Amazon QuickSight vs Tableau comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Salesforce are both solutions in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #3 with an average rating of 7.1, while Salesforce is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.7. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 8.3% mindshare in BIT, compared to Salesforce’s 20.6% mindshare. Additionally, 57% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of Salesforce users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 8, 2024

Tableau and Amazon QuickSight compete in the Business Intelligence tools category. Tableau seems to have the upper hand in advanced visualization, while Amazon QuickSight leads in AWS integration.

Features: Tableau offers advanced visualization capabilities, extensive data connectivity, and varied data integration. Amazon QuickSight provides seamless AWS integration, efficient handling of large data sets, and straightforward deployment within AWS.

Room for Improvement: Tableau needs to improve performance with large data sets, enhance speed, and address challenges in on-premise deployments. Amazon QuickSight could enhance customization options, expand analytical capabilities, and improve advanced analytics features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Tableau offers flexible deployment but may face challenges in complex setups, with users valuing its customer service. Amazon QuickSight provides straightforward deployment within AWS and is favored for its simplicity in that environment.

Pricing and ROI: Tableau requires a significant investment with reports of high ROI due to premium features. Amazon QuickSight is highlighted for cost-effectiveness, offering favorable ROI for AWS users, and praised for accessible pricing within its ecosystem.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon QuickSight vs. Tableau Report (Updated: October 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon QuickSight vs. Tableau

October 2024

Download the complete report

Helped 816,192 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Cognos is 3.8%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon QuickSight is 8.3%, down from 12.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tableau is 20.6%, up from 18.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

Featured Reviews

Carlos Larrad Salgado

Deputy Director Operations Management Control at Mapfre

Improved the quality of our KPIs, while reducing calls to the IT department

I don't like that when we use Colab packages, we get less functionality. For example, you can make groups of data with Excel or with the data sets from the packages, but when you use the Colab packages directly, you can only group the data when you analyze it with Analysis Studio. I think Cognos needs to improve more on this functionality. The user experience is also very important. Cognos is not very easy to understand sometimes, especially when they change the layout but keep the functionality the same. The help is not very graphic and they have no examples. Cognos has to make a big effort to help with understanding the functionality by improving the documentation. There is a lot of documentation, but the examples are hard to find and they should make their help section easier to understand for non-technical users.

Read full review

Anoop Jose

Senior Manager - Architecture and engineering excellence at a healthcare company with 201-500 employees

Helpful for visualization purposes but delayed drill-downs feature

Compared to Power BI, I felt QuickSight lacks some features, like delayed drill-downs. Drill-downs were the main area where we found QuickSight lacking. Especially for root cause analysis, the ability to drill down from a high-level problem to its root is crucial. Aside from that, QuickSight is a good service.

Read full review

ROMIL SHAH

Deputy General Manger - Information Technology at Nayara Energy

Provides fast data access with in-memory extracts, makes it easy to create visualizations, and saves time

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. Tableau has recently launched a paid version for the documentation. So, documentation has become a little bit challenging when it comes to Tableau development because we do not have any tool to export the data out of it. It is a license-based feature that you need to purchase to prepare documentation. So, on the documentation front, for preparing clear documentation for any dashboard, it would help if we get an embedded option, rather than buying a license for each user for the documentation. To document anything, if I have to connect to each workbook and see what has been written as a formula and then document in the Word document, it is pretty time-consuming. We have the Microsoft stack, and we are currently evaluating Power BI because Tableau has a limitation of 50 columns for a drill-down report. If we want more than 50 columns, we have found a hack, but there is no ready-made option for doing it. So, we have to use another tool in case we need a drilled report with more than 50 columns. There are many instances where users need 80 or 90 columns for their analysis, and switching between two technologies becomes a challenge. It is not a cost-effective approach for us. Their support should be improved. We are not happy with their support. Whenever we raised queries, we were pointed to a few blogs, and we didn't get a proper solution from them. Their licensing should also be improved. They want us to purchase a Tableau Creator license for business users, whereas Power BI Desktop is free for business users. They should come up with a basic license with one or two connectors that our business users can use for preparing their visualizations. Tableau also charges us per user for users who want the data only through email.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The initial setup is quite straightforward."

"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'."

"The comprehensiveness or broadness of the software functions or business intelligence functions that it provides is valuable. It is also quite easy to use and user-friendly."

"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."

"We use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."

"The Report Studio that is aimed at professional report writers."

"Mapbox integration for geospatial analytics down to longitude/latitude layers."

"For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent."

More IBM Cognos pros

"It has a lot of valuable features, but the most important aspect is the affordable cost. This solution costs much less in comparison to the competitors like Qlik Sense, Power BI, and Tableau."

"The solution is very quick to turn around and integrate."

"The integration is very seamless. We stored our result CSV files in S3 and connected directly from there."

