Salesforce Einstein Analytics vs Tableau comparison

Salesforce Einstein Analytics and Tableau are both solutions in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category. Salesforce Einstein Analytics is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.6, while Tableau is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.7. Salesforce Einstein Analytics holds a 1.3% mindshare in BIT, compared to Tableau’s 19.8% mindshare. Additionally, 85% of Salesforce Einstein Analytics users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of Tableau users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Salesforce Einstein Analytics and Tableau based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two BI (Business Intelligence) Tools solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Salesforce Einstein Analytics vs. Tableau Report (Updated: December 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Salesforce Einstein Analytics vs. Tableau

December 2024

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Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Cognos is 3.8%, down from 4.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Salesforce Einstein Analytics is 1.3%, down from 1.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tableau is 19.8%, up from 18.5% 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.

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Parker Goodson

Enterprise Account Executive at T-Mobile

Helpful consistent measurements, high availability, and scales well

When it comes to generating reports, it appears that many users rely on experts to handle technical aspects. For instance, if you require a weekly report displaying accounts transitioning in and out of your modules, it seems challenging to accomplish without consulting experts for assistance. Such tasks should be user-friendly and easily achievable without external assistance. It would be beneficial to have visibility into any changes made to your account by individuals other than yourself or your team. It is also important to clearly track the history of these modifications and identify the responsible parties.

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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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."

"The most valuable features of IBM Cognos are governance and enterprise reporting."

"A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."

"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."

"The most valuable feature is developing reports from different data sources, making it a reliable data source."

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

"Dashboarding, reporting, and ad hoc reporting are the valuable features of IBM Cognos."

"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."

More IBM Cognos pros

"The way Salesforce Einstein Analytics is structured in terms of the work assignments and the user profile is very good."

"The solution scales extremely well."

"The inbuilt features, like pictorial representation of the data and the ability to remap and realign the data, provide clarity in understanding sales perspectives."

"Transparency is the most valuable feature of this solution."

"We have found the scalability to be very good."

"he most valuable feature of the solution is its ease of use."

"It is a comprehensive solution. It has everything in it. I can easily find what I need."

"The most valuable feature of Salesforce Einstein Analytics is the reporting tools."

More Salesforce Einstein Analytics pros

"Any feature I am looking for usually is part of the next upgrade within a few months. They have a very good dynamic evolution."

"I believe one of the most valuable features of the solution is trend analysis."

"It is a complete solution allowing a lot of integrations, different graphics, multiple operations and analyzes our date and gives us meaning from it."

"The Web Editing capabilities allow us to grant end users enough capabilities for them to do self-serve discovery without the added cost of needing to get everyone desktop licenses."

"I have found the solution easy to use and the interface is very good."

"I have found many of the self-service features valuable."

"It has a shallow learning curve and so you can go to market very, very, very quickly."

"When compared with Power BI, Tableau is much easier."

More Tableau pros

Cons

"Extending dynamic cubes aggregate awareness with calculated measures."

"They should provide improved visual reporting."

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

"Data modeling needs to be improved. We use the ETL process, and when we get errors, we then need to identify which structural change is required. The error messaging should be better. They should be descriptive rather than semantic."

"Chart quality: many other competitors have charts and graphics that look much better and that provide dynamic effects. Cognos doesn't."

"The high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."

"The AI-based features could be further enhanced by the solution."

"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."

More IBM Cognos cons

"If I could improve Tableau CRM I would make it as powerful as Tableau. Tableau CRM is more integrated and it's on the web, but it has less functionality. It is lacking functionality at this time."

"The product must be more transparent."

"There are some offerings like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud that have very useful online learning options. There need to be more avenues for self-learning with this particular solution. That would be useful."

"Salesforce is working very rigorously on improvements with each release."

"The price of Salesforce Einstein Analytics is quite a bit expensive for the region of Mexico. I think the price of the product could be better."

"They can provide more end-user customizations. There should be the possibility for the end-users to change some elements in the interface. I have a way of doing my job. My colleague may have his own way of doing his job. If I ask for a change, it'll change for everyone. It'll be good to have some end-user personalizations. I can't see many in Salesforce right now."

"The product is expensive."

"They have a lot of opportunity to improve BI tools. With Einstein Analytics, we have a very minimal scope."

More Salesforce Einstein Analytics cons

"Its price should be improved. Its price is much higher than Power BI and QlikView. Programming is not easy on Tableau. For programming, you have to have a separate model. They should include programming directly on the web portion of the Tableau desktop so that people can write Python or JavaScript code for customizations instead of using a different model. Currently, Tableau Data Prep is a separate application that you have to purchase. It would be helpful if they can include Tableau Data Prep and programming languages such as R, Python in the next version. Tableau Public, which is a community version, doesn't allow you to save your work on your desktop. They should allow it. Currently, you can only upload it in the community."

