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 feature is developing reports from different data sources, making it a reliable data source."
"IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team."
"Self-service is possible through the use of dashboards, which are also very intuitive. Stories can be used to pin snapshots, tell the story for meetings, etc."
"We use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."
"IBM Cognos offers tools so that you can design and develop your own test queries and reporting solutions."
"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"The most valuable features of IBM Cognos are governance and enterprise reporting."
"I consider Tableau to be the best analytical tool available. It's really handy to use and can be used by non-technical people."
"Easy to create graphs and visualizations."
"It is easy to use, and it can handle a large amount of data."
"Data handling, visualizations, and aesthetics of it are the most valuable features."
"Self-service is most valuable. Users can pick up quickly and do the resolution. There are a lot of out-of-the-box features, and it satisfies most of the needs. If users are properly trained, they can deal with any situation."
"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."
"It most valuable feature is its ease of developing visualizations, not just charts and graphs."
"The initial setup is simple."
"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"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."
"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."
"Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool."
"Data modeling needs to be improved. We use the ETL process, and when we get errors, we then need to identify which structural change is required. The error messaging should be better. They should be descriptive rather than semantic."
"IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner."
"Extending dynamic cubes aggregate awareness with calculated measures."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would say, monitoring, monitoring, monitoring. Some improvements in monitoring would be helpful. I'd like to see more monitoring of specific reports and fields. The way the auditing is now is very limited, so I'd like to see more of that - of the monitoring."
"From the developer perspective, the data connection handling the target data set is what most needs to be improved."
"When it comes to large datasets, the data should be extracted faster."
"Improvements in schema security and row/column security need to be made."
"Lacks customization in some areas."
"The extraction, transformation and loading of data in Tableau takes a lot of time and we do not have confidence that Tableau is showing all the data we need."
"I would like to be able to set the parameters in a more specific manner."
"We need big servers to perform the operations that we are doing. They should probably relook at its architecture."
"They need to improve the bar chart position and width."
IBM Cognos is ranked 4th in Reporting with 131 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.