"The ease with which it integrates with different data sources is most valuable. Especially when everything is on AWS, it is easy to connect to the data source and organize different dashboards."

"A valuable feature of Amazon QuickSight is that it's a cloud-native service provided by AWS. As all platforms within my company run on AWS, that's the leverage of Amazon QuickSight. Amazon QuickSight is also easy to use, and I find the native connectors from AWS valuable as well."

"Easily able to connect with our other services and easy to manage."

"It is fine for basic reporting."

"Compared to other reporting tools, it is very effective but does require an understanding of certain concepts in QuickSight. This understanding is crucial for creating dimensions, changing metrics, and visualizing reports."

More Amazon QuickSight pros

"The platform's most important feature is predictive analysis."

"The solution makes for very productive and really informative decision making. It can lead the whole business and build a strategy across whole working departments."

"It's easy to use."

"Scheduled extract and the multiple connectors are fantastic!"

"It gives us a new dimension to the way that we analyse our data."

"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."

"Tableau Prep tool for data preparation is a most valuable tool."

"The solution is configurable and flexible. We can customize the dashboards and configure the interface the way that we want. The data can be manipulated and arranged in different ways, such as columns."

More Tableau pros

Cons

"It would be better if it is was easier to implement without extensive training for it."

"The technical support team’s response time is slow and needs to be improved."

"It would be good if the solution had conditional formatting."

"In terms of what could be improved, I would say, monitoring, monitoring, monitoring. Some improvements in monitoring would be helpful. I'd like to see more monitoring of specific reports and fields. The way the auditing is now is very limited, so I'd like to see more of that - of the monitoring."

"The charts and graphics are weak."

"Need improvement towards Visualization."

"Extending dynamic cubes aggregate awareness with calculated measures."

"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."

More IBM Cognos cons

"The product is quite expensive because the price is too close to QlikView's prices but it does not ring as well as QlikView."

"They could provide more options for graphics and other features."

"The cost of queries is very high."

"The number of features in the product is limited in comparison with the other tools in the market, like Power BI."

"An area for improvement in Amazon QuickSight is storage. Data cleanup also needs improvement because I'm experiencing errors when cleaning the data. Amazon QuickSight needs video tutorials showing its different functions and purposes."

"It is a simple tool with limited features. Its visualization set is very limited, and it also has limited functionality. An intelligence tool should not be only for creating reports. Currently, we have to do all computational and mathematical operations outside. We should be able to do such operations in an intelligence tool like this. As an intelligence tool, it should support dynamic refresh. QuickSight currently supports the refresh at a minimum of one hour, and it is not suitable for dynamic dashboards that require frequent refreshes."

"One area is that integrating data from different sources into QuickSight can be a bit tricky, especially with Amazon Connect. To get data flowing, you need to use two additional services and configure them correctly."

"Right now, you can't use Amazon QuickSight on other cloud providers, so I'd like it to have availability on other cloud providers. This is an area for improvement in the product. What I'd like to see in Amazon QuickSight in the future is a distributed centralized system where I can manage all reports in one place, and for Amazon QuickSight to become reporting as a service."

More Amazon QuickSight cons

"There could be improvements on the mobile application, it is lacking features."

"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."

"Provide additional enhancements in any business process: Operations, Marketing and Sales, Finance, Human Resources, Logistics, etc."

"If they could add global filters in the stories, more chart types, and default colours, it would help."

"The data processing in Tableau is pathetic compared to Qlik."

"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."

"Tableau is an end-to-end analytics platform, and it is doing a pretty good job in terms of connecting to the data and analyzing it. It can, however, do better in terms of data management and the ETL features, which are not on the advanced analytics or machine learning side. Tableau Prep is where users would want to see more advancements. They can improve Tableau Prep, which is an analytic platform tool for data cleansing. People who work with data spend most of their time curating the data. Cleaning up the data and getting it ready for analysis is what takes the most time. If Tableau can invest more time in improving the Tableau Prep platform, it would be great. Previously, Tableau didn't have the functionality for writing to a database. So, you couldn't really alter the database tables and write to your database, but they fixed that in one of the very recent releases. However, it isn't really advanced and should be improved."

"Most of the problems in Tableau Online that I have noticed have to do with performance or weird, inexplicable bugs that I can't pin down. For example, you might try unloading some data, and you'll be waiting for a long time without anything happening."

More Tableau cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing should be improved."

"It is averagely priced."

"IBM Cognos price is on the higher side of the spectrum. However, with the features that it brings, such as correlation analysis, it's worth the money. They should look at the pricing more clearly because it's a little on the higher side."

"There is a standard license required to use this solution. There are some additional tools but I am not sure if they are an extra cost."

"The solution is affordable."

"It is pretty expensive."

"I don't know the exact cost, but I believe Cognos is quite expensive, especially when it comes to the support consultants and the procedures that need to be applied."

