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.
"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."
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"The Report Studio that is aimed at professional report writers."
"The most valuable features are Report Development (Functionality) and Information Distribution (Flexibility)."
"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'."
"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"I have worked on the features like dashboards and stories, and I do like them a lot."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The maps and colors and interface are all fantastic."
"The most valuable feature is the 3D charting."
"The product has the best features for analytical views and filters."
"The initial setup is quick and easy and you don't need special outside assistance to set everything up."
"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 have found Tableau easy to use and the features are superb."
"Technical support has been responsive."
"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."
"It would be nice to offer free online training on the tool for end-users."
"Need improvement towards Visualization."
"I would like to see is more easy building, movement in the reports, and dashboard functionality within reporting. Overall more simple elements within reports. If the elements are simple then you don't have to render a full page, but you can move separate parts in the page."
"I don't like that when we use Colab packages, we get less functionality. For example, you can make groups of data with Excel or with the data sets from the packages, but when you use the Colab packages directly, you can only group the data when you analyze it with Analysis Studio. I think Cognos needs to improve more on this functionality."
"It would be better if it is was easier to implement without extensive training for it."
"The visualization aspect needs to be improved and I believe, this is being resolved in upcoming versions."
"The high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."
"IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner."
"They need to improve the icons and the filters, because they look too old, resembling Excel from 1997."
"Licensing and pricing options could be made better so that more users would be able to use it."
"Creating empty extracts is not easy."
"The use of this service in the desktop version is annoying due to the constant updates which lead to reinstalling the application. If they could give support with updates on the same downloaded version, it would be great."
"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."
"The product's features for cloud integration need improvement."
"It will be good if the server, could be more stable, and I would like to have the technical service to be more reliable."
"The solution could use more features in data analytics."
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.