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.
"IBM Cognos offers tools so that you can design and develop your own test queries and reporting solutions."
"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."
"The correlation analysis is excellent. It's one of the best that I have used to date."
"The Report Studio that is aimed at professional report writers."
"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."
"The dashboarding offered by this solution is very valuable to us."
"The comprehensiveness or broadness of the software functions or business intelligence functions that it provides is valuable. It is also quite easy to use and user-friendly."
"It's enabled us to report directly from our main application systems. We're removing islands of data and we're removing inefficiencies, where people or small divisions had their own store of information."
"The product offers an intuitive user interface, detailed screens and widgets, and the absence of data limitations"
"Better interaction and less time spent with end users."
"I have found the solution easy to use and the interface is very good."
"Partner support is very good."
"The solution deployment was straightforward."
"The solution is configurable and flexible. We can customize the dashboards and configure the interface the way that we want. The data can be manipulated and arranged in different ways, such as columns."
"Tableau's initial setup was straightforward."
"A valuable feature of Tableau is that it is a useful tool for small setups. I shuffle between Tableau and MicroStrategy, so I use Tableau for personal purposes more than enterprise. I like the light version of Tableau for personal usage and doing some use cases on my own. When it comes to something small, I use Tableau for setups, rather than any other tool."
"They should provide improved visual reporting."
"The charts and graphics are weak."
"The solution's support could be better."
"Cognos charts are not as fast as those of the other tools, even with DQM (dynamic query mode)."
"It would be nice to offer free online training on the tool for end-users."
"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."
"The solution seems to slow down the servers."
"This product could use improvement in terms of usability for those with less technical know how."
"More integration with Python or something related to machine learning would be a good improvement."
"The product needs to allow for better ways to drill down more effectively on the information at hand."
"The customization in the front end is a bit difficult."
"I would like to be able to set the parameters in a more specific manner."
"The Hyper Extract functionality is not as strong as that provided by Microsoft SQL."
"With Tableau, when you're dealing with very large datasets, it can be slow so the performance is an area that can be improved."
"It needs a little bit more advanced modeling. I would like to see functionality like Cognos has in the Framework Manager."
"Tableau is an end-to-end analytics platform, and it is doing a pretty good job in terms of connecting to the data and analyzing it. It can, however, do better in terms of data management and the ETL features, which are not on the advanced analytics or machine learning side. Tableau Prep is where users would want to see more advancements. They can improve Tableau Prep, which is an analytic platform tool for data cleansing. People who work with data spend most of their time curating the data. Cleaning up the data and getting it ready for analysis is what takes the most time. If Tableau can invest more time in improving the Tableau Prep platform, it would be great. Previously, Tableau didn't have the functionality for writing to a database. So, you couldn't really alter the database tables and write to your database, but they fixed that in one of the very recent releases. However, it isn't really advanced and should be improved."
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.