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.
"Even while a user is using a cube for reporting, there will not be a situation as ' Cube file locked; unable to build or deploy'."
"The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report."
"We use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."
"The most valuable feature of IBM Cognos is security. The solution has updated features that other competitors' solutions come out with long after IBM Cognos has had them."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The basic platform comes with several meta-modelling tools."
"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."
"For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent."
"The UI part is the best. The end-users can easily get started with Tableau Desktop or Tableau Online because of its user-friendliness."
"I have found many of the self-service features valuable."
"Scheduled extract and the multiple connectors are fantastic!"
"Tableau is easy to use compared to some other solutions, such as Excel."
"There is a lot of APIs available, which means that Tableau can be customized to a large extent."
"The most valuable part of the solution is the general dashboard features."
"The geospatial maps representation and the visualizations are nice."
"There are already connectors to almost every single major database and service that you can possibly think of."
"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."
"There are some small features that are missing. It would be nice if the graphics were better. You can use external sources for charts, but it's quite complex to use and not easy to implement. If you want a new chart, you can download it from multiple tools and implement it into IBM Cognos."
"It would be good if the solution had conditional formatting."
"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."
"I would like to see the introduction of mapbooks for supporting some geographical information."
"It would be better if it is was easier to implement without extensive training for it."
"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"I would like to have predictive and forecasting capabilities in Cognos. It's one thing to do reporting, and another thing to easily predict or forecast certain data points, which is very important for all the clients."
"I would like to be able to set the parameters in a more specific manner."
"Licensing and pricing options could be made better so that more users would be able to use it."
"The customization in the front end is a bit difficult."
"It should have more integration with different tools and technologies. Its licensing cost should also be improved."
"We have products like Tableau, Power BI, Cognos, and QlikView in the data visualization segment. Compared to those, Tableau is quite costly."
"Tableau's data modeling, mining, and AI library features need improvement."
"The customization requires a lot of effort and should be simplified. The performance could be better."
"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."
IBM Cognos is ranked 4th in Reporting with 129 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.