Tableau and IBM Cognos are competitors in the data visualization and reporting category. Tableau seems to have the upper hand with its advanced visualization flexibility and user-friendly interface, while IBM Cognos excels in enterprise-level security and comprehensive analytics.
Features: Tableau is known for its advanced data visualization options, intuitive drag-and-drop interface, and seamless data connections. IBM Cognos stands out with its powerful reporting solutions, comprehensive analytics, and suitability for organizations with extensive data governance needs.
Room for Improvement: Tableau could improve its integration with external applications, simplify customization, and enhance automation. IBM Cognos could improve its user interface, handle large datasets more efficiently, and simplify the setup of predictive analytics.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Tableau offers a user-friendly deployment process with substantive community support, but its standard support response time could be faster. IBM Cognos offers flexible deployment options but needs to enhance usability for non-technical users and provide quicker support for complex queries.
Pricing and ROI: Tableau is perceived as more expensive, with high licensing costs justified by its ease of use and insights. IBM Cognos offers competitive pricing for large enterprises, although initial setup costs may deter smaller organizations. Tableau's total cost of ownership is generally higher.
This saves a significant amount of time, particularly for reports that would have needed around fifty people.
The ROI of using Tableau extends to its seamless integration across various platforms, as it's from Salesforce and thus not limited to any specific cloud provider.
I rate technical support from IBM as eight out of ten, indicating a high quality of service.
They provide quick email and phone responses and have Thai-speaking personnel.
I find Tableau's technical support to be good with elite support, but it struggles with usual, general support.
Rating it nine out of ten.
It can be scaled out to other teams, but requires building cubes and implementing policies.
Tableau is easy to scale.
Tableau is easy to use across various dimensions, whether on-premises or on the cloud.
The solution is fully scalable and performs well even with large datasets, provided there is proper supporting hardware.
I rate the stability of this solution as nine out of ten, indicating it is highly stable.
The application hangs after continuous use due to the buildup of cache.
I rate the stability a five or six because Tableau updates very often with new versions or patches.
There is room for improvement in self-service analytics and predictiveness.
It sometimes requires extensive investigation to determine why the data does not appear correctly.
Tableau currently lacks some modern features like AI generative approaches, video type analytics, voice command, and some predictive analytics features.
Pricing is also a concern for me as it is expensive compared to TIBCO Spotfire Enterprise licensing and Microsoft Power Platform.
I rate pricing as a four, meaning it is more expensive compared to other solutions.
Power BI as a much cheaper alternative.
A license for 150 users costs around $17,000 USD per year.
I think Tableau is expensive compared to TIBCO Spotfire Enterprise licensing and Microsoft's Azure and Power Platform.
IBM Cognos is a robust governed platform with significant security features and provides excellent graphics and reporting.
Building hyper extracts and visualization capabilities make Tableau a robust tool for data analysis.
The real-time data processing eliminates the lack of timely reports or dashboards, allowing for hour-by-hour updates instead of monthly or weekly ones.
Tableau serves as a stable dashboarding tool for higher management, aiding in quick decision-making.
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence provides a wide range of tools to help you analyze your organization's data. IBM Cognos BI allows businesses to monitor events and metrics, create and view business reports, and analyze data to help them make effective business decisions.
IBM Cognos applies techniques to describe, summarize, and compare data, and draw conclusions. This allows users to see trends and discover anomalies or variances that may not be evident by simply reading data. Data sources that contain information from different areas of a business can be stored in separate packages. Users can see only information that they have been granted access to, based on their group or role.
IBM Cognos BI consolidates the following business intelligence functions into a single web-based solution:
Reviews from Real Users
IBM Cognos stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its powerful analysis tool and its reporting capabilities.
Prasad B., a senior software engineer at a financial services firm, notes, “The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report. We can receive automated reports as well. They are easy to schedule on a weekly or monthly basis. It is very fast. I mean in means of report output, it's very fast compared to the actual clients involved.”
Tableau is a tool for data visualization and business intelligence that allows businesses to report insights through easy-to-use, customizable visualizations and dashboards. Tableau makes it exceedingly simple for its customers to organize, manage, visualize, and comprehend data. It enables users to dig deep into the data so that they can see patterns and gain meaningful insights.
Make data-driven decisions with confidence thanks to Tableau’s assistance in providing faster answers to queries, solving harder problems more easily, and offering new insights more frequently. Tableau integrates directly to hundreds of data sources, both in the cloud and on premises, making it simpler to begin research. People of various skill levels can quickly find actionable information using Tableau’s natural language queries, interactive dashboards, and drag-and-drop capabilities. By quickly creating strong calculations, adding trend lines to examine statistical summaries, or clustering data to identify relationships, users can ask more in-depth inquiries.
Tableau has many valuable key features:
Tableau stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Some of these include its fast data access, easy creation of visualizations, and its stability. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:
Romil S., Deputy General Manager of IT at Nayara Energy, notes, "Its visualizations are good, and its features make the development process a little less time-consuming. It has an in-memory extract feature that allows us to extract data and keep it on the server, and then our users can use it quickly.
Ariful M., Consulting Practice Partner of Data, Analytics & AI at FH, writes, “Tableau is very flexible and easy to learn. It has drag-and-drop function analytics, and its design is very good.”
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