"The charts need to be improved. The drawings and the visualization need to be more accurate."

"It needs more ETL capabilities, to be able to address the end-to-end BI need."

"There should be stronger data modules for the platform."

"The process of embedding the dashboards on external portals and websites could be improved."

"The integration with other program languages, like Python, needs to be better."

"Implementation requires a technical background."

"The SQL programming functionality needs to be improved."

More Tableau cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is averagely priced."

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

"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."

"Cognos is super expensive compared to Tableau ($70/month) and Power BI ($20/month) — I think Cognos is roughly $200 a month."

"It's more expensive than similar solutions like Tableau and Power BI."

"On a scale from one to ten where one is low pricing and ten is high pricing, I would rate this solution at eight."

"Pricing should be improved."

"It is my understanding that the cost is very low. It's not very expensive."

More IBM Cognos pricing and cost advice

"I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten."

"Price-wise, Salesforce Einstein Analytics is an expensive tool."

"Salesforce Einstein Analytics can be considered somewhat expensive, depending on the company's needs. If they want the complete package with all the features, it's pricier. It all comes down to what the company requires from the platform."

"Although it was deemed slightly expensive and failed the cost analysis we conducted in our company, we proceeded with the purchase because we desired to have a leading CRM system in the industry."

"The biggest challenge we had was the cost and the licensing. We ended up getting an enterprise licensing agreement(ELA). That took a lot of negotiations and a lot of pressure. We were able to receive a good price for the community licensing they bundled Salesforce Einstein Analytics. They bundled a lot of capabilities with us with the ELA."

"Salesforce has a subscription-based licensing structure, where it's between $20 to $75 per month, per user."

"The solution is expensive."

"The product's price is relatively inexpensive and manageable for enterprise-level companies."

"The pricing for Tableau is the same as the other products in the market."

"In general, if someone is new and wants to learn Tableau, it's around $70 per month."

"Pricing is not bad. It's competitive."

"Tableau is free."

"Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis."

"The price is definitely a point because smaller firms don't use Tableau as it's an expensive tool."

"The cost is high."

More Tableau pricing and cost advice

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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…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

55%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Government

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

41%

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 ...

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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.

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What needs improvement with IBM Cognos?

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

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What do you like most about Salesforce Einstein Analytics?

The tool is valuable. It's one of the greatest programs I'm currently working with, and I believe it will continue to...

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What needs improvement with Salesforce Einstein Analytics?

Salesforce is working very rigorously on improvements with each release.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Salesforce Einstein Analytics?

I am a Salesforce CPQ developer. I have also worked on Einstein Analytics for reporting purposes.

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

Amazon QuickSight vs IBM Cognos

Compared 8% 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

More IBM Cognos Competitors

Microsoft Power BI vs Salesforce Einstein Analytics

Compared 44% of the time

Databricks vs Salesforce Einstein Analytics

Compared 15% of the time

IBM Watson Explorer vs Salesforce Einstein Analytics

Compared 11% of the time

SAP Analytics Cloud vs Salesforce Einstein Analytics

Compared 10% of the time

Qlik Sense vs Salesforce Einstein Analytics

Compared 5% of the time

More Salesforce Einstein Analytics Competitors

Microsoft Power BI vs Tableau

Compared 19% of the time

Domo vs Tableau

Compared 12% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs Tableau

Compared 8% of the time

Databricks vs Tableau

Compared 5% of the time

Oracle Hyperion vs Tableau

Compared 2% of the time

More Tableau Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Cognos

December 2024

Download IBM Cognos product report

Buyer's Guide

Salesforce Einstein Analytics

November 2024

Download Salesforce Einstein Analytics product report

Buyer's Guide

Tableau

November 2024

Download Tableau product report

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics

Einstein Analytics, Salesforce Wave Analytics

Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online

Learn More

IBM

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.”

Salesforce Einstein Analytics is a customer and business analytics platform that’s optimized for mobile use and brings flexible customer analytics to everyone in the company. It works with many types of data, from many data sources, and it can change the way your company answers critical questions. Einstein Analytics allows you to:

Connect directly to your CRM data and execute on insights directly in Chatter.
Automatically analyze millions of rows of data and get predictive analytics with Einstein Discovery.
Explore data quickly and automate actions with prebuilt apps.
Use mobile to act, whether you're on Android or iOS.

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.

ADS Securities, Alstom Grid, American Express, Barclays Bank, Coca-Cola, CoderDojo, Dubai Multi Commodities Centre, Financial Conduct Authority

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

Salesforce Einstein Analytics vs. Tableau

December 2024

Free Report: Salesforce Einstein Analytics vs. Tableau

Find out what your peers are saying about Salesforce Einstein Analytics vs. Tableau and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.

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