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.
"If they want dashboarding, storytelling, and analyzing why KPIs are met or not, then Cognos is a better candidate than Qlik Sense."
"IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team."
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"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."
"The three IBM Cognos features I find the most valuable are Dynamic Cubes, PowerPlay, and Watson."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools."
"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."
"Integration with Office can enable the 'download' mode of storytelling."
"The UI part is the best. The end-users can easily get started with Tableau Desktop or Tableau Online because of its user-friendliness."
"Tableau has comprehensive, insightful charts, which allow you to build stunning dashboards and enrich your support decision-making."
"Tableau will automatically show charts for the related data that I choose making it very easy to use."
"It has made the reporting stage simple and enabled us to focus mainly on the ETL part"
"The use of a storyboard helps the flow of the data visualisation."
"I really like the interactivity of the dashboards."
"Tableau's most valuable feature is its ability to connect with various data sources and display real-time data on three different dashboards."
"Partner support is very good."
"I would like to see is more easy building, movement in the reports, and dashboard functionality within reporting. Overall more simple elements within reports. If the elements are simple then you don't have to render a full page, but you can move separate parts in the page."
"They should provide improved visual reporting."
"This product could use improvement in terms of usability for those with less technical know how."
"There are a lot of limitations with the out-of-the-box tool."
"There are some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data."
"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."
"It would be better if it is was easier to implement without extensive training for it."
"There are many problems with the product's stability part, making it an area where improvements are required."
"Its integration with Microsoft products such as Teams should be improved."
"There should be more GIS features, such as location analysis, which is quite limited. There are very few location-based functionalities."
"With Tableau, when you're dealing with very large datasets, it can be slow so the performance is an area that can be improved."
"The use of this service in the desktop version is annoying due to the constant updates which lead to reinstalling the application. If they could give support with updates on the same downloaded version, it would be great."
"The charting is overly complex in comparison with Power BI's"
"When I've done presentations in the past, I've had issues with uploading the cartography."
"The user story model is the most deceptive part of Tableau. It is a big marketing option, however, the reality is that it is not enough."
"I would like to be able to set the parameters in a more specific manner."
IBM Cognos is ranked 7th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 132 reviews while Tableau is ranked 2nd in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 293 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 QlikView. See our IBM Cognos vs. Tableau report.
See our list of best BI (Business Intelligence) Tools vendors and best Reporting vendors.
We monitor all BI (Business Intelligence) Tools 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.