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 product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of IBM Cognos is security. The solution has updated features that other competitors' solutions come out with long after IBM Cognos has had them."
"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability."
"Even while a user is using a cube for reporting, there will not be a situation as ' Cube file locked; unable to build or deploy'."
"The dashboarding offered by this solution is very valuable to us."
"You can create attractive dashboards that inform users using Tableau."
"I have found many of the self-service features valuable."
"It has a shallow learning curve and so you can go to market very, very, very quickly."
"Tableau has greatly enhanced our organization's data-driven decision-making processes by enabling us to create visually compelling reports and dashboards."
"It most valuable feature is its ease of developing visualizations, not just charts and graphs."
"One of the most valuable features is that the solution allows users to build interactive dashboards. This allows the end user to modify the criteria or the filtering if need be. As far as for my personal use as a QA Engineer, I really value how extensive their API document support has been."
"The data blending capabilities is a huge factor for our team."
"I have found Tableau easy to use and the features are superb."
"One thing that we really want is the ability to have data portrayed on an image. Cognos is not able to do it at the moment, and that's becoming a requirement from the business side: having an image and then plotting your dataset on top of the image as a map."
"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."
"The visualization aspect needs to be improved and I believe, this is being resolved in upcoming versions."
"There are some small features that are missing. It would be nice if the graphics were better. You can use external sources for charts, but it's quite complex to use and not easy to implement. If you want a new chart, you can download it from multiple tools and implement it into IBM Cognos."
"There are some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data."
"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"They should provide improved visual reporting."
"IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner."
"When there are millions of records, scaling up is quite difficult."
"When you're working on a dashboard, you can't select multiple components at a time and align them, so you have to go one by one. This is very cumbersome."
"At the organizational level, increasing the servers' capabilities to support us as an enterprise tool."
"Overall, the only major frustration that I have had so far is with Tableau Public. I first used Tableau Public when I was building capacity, and when there was a later release to download and you wanted to upgrade, all your work would have to be manually re-entered."
"It's not an aesthetic platform at the moment."
"A strict security measure is needed. I believe it is weak in terms of security."
"Its integration with Microsoft products such as Teams should be improved."
"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.