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.
"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'."
"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."
"Mapbox integration for geospatial analytics down to longitude/latitude layers."
"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."
"A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."
"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."
"IBM Cognos is an excellent solution for tax, planning, budgeting, profit and loss statements and balance sheets."
"It is a stable product."
"This service is the combination of very pleasant, interactive graphical visualizations along with the application of advanced statistical models (in some cases)."
"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."
"It's very user-friendly. It's not like Power BI, Tableau is very user-friendly. Anybody can use Tableau. It's very easy to adopt things. I can visualize the stats."
"I really like the interactivity of the dashboards."
"Tableau's initial setup was straightforward."
"Although Tableau isn't the best for us when it comes to processing and working on live data, it is very good at extracting data for analysis."
"The Web Editing capabilities allow us to grant end users enough capabilities for them to do self-serve discovery without the added cost of needing to get everyone desktop licenses."
"The solution allows for the possibility for end-users to do their own reporting."
"They were lacking in the initial phases of development in the area of big data, and they still need to improve that aspect of the product."
"Chart quality: many other competitors have charts and graphics that look much better and that provide dynamic effects. Cognos doesn't."
"I think the GIS pieces maybe not as good as we would like."
"The technical support team’s response time is slow and needs to be improved."
"They should provide improved visual reporting."
"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."
"IBM Cognos's error messages seem to be a bit ambiguous. An error will be encountered and a message will be sent out very ambiguous and after investigating the error message it could be any number of issues. There was never a direct answer to the question or a direct answer to the error messages. Sometimes it would be a generic error message for 21 different solutions. It wasn't very specific, which required a lot of digging around and trial and error trying to fix the problem. The messaging in their error messaging is something needing improvement."
"Need improvement towards Visualization."
"Reports should be downloadable as PDF files."
"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."
"When it comes to large datasets, the data should be extracted faster."
"When we put more information on a single screen, it gets compressed and superimposed in many places while scrolling."
"Lacks customization in some areas."
"With performance tuning, it generates a pretty complex query when it is not required."
"There are not enough language options. It needs to be offered in more than just English."
"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."
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.