IBM Cognos Analytics vs Tableau Comparison

Feature set, visualizations

No cons were added to this review

the powerful framework manager, allow us to implement complicated logic into model and deliver a package to end user, business user can do ad-hoc report easily.

steep learning curve for beginners. not mention people who doesn't have BI experience, Had a few new team members from tableau background. the FM package complexity is much more than they have done in the tableau data source.

I like it because of its visualization, 3D graphs wich is not available in Tableau. With the help of Cognos, we have created a lot of dashboards.

I don't have any concern with Cognos. Thanks, Cognos, I really like the features of Cognos.... Thanks to being a such a nice tool Cognos team.

I would definitely recommend this to people who want to create effective dashboards and reports. It has user friendly interface. I is good alternative for tableau or power BI.

It needs to upgrade a little bit to give features like Power BI

Customizeable, if you know how to code. Probably could be a good tool if you have a team of trained Cognos experts that deliver all the reports and dashboards in very old-school Enterprise way.

Very very bad UI, unintuitive, messy and buggy. Very fiddly to get things right when creating reports.

Well established took with huge user base and support. Being IBMs main BI tool, it comes with a lot of Support and Knowledge Base. There are tons of supporting products for Advanced Analytics, Visualization and AI/ML which makes the tool both powerful and versatile. It fits into both departmental BI as well as for Enterprise wide reporting.

IBM should increase the support the provide for their products. It is difficult to get quick help from IBM.Self service features of the tool and not as easy as other contemporary tools like Tableau and Qlikview. IBM has catching up to do in this area. Also cloud based SAAS is not yet advanced for COGNOS.

The ability to visualize data in many way all using the same utility is beneficial so we don't have to worry about multiple deployment/support patterns. Having an in-memory OLAP option made performance less of an issue compared to hitting an on-prem database directly for everything. The ability to add custom code allows for some really creative solutions to unique business problems in reporting.

We felt the interface and functionality was a little dated - our more technical employees were fine but the more analyst-type developers preferred something "prettier"/"friendlier" like Tableau/Power BI. It also got expensive for us which was one of the two the primary reasons we transitioned. This is obviously dependent on the number of users, so consider your own environment of course.

Tableau tries to predict what the developer is trying to do based on the variables. It is easy to play around with different fields and see what kind of visualization you get.

It is not as good for reporting as Cognos. Table calculations can be tricky.

Extract data source - hyper. we converted some Cognos reports to Tableau, in Cognos we have to pre-schedule it because the complex query behind the scenes takes long time to run. At beginning we use Tableau live connection, put most of calculations in ETL but still getting performances issue. after switch to hyper...oh it's fantastic.

In Cognos, to view Query behind FM model or Report just one click, it's very helpful and convenient during development and troubleshooting. In Tableau have to dig into log to find the query or check from DB side.

Before they added the data Prep "ETL" tool, Tableau really couldn't compare to Cognos or Power BI. With that tool, it's superior visualization features put it ahead in many ways.

It is nearly impossible to join more than two data sources effectively without breaking something. Luckily, prep has made this much less of a problem.

Tableau is great for data analysis. His design is super user friendly , making easy to make connections and visualize dataset.

Compared to his competitors, such as IBM Watson and Microsoft Power BI, Tableau has space to improvement on his processing power. Sometimes, running complex analyzes makes the program slow.

Easy data Connection and Visualization, Easy interface. Multiple Datasource connection.

Cube datasource Integration, and Calculated field creation.

Seems much easier to use and seems to integrate well with SAP Hana graphics are good, and downloads seem quick

Any display is limited to 16 data columns, often need to replicate screens to show different data, this diminishes efficiency

This is the best BI platform out there. Super high quality graphics and easy to use

Can take a bit to link the dashboard to a database

Ease of use and easy to learn; good options for data aggregation and visualization

Some limitations to joins require outside SQL work

I use Tableau every day. It is easy to learn with great tutorials and online resources. It is powerful to extend with lots of plugins. And it produces brilliant charts for clients.

Tableau is great for desktop use, but I'm not a big fan of Tableau's online integration. I've been using Google Data Studio for quick and dirty online collaborations.

Easy to use. Lots of integrations. Quick setup and visualisation creation.

Customising dashboards and data views can quickly become a tedious and time intensive task.

Once you have made yourself familiar with the software, it will become a very powerful tool for visualization.

If you are a beginner or are trying to work on some simple project, Tableau is not the first priority and unnecessary. Try to use it when you have learned how to utilized its functions.

user friendly reports and dashboards. One of the best analytics tool providing embedded and enterprise analytics

Tableau provides less options for licenses. For a individual using free version, options are limited

The way tableau helps to visualize data and helps in taking faster-informed decisions.

A beginner would get very scared looking at the dashboard for the first time, so, an AI-assisted on-screen tutorial would help.

It is top notch when dealing with data visualization and story telling, it has different features needed to get your work summary

It is very tedious to learn because of it complicated user interface, it not user friendly for beginners and over expensive to used

Visual Analytics and stories can be easily built. The data capture and the cleansing is much helpful for the development perspective.

When the data is huge, the application is slow and we need to wait for a longer time for the application to respond.

The product accesses multiple disparate data sources easily, cleans them easily, integrates them easily, and creates data stories easily

The software is historically somewhat weak in the analytics space. It gathers data easily but its ability to perform reasonable analytics lags behind its competitors in that space

Ease of use. Functionality Visualization Abilities Integration with Python and R

Extensive documentation. Some Functionalities are complex to integrate

One can use various tools on it. It would be cheaper for an organization that uses analytics and visualization often to use this software. It provides different user groups to make sure that the data isn't corrupted and also, you can message colleagues on your workspace. They also have good training material.

None so far. But the training material is a bit slow.

multiple data sources, visualizations, analytics

learning some simple things can be hard if you are used to excel

Tableau integrates well with various data sources. The user interface offers a good deal of options to view your data from different perspectives and at different levels. I have worked extensively with Excel pivot tables but Tableau takes data visualization to the next level.

The extensive options can be overwhelming at times but the hover-over explanations are extremely helpful.

Wide ranges of measurements for analytics.

Many choices and ever changing for statistics needs more monitoring than anticipated

Amazing dashboard capabilities, extensive data analytics

Requires some user training but there is plenty of support

Some dashboards that we can't see in Salesforce, we have looked for other resources. Tableau has just about everything we need in this category and it helps us dissect our business needs.

I wish that there was some more integration with other softwares so that we could leverage all data in one place.

Multiple alogo based dashboards and analytics possible

It's a wonderful product with minimum glitches

I like focus on clean design as an output of data analysis. Other programs function similarly but it's the look of the visualisations that make Tableau stand out. When teaching others how to use this programme, they catch on quickly and are delighted by the output.

Being able to share and use your visualisations outside of the software is where the program is limiting. It's very contained to this programme, as most softwares like this are but it would be good to provide more ability to share the visualisations with a wider public.