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SAP Analytics Cloud vs Tableau comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 8, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos
Sponsored
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
134
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (4th)
SAP Analytics Cloud
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
69
Ranking in other categories
Predictive Analytics (2nd)
Tableau
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
294
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (2nd), Data Visualization (1st), Embedded BI (1st)
 

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 SAP Analytics Cloud is 5.1%, down from 5.9% 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 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
RamasamyTelungupalayam - PeerSpot reviewer
Seamless integration, collaborative features, and enhances data exploration
There are several areas for improvement in SAP Analytics Cloud. Firstly, features available in SAP Lumira are missing in SAP Analytics Cloud. Secondly, the predictive analytics functions, although promising, are currently only suitable for Proof of Concepts (POCs) and not for industrial-scale use. Lastly, the pricing model for the planning functionality is quite high and presents an entry barrier.
ROMIL SHAH - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The tool can join data from different sources, write back to databases, generate alerts, and be customized to our preferences. It's an enterprise BI tool that's more powerful than just visualization tools like Power BI or Tableau."
"Self-service is possible through the use of dashboards, which are also very intuitive. Stories can be used to pin snapshots, tell the story for meetings, etc."
"Mapbox integration for geospatial analytics down to longitude/latitude layers."
"The most valuable feature of IBM Cognos is security. The solution has updated features that other competitors' solutions come out with long after IBM Cognos has had them."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools."
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"The most useful feature of SAP Analytics Cloud is planning because it helps users with making predictions and forecasts. Clients can forecast, make data allocations, and other actions. The solution is useful for planning."
"The product's most valuable features are reporting and planning, driverless planning, business vertical-wise planning, dashboarding, forecasting tools, and business forecasting."
"Real-time data makes for a single version of the truth."
"SAP Analytics Cloud is easy to create charts with, and is a stable business intelligence platform. Easy to set up solution."
"There is a really nice insight feature that I enjoy using."
"A robust solution."
"It's easy to connect Analytics Cloud with other SAP solutions, and it's also effortless to deploy. You don't need much technical skill to set it up. It's as easy as setting up a tablet. I said tablet before. It's very easy to actually set up."
"The stories have really been helpful in looking at specific scenarios and analyzing trends over periods of time."
"Provides a very good sound analysis quotient."
"It's the ease of use. It is also a self-service tool so it decreases the burden on having centralized IT-type teams or developers."
"The initial setup is simple."
"We frequently utilize visualizations using maps and different objects, all with rich coloring options. And tooltips are absolutely essential for us. Tooltips, like the pop-up descriptions when you hover over some object or graph. Those tooltips in Tableau are great features."
"When compared to Power BI, Tableau has more readily available resources."
"The most valuable feature is the 3D charting."
"It’s good for quick visualization and being able to quickly consume unstructured data to play around with."
"The feature that is currently most valuable is the import feature where I can link to an Excel data source. I'm not using it with any other data source, such as SQL Server. I directly link it to an Excel sheet, and if I change anything in that Excel sheet, the changed data immediately gets reflected in the virtualization. This is something that is very convenient for me as of now."
 

