporting requirements."
"Overall, the only major frustration that I have had so far is with Tableau Public. I first used Tableau Public when I was building capacity, and when there was a later release to download and you wanted to upgrade, all your work would have to be manually re-entered."
"The process of embedding the dashboards on external portals and websites could be improved."
"It would be nice if we could export more raw data. Currently, there is a limit as to how much data you can export."
"I would like the solution to have certain features allowing the delivery of reports to the email."
"Licensing and pricing options could be made better so that more users would be able to use it."
"The forecasting feature in Tableau in my view is too limited because it must have dates but I should be able to predict the outcome of an event without having a date as part of the input."
"They need a write-back; that is what is missing. If they get the write back to the database, they will be fully automated, but for the time being, they are not."
IBM Cognos is ranked 4th in Reporting with 132 reviews while Tableau is ranked 2nd in Reporting with 290 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 Oracle OBIEE. See our IBM Cognos vs. Tableau report.
See our list of best Reporting vendors and best BI (Business Intelligence) Tools vendors.
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