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.
"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"A positive feature is Report Studio, where we create beautiful, complex reports."
"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."
"We use the account statement report. When you use an account in HSBC, you receive various types of accounts, such as the stock market, fixed accounts, credit cards, and business accounts. We can create one consolidated report called CCS support, which includes all these accounts. In that statement, we are consolidating all those accounts."
"The most valuable feature is developing reports from different data sources, making it a reliable data source."
"The main difference that I like about Cognos compared to other solutions is its data splitting functionality. We have all our company data inside the Cognos environment and so we prefer to split the information Cognos itself. It's more efficient this way."
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"Tableau will automatically show charts for the related data that I choose making it very easy to use."
"You can create attractive dashboards that inform users using Tableau."
"The initial setup is simple."
"The UI part is the best. The end-users can easily get started with Tableau Desktop or Tableau Online because of its user-friendliness."
"Visualization attributes: Marks – Color, Size, Label, etc.. Easily Accessible and Intuitive."
"The maps and colors and interface are all fantastic."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the permission management and the user management."
"It gives us a new dimension to the way that we analyse our data."
"Chart quality: many other competitors have charts and graphics that look much better and that provide dynamic effects. Cognos doesn't."
"They were lacking in the initial phases of development in the area of big data, and they still need to improve that aspect of the product."
"The technical support team’s response time is slow and needs to be improved."
"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."
"There are many problems with the product's stability part, making it an area where improvements are required."
"I would like for the platform to become more standard. If we make a development on our report and our dashboard, it will not be used in another solution. That means there is no portability for the developers."
"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."
"The visualization aspect needs to be improved and I believe, this is being resolved in upcoming versions."
"Most of the problems in Tableau Online that I have noticed have to do with performance or weird, inexplicable bugs that I can't pin down. For example, you might try unloading some data, and you'll be waiting for a long time without anything happening."
"Whenever it comes to specialized visualization, Tableau is an absolute failure."
"The product needs to allow for better ways to drill down more effectively on the information at hand."
"If you mainly need a tool for BI reporting, it's not the best option. Tableau needs better abilities to generate simple reports, integrate, create databases, and work with data lakes."
"Its price is a concern. It is more expensive than Power BI. The other thing that I never liked about Tableau is its ability to handle large sets of data. To present the data in the dashboards, we have to stage it up exactly like it is going to come into the dashboard. We use another tool called Alteryx that does that for us. So, we manipulate the data, get it staged, and then push it into Tableau. Tableau is terrible at handling large data sets, and we knew right away that we couldn't use Tableau to do data manipulation."
"More integration with Python or something related to machine learning would be a good improvement."
"Areas for improvement would be visualization and augmented analytics. In the next release, I would like to see automated insights from the data added to the dashboard."
"There should be stronger data modules for the platform."
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.