Cons

"Cognos charts are not as fast as those of the other tools, even with DQM (dynamic query mode)."
"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."
"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."
"They should provide improved visual reporting."
"Extending dynamic cubes aggregate awareness with calculated measures."
"IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner."
"Need improvement towards Visualization."
"Pricing is fine for the BI license, but when it comes to client license, that fee is a bit high."
"It's lacking a bit in maturity and we find we can't run our business off it until it's improved."
"The price, integration, and modeling capabilities could be better. I have to use an integration engine to integrate our products and databases. SAP Analytics Cloud is made specifically for KPIs and business intelligence. The modeling capabilities are kind of poor. You always have to model the data and then present it visually in SAP Analytics Cloud. In the next release, I would like to have a lite version for planning to create scenarios quickly. For me personally, planning is the most complicated feature of SAP Analytics Cloud."
"There should be more features for the time series charts."
"The integration with other vendors and solutions could be improved."
"It seems like there's a problem with the tool's licenses. If there are a lot of users, like 200, who only use the solution once a year, paying for a full-year license for each user is expensive. There's no option for users who only use the solution occasionally."
"The budget management could be better."
"Live Data Models are very slow and the setup can be improved, with tools such as Cloud Connector being inbuilt into SAP Analytics Cloud. Likewise, we need to write application code from scratch, rather than tweaking existing code, as we might with Excel macros. Moreover, when using responsive pages, the widgets get adjusted according to the mobile screen. As a result, when I place two or three KPI tiles, they can only be viewed tile-by-tile. We want to see the full dashboard on the mobile screen and zoom in to click on a particular section of the dashboard and go further into that. But displaying tile-by-tile makes it very annoying and the upper management using this dashboard might not be aware there are any more tiles to view."
"Tableau could be improved by introducing a data manipulation layer within the tool itself. Currently, data manipulations require using additional tools like Alteryx. If Tableau included these capabilities, it would reduce the need for external dependencies. The tool gets slower when we feed huge amounts of data."
"They need a write-back; that is what is missing. If they get the write back to the database, they will be fully automated, but for the time being, they are not."
"It is not so great when it comes to data exchange/integration, data mining, etc."
"The solution’s pricing could be improved."
"At the organizational level, increasing the servers' capabilities to support us as an enterprise tool."
"Reports should be downloadable as PDF files."
"I would like them to include the Italian language, as I can see there are other foreign language in the product."
"I have used Power BI as well as Tableau. There are a couple of interesting features that I like in Power BI, but they are not present in Tableau. For example, in Power BI, if I am looking at country-wise population, I can type and ask for the country that has the maximum population, and it will automatically give an answer and address that query. This kind of feature is not there in Tableau. Similarly, in Power BI, for integrating with the latest ML algorithms, we have decision trees and primarily multiple machine learning algorithms. The decision tree essentially visualizes the patterns in the data. We don't have such a feature in Tableau. If Tableau can integrate with the machine learning algorithms and help us to do visualizations, it would be a wonderful combination. Most of the people are going for Tableau primarily for visualization purposes. However, in the data science industry, users want to do model building as well as tell a story. As of now, Tableau is fulfilling the requirements for visualization purposes. If they can bring it up to a level where I can use it for machine learning purposes as well as for visualization, it would be very helpful. Many people who want to do data science don't want to write a code. Tableau is anyway a drag and drop tool, and if they can provide those options as well, it will be a powerful combination."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cognos is super expensive compared to Tableau ($70/month) and Power BI ($20/month) — I think Cognos is roughly $200 a month."
"IBM Cognos offers competitive pricing similar to other BI vendors in the market."
"It is quite pricy. I think Microsoft BI is cheaper. Tableau might also be cheaper, but it also depends on the usage. If you have very many users, Cognos can be a problem. It could be cheaper than Tableau but not for so many users. If you have a few thousand users, Tableau, which is generally quite expensive, can be cheaper than Cognos."
"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."
"Pricing should be improved."
"The pricing of this product is meant for medium to large-scale enterprises."
"There is need to assess the purchase license accordingly so as to avoid audit penalties."
"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."
"I don't have the exact price for SAP Analytics Cloud, but it could be improved and made cheaper, especially when compared to Power BI."
"SAP Analytics can be very costly to license, which can make it difficult for organizations to implement."
"It Wasn't directly involved in the pricing discussions, but when I joined the organization, they had already purchased the SAP Analytics Cloud solution. The organization faced challenges due to its perceived expense, leading to restrictions on granting access to many users."
"The platform is about 50% more expensive than Power BI."
"It is not the most expensive one. You have to do the cost-of-ownership analysis and take a lot of things into consideration to come up with the conclusion that it is cheaper or not, but its price is reasonable. It provides value for money."
"The tool's pricing is medium, and licensing costs are yearly."
"It is a bit expensive, but really worth it, especially if you are already using other SAP tools."
"This solution is pricey."
"Tableau is a little cheaper as compared to Power BI and other technologies that we have used in the past. However, if the business users in our organization want to make presentations, Tableau has been asking us to purchase a Tableau Creator license, and $35 per month is expensive for business users. Power BI is giving a free desktop version for business users to connect to any data source and build their own dashboards. That's why we have proposed to use Power BI for most of the business users in our organization."
"It is reasonable based on what it offers."
"There is a license required, we pay an annual license which is priced fair."
"Tableau is free."
"The professional version of Tableau is quite expensive."
"Its price is higher than Power BI and QlikView. Tableau costs around $70 per user per month, whereas Power BI is around $8 to $9. QlikView is around $30. Tableau has various prices for various models such as Creator, Designer."
"Tableau can be costly (but this can be indefinable, such as user experience vs. cheaper etc.)"
"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."
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Comparison Review

it_user6330 - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
 

Answers from the Community

ME
Sep 27, 2023
Sep 27, 2023
In case you are working for a small accounting firm, Tableau or Power Bi may cover all your needs. It is important, what kind of ERP system do you use. Are you running SAP S4/Hana, stay in SAP word. If you run other product look to other options. Does not make sense to use SAP AC only, far too expensive and will be hard to utilize fully. Solutions like Tableau or Power Bi are easy to use and wi...
See 2 answers
Kapil Rampal - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 27, 2023
Tableau is a fantastic product. It works really well and is remarkably easy to use. SAP Analytics Cloud is also a good product. Both are quite inexpensive. Personally, I prefer Tableau for its ease of use and quick results. 
Milan Orendac - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 27, 2023
In case you are working for a small accounting firm, Tableau or Power Bi may cover all your needs. It is important, what kind of ERP system do you use. Are you running SAP S4/Hana, stay in SAP word. If you run other product look to other options. Does not make sense to use SAP AC only, far too expensive and will be hard to utilize fully. Solutions like Tableau or Power Bi are easy to use and will give you great result. On the other side it is not so much about the system, but about data quality, this is the key. 
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
55%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
4%
Government
4%
Educational Organization
25%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Educational Organization
42%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

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 ...
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.
What needs improvement with IBM Cognos?
I need improvements, particularly with the Framework Manager, which has an outdated user interface from older version...
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....
What do you like most about SAP Analytics Cloud?
In the data warehouse, you're free to make changes. You can make everything text, meaning it's always a string. Even ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP Analytics Cloud?
The pricing model for SAP Analytics Cloud is quite competitive, but the cost for the planning functionality is high a...
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...
What do you like most about Tableau?
Tableau is a fantastic tool that provides impressive dashboards and customized reports.
 

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
SAP BusinessObjects Cloud
Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

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.
Live Oak Bank
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.
Find out what your peers are saying about SAP Analytics Cloud vs. Tableau and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.