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.
"We are able to generate quality reports easily which allows us to decrease response time."
"In terms of stability, I think that Cognos is more stable than Tableau and Power Bi because of its framework manager concept that allows us to import metadata and store it in the framework manager."
"We use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."
"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."
"The basic platform comes with several meta-modelling tools."
"The three IBM Cognos features I find the most valuable are Dynamic Cubes, PowerPlay, and Watson."
"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."
"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"It provides business users with a tool, so they are not dependent on IT."
"The ease of presenting findings is very helpful."
"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."
"The solution is easy to use, flexible, our clients enjoy seeing the data on maps, and you do not need to be an expert in SQL to use it."
"It's very easy to set everything up."
"Tableau is highly scalable. Now that they've introduced Hyper, you can create an extract of more than 5 million rows in minutes and then do your analysis."
"The best use case for us is the solution's integration with Salesforce because we are also partners of Salesforce."
"I consider Tableau to be the best analytical tool available. It's really handy to use and can be used by non-technical people."
"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."
"This product could use improvement in terms of usability for those with less technical know how."
"There are many problems with the product's stability part, making it an area where improvements are required."
"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."
"The high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."
"I think the GIS pieces maybe not as good as we would like."
"Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool."
"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."
"Reports should be downloadable as PDF files."
"The charting is overly complex in comparison with Power BI's"
"We need big servers to perform the operations that we are doing. They should probably relook at its architecture."
"Other tools are more competitively priced."
"There are more than a powerful tool in the market, such as Microsoft BI."
"I would like to be able to set the parameters in a more specific manner."
"Creating empty extracts is not easy."
"The only issue with the solution is with its prices at a regional level."
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.