"The pricing of this product is meant for medium to large-scale enterprises."

More IBM Cognos pricing and cost advice

"I wouldn't say that it is an expensive product, but to stay competitive they would need to bring down the prices."

"The solution is not affordable."

"The pricing is cost-effective with a good plan."

"I'm using a paid version of Amazon QuickSight, paying about $22 monthly. As I have yet to learn about the pricing for other tools, such as Power BI, I won't be able to compare."

"The Amazon QuickSight licensing model my company's on is pay-as-you-go, but I wouldn't be able to give the figures because that's handled by the finance department."

"A highly affordable cost structure with fixed membership and timeframe basis options."

"The solution's pricing is cheaper than the other products in the market."

"The product pricing is better than other vendors."

More Amazon QuickSight pricing and cost advice

"For big business, Tableau could be expensive as having a lot of Tableau server users (entering with a browser to reports) could be a bit expensive."

"Its cost is quite high. A corporate license costs about 150-200K per year for all the users, but there was probably some discounted amount. This cost includes everything."

"The price could be higher for the quality of software, so they revised the pricing in this version, and I agree with the price for top version. The top version costs about $70 per month, and the price is cheap for the quality."

"In Korea, the tool's pricing depends on the scale of usage. For instance, it's reasonable for a department with fewer than 50 users to adopt Tableau, like sales. However, the pricing becomes an issue when considering an enterprise solution for a larger user base, say 10,000 people."

"Cost is where tools like MicroStrategy, Power BI, or Spotfire come into play. Cost-wise, Tableau is a little bit costlier than other tools such as Power BI. I have been using Tableau all these years, but about four years ago, Power BI came out at a very low cost. Their desktop version was free from the beginning. Power BI Desktop has always been free, whereas Tableau Desktop is costly. When it comes to cost, people prefer Power BI because it integrates very well with Office 365. You don't have to worry about integration with Teams or SharePoint."

"Its price is a concern. It is more expensive than Power BI. My guess would be that it is $1000 or less per year. We might go for Power BI in the future because of its umbrella with Microsoft licensing. It is much cheaper for us to use Power BI, and some folks will go in that direction because they don't want to pay the higher license."

"Tableau has core-based and user-based licensing, and it is tied to scalability. The core-based licensing is about you buying a certain number of cores, and there is no restriction on the number of users who can use Tableau. The restriction is only on the number of cores. In user-based subscription licensing, there is a restriction on the number of users. Big companies and government organizations with a lot of users typically go for core-based licensing. User-based subscription licensing is a more common model. It has user roles such as creator, explorer, and viewer. A creator is someone who does the groundwork or development work. An explorer is someone who is into middle management but is not technically savvy, such as a category head. A viewer is like a typical decision-maker in senior management. For each role, Tableau is priced differently. The viewer role has the minimum price, and the creator role has the highest price. This pricing is available on their website. Everybody can see it."

"Tableau is an expensive solution compared to Power BI."

More Tableau pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which BI (Business Intelligence) Tools solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

816,192 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Comparison Review

it_user6330

Product Manager at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

May 2, 2013

MicroStrategy vs. Tableau

After a recent presentation, several attendees asked me about the applications of Visual Insights and Tableau. Many companies are investing in both tools and are trying to figure out the right tool for specific applications Tableau has found its sweet-spot as an agile discovery tool that analysts…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

56%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Educational Organization

40%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Seeking lightweight open source BI software

It depends on the Data architecture and the complexity of your requirement. Some great tools in the market are Qlik ...

See all answers

What do you like most about IBM Cognos?

The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools.

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM Cognos?

I need improvements, particularly with the Framework Manager, which has an outdated user interface from older version...

See all answers

What do you like most about Amazon QuickSight?

The integration is very seamless. We stored our result CSV files in S3 and connected directly from there.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon QuickSight?

Competition pricing is high for query processing, however, the Data Lake cost is nominal as it is on top of S3.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon QuickSight?

The cost of queries is very high. Improvements in drill-down ability and evolving it as an OLAP tool would help more.

See all answers

Tableau vs. Business Objects - Which is a better solution for visualization and analysis?

Both tools have their positives and negatives. First, I should mention that I am relatively new to Tableau. I have be...

See all answers

Which would you choose - Tableau or SAP Analytics Cloud?

Tableau is easy to set up and maintain. In about a day it is possible for the entire platform to be deployed for use....

See all answers

What do you like most about Tableau?

Tableau is a fantastic tool that provides impressive dashboards and customized reports.

