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.
"IBM Cognos offers tools so that you can design and develop your own test queries and reporting solutions."
"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."
"A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."
"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"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 feature is developing reports from different data sources, making it a reliable data source."
"We use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."
"The initial setup is simple."
"Data Interpreter: Which can identify issues or potential errors with your imported data."
"The solution has a lot of customization when comparing to Microsoft BI."
"Tableau has improved my organization in a variety of ways, one of its uses being that of data analysis. A feature I have found most valuable is the ease of use and straightforwardness, in addition to the flexibility of Tableau."
"The most valuable feature is that we can integrate with our own database, and it will displays the KPIs. This is highly required from the business side."
"A valuable feature of Tableau is that it is a useful tool for small setups. I shuffle between Tableau and MicroStrategy, so I use Tableau for personal purposes more than enterprise. I like the light version of Tableau for personal usage and doing some use cases on my own. When it comes to something small, I use Tableau for setups, rather than any other tool."
"The platform's most important feature is predictive analysis."
"I consider Tableau to be the best analytical tool available. It's really handy to use and can be used by non-technical people."
"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."
"It could have more options for themes."
"Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."
"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"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 tool needs to improve the connectivity since I see that, at times, there is a need to increase the memory in the database."
"The solution seems to slow down the servers."
"From the developer perspective, the data connection handling the target data set is what most needs to be improved."
"I would like to have the product be more flexible in terms of creating online shared dashboards."
"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."
"It should have more integration with different tools and technologies. Its licensing cost should also be improved."
"Tableau is difficult to scale because of the cost, which makes it difficult to scale."
"Its documentation can be improved so that a user can get a good hands-on experience. Tableau is well documented, and on their website, there are a lot of tutorials that are available for free. I started my learning process through those tutorials, but there are certain loopholes in those tutorials, which only got filled through a couple of good YouTube channels that talk about Tableau. YouTube helped me a lot. So, the documentation could be better, I understand that it is evolving day by day, and with more usage, there would be more such documentation."
"The architecture should be improved to better handle the data."
"The product's features for cloud integration need improvement."
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.