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.
"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."
"The initial setup is quite straightforward."
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."
"The correlation analysis is excellent. It's one of the best that I have used to date."
"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."
"Dashboarding, reporting, and ad hoc reporting are the valuable features of IBM Cognos."
"We use the account statement report. When you use an account in HSBC, you receive various types of accounts, such as the stock market, fixed accounts, credit cards, and business accounts. We can create one consolidated report called CCS support, which includes all these accounts. In that statement, we are consolidating all those accounts."
"When compared with Power BI, Tableau is much easier."
"The solution has great features which nobody can beat, you can do a lot of customizations, such as use different dimensions and colorize them. Additionally, you can use the numeric values for the customization, which is an exceptional feature."
"The ease of presenting findings is very helpful."
"Visualization attributes: Marks – Color, Size, Label, etc.. Easily Accessible and Intuitive."
"It is so easy to do a lot of things. There is a lot of flexibility and creativity in this product. In other products, you don't have this flexibility."
"It is a complete solution allowing a lot of integrations, different graphics, multiple operations and analyzes our date and gives us meaning from it."
"Technical support has been responsive."
"It has made the reporting stage simple and enabled us to focus mainly on the ETL part"
"I don't like that when we use Colab packages, we get less functionality. For example, you can make groups of data with Excel or with the data sets from the packages, but when you use the Colab packages directly, you can only group the data when you analyze it with Analysis Studio. I think Cognos needs to improve more on this functionality."
"The AI-based features could be further enhanced by the solution."
"I would like to see the introduction of mapbooks for supporting some geographical information."
"The technical support team’s response time is slow and needs to be improved."
"Chart quality: many other competitors have charts and graphics that look much better and that provide dynamic effects. Cognos doesn't."
"The solution's support could be better."
"The tool needs to improve the connectivity since I see that, at times, there is a need to increase the memory in the database."
"Need improvement towards Visualization."
"Lacks customization in some areas."
"I would like the solution to have certain features allowing the delivery of reports to the email."
"When it comes to visualizations, Tableau has a limitation as compared to Power BI. It has a limited set of visualizations. Power BI has the entire marketplace, so you can connect and import many visualizations and use them, whereas Tableau has only 10 or 15 visualizations. There should be more visualizations, and there should also be data integration with more cloud providers."
"The customization requires a lot of effort and should be simplified. The performance could be better."
"Small multiples (a.k.a. Trellis charts) are possible only through very hacky means. Update: Still remains a challenge."
"From a downside perspective, some of the more advanced modeling techniques are actually fairly difficult to do. In addition, I just fundamentally disagree with the way you have to implement them because you can get incorrect answers in some cases."
"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."
"Improvements can be made in template support. The workbook file structure is really hard to version control. If there was some sort of version control support offered particularly for workbooks, that would help big time."
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.
We monitor all Reporting 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.