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."
"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"IBM Cognos is an excellent solution for tax, planning, budgeting, profit and loss statements and balance sheets."
"The most valuable features are Report Development (Functionality) and Information Distribution (Flexibility)."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"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 has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."
"The solution's initial setup process is easy."
"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."
"The dashboards are amazing, with different report types and stunning visuals. Most importantly, Tableau's AI with machine learning automatically predicts features and reports based on historical data. These are the three most valuable features for me."
"The product’s performance is better than other tools."
"The most important feature in Tableau is visual analytics."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the permission management and the user management."
"The ability to deploy is the added ability to centralise the Tableau repository for all Tableau Developers."
"Compared to other products, visualization features are really good."
"The most valuable feature is the drag and drop, then the simplicity to build dashboards which allows us to provide more usable data to our customers."
"Need improvement towards Visualization."
"The high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."
"The visualization aspect needs to be improved and I believe, this is being resolved in upcoming versions."
"Extending dynamic cubes aggregate awareness with calculated measures."
"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"The tool needs to improve the connectivity since I see that, at times, there is a need to increase the memory in the database."
"Compared to Tableau and PowerBI, the IBM interface is easier to use. However, the drag-and-drop functionality isn't as straightforward. Formatting is also more challenging in the cloud than in other applications, like Power BI. Also, if you encounter an issue, it takes more time to resolve it on the formatting side."
"There are a lot of limitations with the out-of-the-box tool."
"The solution could use more features in data analytics."
"The customization in the front end is a bit difficult."
"Other tools are more competitively priced."
"I would like the solution to have certain features allowing the delivery of reports to the email."
"I would like them to include the Italian language, as I can see there are other foreign language in the product."
"The product needs to allow for better ways to drill down more effectively on the information at hand."
"From the developer perspective, the data connection handling the target data set is what most needs to be improved."
"It needs more ETL capabilities, to be able to address the end-to-end BI need."
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.