"If they want dashboarding, storytelling, and analyzing why KPIs are met or not, then Cognos is a better candidate than Qlik Sense."
"We are able to generate quality reports easily which allows us to decrease response time."
"In terms of stability, I think that Cognos is more stable than Tableau and Power Bi because of its framework manager concept that allows us to import metadata and store it in the framework manager."
"IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team."
"A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."
"The initial setup is quite straightforward."
"Comparing IBM Cognos to other applications, once a person is trained on it or they have developed a skill set to operate the application, it is best in its category."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"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."
"Any feature I am looking for usually is part of the next upgrade within a few months. They have a very good dynamic evolution."
"Business insights are shared across various departments."
"I have found Tableau easy to use and the features are superb."
"Easy to create graphs and visualizations."
"When compared to Power BI, Tableau has more readily available resources."
"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."
"It is very easy to create dashboards, charts, and graphs."
"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."
"The data uploads that we do, such as Excel files, have a lot of restrictions. If we can make it a bit more user-friendly, allowing us to have more flexibility it would be a great help."
"I would like to see is more easy building, movement in the reports, and dashboard functionality within reporting. Overall more simple elements within reports. If the elements are simple then you don't have to render a full page, but you can move separate parts in the page."
"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."
"Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."
"I would like to have predictive and forecasting capabilities in Cognos. It's one thing to do reporting, and another thing to easily predict or forecast certain data points, which is very important for all the clients."
"The high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."
"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."
"The user story model is the most deceptive part of Tableau. It is a big marketing option, however, the reality is that it is not enough."
"When it comes to visualizations, Tableau has a limitation as compared to Power BI. It has a limited set of visualizations. Power BI has the entire marketplace, so you can connect and import many visualizations and use them, whereas Tableau has only 10 or 15 visualizations. There should be more visualizations, and there should also be data integration with more cloud providers."
"The data entered into Tableau must be clean. Otherwise, it won't work properly."
"The Hyper Extract functionality is not as strong as that provided by Microsoft SQL."
"The data preparation/blending options are very basic. They could be improved."
"We need big servers to perform the operations that we are doing. They should probably relook at its architecture."
"An area needing improvement involves the complexity of the product should you need to alter a lot of parameters. If you have technical servers, much interface, different providers and more serious processes, that will be time consuming."
"In the cloud sometimes the performance is a little bit slow."
IBM Cognos is ranked 4th in Reporting Tools with 17 reviews while Tableau is ranked 2nd in Reporting Tools with 105 reviews. IBM Cognos is rated 8.0, while Tableau is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of IBM Cognos writes "Helpful online community, highly reliable, and secure". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Tableau writes "Lets me train new users quickly, easily, and intuitively". IBM Cognos is most compared with Microsoft BI, Qlik Sense, Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, MicroStrategy and Oracle OBIEE, whereas Tableau is most compared with Microsoft BI, SAP Analytics Cloud, Amazon QuickSight, MicroStrategy and Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services. See our IBM Cognos vs. Tableau report.
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