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.
"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"Integration with Office can enable the 'download' mode of storytelling."
"I have worked on the features like dashboards and stories, and I do like them a lot."
"Previously, we were doing static reporting. Management would request a report, and it would take staff a week or more to provide it. With Cognos, we have dynamic reporting, and it has reduced both reporting and decision making times significantly. With the solution's dashboard, the company's management team has updated records at their fingertips. This means that they can directly access the data they need to make decisions."
"IBM Cognos is an excellent solution for tax, planning, budgeting, profit and loss statements and balance sheets."
"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'."
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"The main difference that I like about Cognos compared to other solutions is its data splitting functionality. We have all our company data inside the Cognos environment and so we prefer to split the information Cognos itself. It's more efficient this way."
"I love the customization skills that Tableau has, it is not restricted to what is built-in already."
"The dashboards are amazing, with different report types and stunning visuals. Most importantly, Tableau's AI with machine learning automatically predicts features and reports based on historical data. These are the three most valuable features for me."
"It has made the reporting stage simple and enabled us to focus mainly on the ETL part"
"The most valuable feature is the 3D charting."
"The UI part is the best. The end-users can easily get started with Tableau Desktop or Tableau Online because of its user-friendliness."
"There are already connectors to almost every single major database and service that you can possibly think of."
"It is easy to use, and it can handle a large amount of data."
"From the data science point of view, we use it for model building purposes. For example, if we are using it for a bank and we want to understand how much loan the bank can provide, we can use visualization to show the educational qualification, salary, gender, and city of a customer, and by using this information, we can arrive at the loan amount that this person is eligible for. I can also use it to view all prospective customers, so essentially, this is going to help me in model building as well as in understanding and segmenting customers and doing forecasting and predictive analytics. We use model widgets, and we can create thousands of visualizations, such as motion charts and bubble charts. We can also create animated versions of the graphs and view the data from multiple dimensions. These are the features that we typically use and like."
"I would like to see the introduction of mapbooks for supporting some geographical information."
"Most of our company's customers want to be able to deploy IBM Cognos on a web application and use it as a desktop application, which is not possible currently."
"We need more predictive analytical functions, not only diagnostic or decryptic analytics."
"The tool needs to improve the connectivity since I see that, at times, there is a need to increase the memory in the database."
"It would be good if the solution had conditional formatting."
"The solution seems to slow down the servers."
"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"It would be better if it is was easier to implement without extensive training for it."
"The customization requires a lot of effort and should be simplified. The performance could be better."
"When compared to Power BI, it is less user-friendly."
"I would like them to include the Italian language, as I can see there are other foreign language in the product."
"They need to improve the icons and the filters, because they look too old, resembling Excel from 1997."
"The integration with other program languages, like Python, needs to be better."
"Licensing and pricing options could be made better so that more users would be able to use it."
"At the organizational level, increasing the servers' capabilities to support us as an enterprise tool."
"When we put more information on a single screen, it gets compressed and superimposed in many places while scrolling."
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.