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.
"The most valuable features of IBM Cognos are governance and enterprise reporting."
"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."
"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."
"We are able to generate quality reports easily which allows us to decrease response time."
"IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team."
"The most valuable features are Report Development (Functionality) and Information Distribution (Flexibility)."
"A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."
"We use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."
"The UI part is the best. The end-users can easily get started with Tableau Desktop or Tableau Online because of its user-friendliness."
"You can create attractive dashboards that inform users using Tableau."
"Technical support has been responsive."
"I like the solution's web version, more so than Power BI's web version. It just makes it easier to drag and drop things and to blend data on the backend. It simplifies the process."
"The ease of presenting findings is very helpful."
"It's easy to use."
"The most important feature is the tool is very easy to use. This makes it simple to introduce it to CxOs. After a rapid demo, they are usual impressed by the results shown, because it has such a rare simplicity."
"It is easy to use, and it can handle a large amount of data."
"The technical support team’s response time is slow and needs to be improved."
"Extending dynamic cubes aggregate awareness with calculated measures."
"There are a lot of limitations with the out-of-the-box tool."
"There are some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data."
"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."
"One thing that we really want is the ability to have data portrayed on an image. Cognos is not able to do it at the moment, and that's becoming a requirement from the business side: having an image and then plotting your dataset on top of the image as a map."
"I think the GIS pieces maybe not as good as we would like."
"We need more predictive analytical functions, not only diagnostic or decryptic analytics."
"It would be nice if we could export more raw data. Currently, there is a limit as to how much data you can export."
"At the organizational level, increasing the servers' capabilities to support us as an enterprise tool."
"The price could be better."
"In the next release, there should be more information describing each chart because users have a difficult time telling them apart. They should also include the animations/videos, similar to Power BI."
"When you create new fields in Tableau and you enter the formulas, there is a new small window that is there in the interface. You can enter the calculated fields, it could be more user-friendly. At this time it is limited and hard to understand at the beginning. The fields should be easier to use, such as in Microsoft Excel. You can have a difficult time understanding what to do in the fields, you end up doing trial and error to figure it out."
"The pricing is a bit expensive."
"Tableau's automatic insight could be improved. It has some predefined capabilities to understand the data, but I think they need more. Customers need more insight automatically from data—they don't want to discover them, they want to get the forecast automatically. The data preparation should also be improved because it's not easy. Tableau tries to focus on the business side, but the backend side has not improved much. They also have an ETS solution, but it's limited."
"The charts need to be improved. The drawings and the visualization need to be more accurate."
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.