We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos, Microsoft Power BI, and Tableau based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, Oracle and others in 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."
"IBM Cognos is an excellent solution for tax, planning, budgeting, profit and loss statements and balance sheets."
"The Report Studio that is aimed at professional report writers."
"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."
"Cognos' most valuable features are the bundled studios, simple UI, and advanced features like the ability to create data modules."
"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 solution's initial setup process is easy."
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"The most valuable features of Microsoft BI are its intuitiveness and ease to use."
"The scalability is good. We have 20 people in my organization using this solution and plan to increase usage."
"Easy to use and the visualization is valuable."
"The product can go easily go and extract data and it can put it into any format."
"It's similar to Excel, but it's much more powerful than Excel."
"If you are not very technical this tool could be very useful."
"It works well with SSAS, which we use to generate all different kinds of trending and analytics reports. Sometimes we use Power Query and DAX to build some aggregations on the Power BI side as well."
"Its connectivity with other Office applications, mostly with Excel, and the ability to deploy it very easily are the most valuable features. It comes sort of bundled with the cloud, so you don't need to set up a server and a standalone infrastructure. So, getting into the system or building something that you can deploy is very easy and very cheap. With other systems, you need to have a server, and you need to have a license for the server. The initial setup is very costly."
"It's easy to use."
"The solution has great features which nobody can beat, you can do a lot of customizations, such as use different dimensions and colorize them. Additionally, you can use the numeric values for the customization, which is an exceptional feature."
"Visualization attributes: Marks – Color, Size, Label, etc.. Easily Accessible and Intuitive."
"The most valuable features are the visualizations, the way they show the combination charts."
"Technical support has been responsive."
"The ability to deploy is the added ability to centralise the Tableau repository for all Tableau Developers."
"Our customers love the visual capabilities on top of it and the ability to explain and get the required data. There is no other product like Tableau in the business intelligence and analytics space."
"The maps and colors and interface are all fantastic."
"The tool needs to improve the connectivity since I see that, at times, there is a need to increase the memory in the database."
"Cognos charts are not as fast as those of the other tools, even with DQM (dynamic query mode)."
"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."
"There are many problems with the product's stability part, making it an area where improvements are required."
"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."
"It would be good if the solution had conditional formatting."
"Defining a relationship was very confusing. There were circular directions for which I had to do a lot of adjustments in the data. They can do something to make it easier."
"I cannot comment on the stability as we haven't yet used it for a big project."
"More connections with other systems should be added, which would allow for other integrations."
"The one thing that I noticed specifically was the graphical features, and some of the analytical features. They were stronger on the Tableau side."
"The visual outlet or the visualization aspect can be improved because the settings piece is quite problematic. It requires a lot of time to set the visuals and check. It is quite fiddly to change all the settings and font sizes. It just needs better ability in terms of using templates or visualization templates to get the vision. Our users always benchmark based on the product, and they don't appreciate everything under the bonnet. The only rating is based on the actual reports in the settings for the dashboard. They should make it look a bit funky and a bit more aesthetically pleasing on the eye. It is quite a fiddly tool, but other than that, it is pretty slick. Because it is community-driven, the marketplace tends to be changing forever. You get the standard visualizations, and you've also got all other marketplace visualizations that require you to spend a bit more money and purchase things in the marketplace. With certain visualizations, there is no longevity. I had used certain visualizations, but they discontinued them, and I had to rebuild my reports, which is obviously very frustrating. There should be some sort of stabilization around how the marketplace visuals impact the users when they expire."
"It could have more of a hold on big data. Manipulating big data on this solution complicates things. This needs to be improved."
"The solution struggles with large amounts of data."
"Real-time refreshing for SAP BW would be nice. We know its on the radar for the development team at MS. "
"The cost of owning the solutions from Tableau is much higher compared to any other analytical solutions."
"The user experience for less savvy or non-technical people (from my experience)."
"It's already using 32 gigabytes of memory, but the performance is not so good. It's very heavy."
"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."
"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."
"Improvements in schema security and row/column security need to be made."
"It would be nice to include more features on each dashboard."
"Lacks machine learning algorithms that you can implement using R, SPSS Modeler, and Python."
