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.
"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."
"Dashboarding, reporting, and ad hoc reporting are the valuable features of IBM Cognos."
"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'."
"Using custom controls, it is possible to extend the application with even more functionality and make the application intuitive and attractive."
"IBM Cognos offers tools so that you can design and develop your own test queries and reporting solutions."
"IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team."
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent."
"From my perspective, it enables clients to better understand our data and make better decisions based on that information."
"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."
"Any feature I am looking for usually is part of the next upgrade within a few months. They have a very good dynamic evolution."
"It allows us to basically understand and evaluate our numbers in an expedient manner."
"Its visualizations are good, and its features make the development process a little less time-consuming. It has an in-memory extract feature that allows us to extract data and keep it on the server, and then our users can use it quickly."
"Although Tableau isn't the best for us when it comes to processing and working on live data, it is very good at extracting data for analysis."
"It is definitely easy to use. It is intuitive, and more or less, everything can be done from the front end. As such, there is no concept of metadata. You can just take data from a database and start building your own stuff, such as OLAP data warehouse. You don't need extensive metadata modeling like Oracle BI."
"Its dashboarding is the most valuable. It is easy to create visualizations and dashboards and import Excel sheets and ESP files in Tableau as compared to other tools."
"This product could use improvement in terms of usability for those with less technical know how."
"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."
"It could have more options for themes."
"It would be better if it is was easier to implement without extensive training for it."
"Cognos charts are not as fast as those of the other tools, even with DQM (dynamic query mode)."
"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."
"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."
"Need improvement towards Visualization."
"The user story model is the most deceptive part of Tableau. It is a big marketing option, however, the reality is that it is not enough."
"An area needing improvement involves the complexity of the product should you need to alter a lot of parameters. If you have technical servers, much interface, different providers and more serious processes, that will be time consuming."
"An advanced type of visualization is a bit tricky to create. It has something called a Calculated field, and that sometimes gets a bit difficult to use when you want to create an advanced type of visualization."
"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."
"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."
"When we put more information on a single screen, it gets compressed and superimposed in many places while scrolling."
"I would like Tableau Prep to be integrated with Tableau Desktop. I would also like more customizations for tables."
"It needs a little bit more advanced modeling. I would like to see functionality like Cognos has in the Framework Manager."
IBM Cognos is ranked 4th in Reporting with 131 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.