We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos, Pentaho Business Analytics, and Tableau based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, Oracle and others in Reporting."We use the account statement report. When you use an account in HSBC, you receive various types of accounts, such as the stock market, fixed accounts, credit cards, and business accounts. We can create one consolidated report called CCS support, which includes all these accounts. In that statement, we are consolidating all those accounts."
"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"The dashboarding offered by this solution is very valuable to us."
"I have worked on the features like dashboards and stories, and I do like them a lot."
"The basic platform comes with several meta-modelling tools."
"When it comes to decision-making, the product is very useful and used in many departments since a lot of people prefer the reports to be generated by IBM Cognos."
"The initial setup is quite straightforward."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"Pentaho Business Analytics' best features include the ease of developing data flows and the wide range of options to connect to databases, including those on the cloud."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"Easy to use components to create the job."
"I use the BI Server, CDE Dashboards, Saiku, and Kettle, because these tools are very good and highly experienced."
"Pentaho is an analytics platform that can be used when an organization has a lot of big data storage systems already installed and needs to manage and analyze that data. It has a specific use case for unstructured data, such as documents, and needs to be able to search and analyze it."
"The most valuable feature of Pentaho is the Tableau report."
"We were able to install it without any assistance from tech support."
"Tableau is easy to use. That's the first and most important thing. I not only provide consulting but I also train people to use it, so with its ease-of-use it's not as difficult for me to train executives and management staff, because they don't have the IT background, unlike when I'm using Python."
"The data visualization piece is most valuable. We do ad-hoc analysis or one-time shot things, but there are things that we have to track every single day. When our management and our customers want to see how things are changing, the dashboarding provides that information. Tableau is key in providing that data on a refresh basis. We use a data blending tool that pumps the data into Tableau, and we just schedule it to run every single day. So, the automation of the data and being able to present it to people who are interested are the most valuable features."
"The solution deployment was straightforward."
"When compared with Power BI, Tableau is much easier."
"I have found the solution easy to use and the interface is very good."
"The best thing I like about Tableau is that you don't have to go for creating; it is calculated free."
"It most valuable feature is its ease of developing visualizations, not just charts and graphs."
"The geospatial maps representation and the visualizations are nice."
"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."
"They should provide improved visual reporting."
"Chart quality: many other competitors have charts and graphics that look much better and that provide dynamic effects. Cognos doesn't."
"Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."
"IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner."
"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."
"Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool."
"We need more predictive analytical functions, not only diagnostic or decryptic analytics."
"Version control would be a good addition."
"The repository should be improved."
"Pentaho, at the general level, should greatly improve the easy construction of its dashboards and easy integration of information from different sources without technical user intervention."
"Another concern is that Pentaho is not customizable or interactive."
"Deployment is not simple. It is not simple because we are dealing with a lot of data; we are dealing with a lot of storage. So, it's not a simple process."
"We did not achieve the ROI. The work delivered to users had lesser value than the subscription cost."
"Logging capability is needed."
"Pentaho Business Analytics' user interface is outdated."
"It's not an aesthetic platform at the moment."
"The pricing is a bit expensive."
"I take a long time to process the hundreds of thousands or millions of records that must be processed every day."
"From the developer perspective, the data connection handling the target data set is what most needs to be improved."
"Its price is a concern. It is more expensive than Power BI. The other thing that I never liked about Tableau is its ability to handle large sets of data. To present the data in the dashboards, we have to stage it up exactly like it is going to come into the dashboard. We use another tool called Alteryx that does that for us. So, we manipulate the data, get it staged, and then push it into Tableau. Tableau is terrible at handling large data sets, and we knew right away that we couldn't use Tableau to do data manipulation."
"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."
"Reports should be downloadable as PDF files."
"Licensing and pricing options could be made better so that more users would be able to use it."