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Power BI vs IBM Cognos

Compared 13% of the time

Oracle Hyperion vs IBM Cognos

Compared 10% of the time

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs IBM Cognos

Compared 7% of the time

SAP Analytics Cloud vs IBM Cognos

Compared 5% of the time

Qlik Sense vs IBM Cognos

Compared 5% of the time

More IBM Cognos Competitors

Microsoft Power BI vs Amazon QuickSight

Compared 25% of the time

Looker Studio vs Amazon QuickSight

Compared 10% of the time

Qlik Sense vs Amazon QuickSight

Compared 8% of the time

Looker vs Amazon QuickSight

Compared 8% of the time

Databricks vs Amazon QuickSight

Compared 4% of the time

More Amazon QuickSight Competitors

Microsoft Power BI vs Tableau

Compared 20% of the time

Domo vs Tableau

Compared 14% of the time

Databricks vs Tableau

Compared 5% of the time

SAS Visual Analytics vs Tableau

Compared 4% of the time

Oracle Hyperion vs Tableau

Compared 2% of the time

More Tableau Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Cognos

November 2024

Download IBM Cognos product report

Buyer's Guide

Amazon QuickSight

November 2024

Download Amazon QuickSight product report

Buyer's Guide

Tableau

October 2024

Download Tableau product report

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics

QuickSight

Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online

Learn More

IBM

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Salesforce

Overview

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:

IBM Cognos Insight: Create personal and managed workspaces for data analysis. Using these interactive workspaces, you can share insight results with managers. Cognos Insight supports write-back, and you can also use these workspaces to capture and integrate management goals, commitments, and forecasts.
IBM Cognos Workspace: With IBM Cognos Workspace, you can create rich, interactive workspaces using IBM Cognos content as well as data from external sources. You can view and open your favorite workspaces and reports, edit content in your workspaces, and share your workspaces via email.
IBM Cognos Analytics: IBM Cognos Analytics utilizes built-in AI and intuitive searches which helps users to quickly create the visualizations and a wide range of reports. Cognos Analytics provides cognitive and managed self-service, enabling you to gain insights from controlled and trusted data.
IBM Cognos Report Studio and IBM Cognos Query Studio: Easily create structured and query reports. IBM Cognos allows users to create application and report templates. In addition, report authors can reuse report objects to apply filters, fields, and styles to reports. Users can set the language of the user interface and report content according to the user's native language.
IBM Cognos Event Studio: Receive notifications of events that occur within your organization in real time. Event Studio enables the creation of agents that detect the occurrence of business events, failures, or anomalies, based on the change of specific events or data conditions. Notification can be sent via email, publication in the portal, or by triggering reports.
IBM Cognos Connection: This is the Web portal for IBM Cognos BI and is the central area for accessing all the IBM Cognos functions. In the web portal, users can schedule and distribute reports, create tasks, administer the server and the access permissions, and more.

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.”

Amazon QuickSight is a fast, cloud-powered business analytics service that makes it easy to build visualizations, perform ad-hoc analysis, and quickly get business insights from your data. Using our cloud-based service you can easily connect to your data, perform advanced analysis, and create stunning visualizations and rich dashboards that can be accessed from any browser or mobile device.

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 dashboards provide a complete view of your data through visualizations, visual objects, text, and more.
Tableau provides convenient, real-time options to collaborate with other users and instantly share data in the form of visualizations, sheets, and dashboards.
Tableau ensures connectivity to both live data sources and data extraction from external data sources as in-memory data. This gives users the flexibility to use data from more than one source without any restrictions.
Tableau gives many data source option, ranging from spreadsheets, big data, on-premise files, relational databases, non-relational databases, data warehouses, and big data, to on-cloud data.
Tableau has a lot of pre-installed information on maps, such as cities, postal codes, and administrative boundaries.
Tableau has a foolproof security system based on authentication and permission systems for data connections and user access. Tableau also gives you the freedom to integrate with other security protocols.

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.”

Sample Customers

More than 23,000 leading organizations across multiple industries use Cognos. Some examples of Cognos customers include BMW Financial Services, Quinte Health Care, Troy Corporation, Michigan State University, and GKN Land System.

MLB Advanced Media, Infor, HotelBeds, Gemini, Jivochat, Edmunds.com

Accenture, Adobe, Amazon.com, Bank of America, Charles Schwab Corp, Citigroup, Coca-Cola Company, Cornell University, Dell, Deloitte, Duke University, eBay, Exxon Mobil, Fannie Mae, Ferrari, French Red Cross, Goldman Sachs, Google, Government of Canada, HP, Intel, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Macy's, Merck, The New York Times, PayPal, Pfizer, US Army, US Air Force, Skype, and Walmart.

Buyer's Guide

Amazon QuickSight vs. Tableau

October 2024

Free Report: Amazon QuickSight vs. Tableau

Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon QuickSight vs. Tableau and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.

DOWNLOAD NOW

816,192 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Amazon QuickSight vs. Tableau report.

See our list of best BI (Business Intelligence) Tools vendors.

We monitor all BI (Business Intelligence) Tools 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.