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.
"Integration with Office can enable the 'download' mode of storytelling."
"When it comes to decision-making, the product is very useful and used in many departments since a lot of people prefer the reports to be generated by IBM Cognos."
"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."
"The most valuable features are Report Development (Functionality) and Information Distribution (Flexibility)."
"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."
"For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent."
"If they want dashboarding, storytelling, and analyzing why KPIs are met or not, then Cognos is a better candidate than Qlik Sense."
"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."
"I like the visualization component."
"One of the most valuable features is that the solution allows users to build interactive dashboards. This allows the end user to modify the criteria or the filtering if need be. As far as for my personal use as a QA Engineer, I really value how extensive their API document support has been."
"The solution offers very good reporting."
"The most valuable feature is the user experience."
"The most valuable feature is the interface, which is user-friendly and intuitive."
"One of the most valuable features of Tableau is that it's a visual analytics solution, not just a dashboarding solution. Compared to Power BI, which is a dashboarding solution, there are no limitations with Tableau. For example, when you add a chart or a map to Power BI, it has a 3,000-point limitation. When you try to track your whole vehicle on the map, you only see the first 3,000 rows on the map, and Power BI doesn't tell you which part of the data is shown on the map. But Tableau doesn't have any limitations, which means that you can see five million data points on a map. It starts the project by creating the visuals that directly converts to SQLs. In that way, all the components have no limitations. When we compared Tableau to Power BI, we also found Tableau to be more fancy. Fancy means you can create more visual graphics and more visual dashboards. With Power BI, this isn't so—it's just some tables and some simple charts together. Tableau is more for business users who want to analyze data. Tableau can directly connect the analytics systems, like R or Titan, and get the results in screen, so it's a good solution for analytics scientists. It has some predefined capabilities to understand the data."
"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."
"Tableau has many different connectors for different databases. It's very easy to connect to MySQL, SQL Server, Amazon EMR, Presto, Redshift, BigQuery, and so on."
"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 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."
"We need more predictive analytical functions, not only diagnostic or decryptic analytics."
"Chart quality: many other competitors have charts and graphics that look much better and that provide dynamic effects. Cognos doesn't."
"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."
"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."
"The product's features for cloud integration need improvement."
"It needs more ETL capabilities, to be able to address the end-to-end BI need."
"When you're working on a dashboard, you can't select multiple components at a time and align them, so you have to go one by one. This is very cumbersome."
"Whenever it comes to specialized visualization, Tableau is an absolute failure."
"I have noticed that Tableau is not very compatible with ClickHouse. There's no direct connection to ClickHouse; you have to set up an ODBC connection."
"In the cloud sometimes the performance is a little bit slow."
"If I have to develop any, for example, pie charts, I can develop them just fine. However, if I have to develop a donut chart, that I cannot do it in a simple way. There are tricks that I need to use if I have to design a donut chart. It should be more flexible and provide more visualization options."
"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."
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.
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