Sigma vs Tableau comparison

Sigma Computing and Salesforce are both solutions in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category. Sigma Computing is ranked #19 with an average rating of 9.3, while Salesforce is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.7. Sigma Computing holds a 0.6% mindshare in BIT, compared to Salesforce’s 20.6% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Sigma Computing 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 Summary

We performed a comparison between Sigma 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 Sigma vs. Tableau Report (Updated: November 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Sigma vs. Tableau

November 2024

Download the complete report

Helped 815,854 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 Sigma is 0.6%, up from 0.5% 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

Jul 27, 2022

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

Erik Jones

Head of BI and Analytics at HyperScience

Nov 14, 2022

Streamlines reporting; like Excel on steroids

Our primary use cases for Sigma are exploratory data analysis and reporting and dashboarding Sigma improved our organization by enabling us to streamline our processes. My finance team previously handled reporting in Microsoft Excel and in Google Sheets. That's now all been transferred over to…

Read full review

ROMIL SHAH

Deputy General Manger - Information Technology at Nayara Energy

Mar 22, 2022

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 most valuable features are Report Development (Functionality) and Information Distribution (Flexibility)."

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

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

"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."

"The dashboarding offered by this solution is very valuable to us."

"A positive feature is Report Studio, where we create beautiful, complex reports."

"If they want dashboarding, storytelling, and analyzing why KPIs are met or not, then Cognos is a better candidate than Qlik Sense."

"The solution's initial setup process is easy."

More IBM Cognos pros

"The tool's interface is easy to use. The functions listed as a part of the menu items are easy to use."

"Sigma is a great software for non-technical business users. If someone's familiar with pivot tables or Excel or Google Sheets, they should be able to pick up Sigma pretty quickly. There is a very low bar for onboarding."

"The most valuable aspect for me is having real-time data."

"It is very easy to create dashboards, charts, and graphs."

"I like the solution's web version, more so than Power BI's web version. It just makes it easier to drag and drop things and to blend data on the backend. It simplifies the process."

"Tableau's most valuable feature is its ability to connect with various data sources and display real-time data on three different dashboards."

"The action feature which Tableau has is very useful for us. If we click on one visualization, it will pass the value to another visualization. That interactivity within different visualizations is the most valuable feature of Tableau."

"The most important feature is the tool is very easy to use. This makes it simple to introduce it to CxOs. After a rapid demo, they are usual impressed by the results shown, because it has such a rare simplicity."

"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."

"Technical support has been responsive."

"I like Tableau's heat maps and the storyboard. You can create data stories and tons of visuals with it, and it goes together really well. Tableau lets you manipulate the data in various ways."

More Tableau pros

Cons

"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."

"Cognos charts are not as fast as those of the other tools, even with DQM (dynamic query mode)."

"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 think the GIS pieces maybe not as good as we would like."

"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."

"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."

"There are many problems with the product's stability part, making it an area where improvements are required."

"I need improvements, particularly with the Framework Manager, which has an outdated user interface from older versions like IBM Cognos 10 or 8. Additionally, the Event Studio, which offered great flexibility in previous versions, is no longer available in IBM Cognos Analytics 12. These are areas that could be improved to enhance the product."

More IBM Cognos cons

"I would like to see better visualization options. That would allow me to build out more visually pleasing dashboarding in Sigma."

"The product's roadmap regarding introducing new features in the solution or new versions of the tool can be made better in the future."

"The only minor area for improvement lies in handling highly complex visualizations."

"The forecasting feature in Tableau in my view is too limited because it must have dates but I should be able to predict the outcome of an event without having a date as part of the input."

"There are more than a powerful tool in the market, such as Microsoft BI."

"It's already using 32 gigabytes of memory, but the performance is not so good. It's very heavy."

"The solution’s pricing could be improved."

"From a downside perspective, some of the more advanced modeling techniques are actually fairly difficult to do. In addition, I just fundamentally disagree with the way you have to implement them because you can get incorrect answers in some cases."

"If you mainly need a tool for BI reporting, it's not the best option. Tableau needs better abilities to generate simple reports, integrate, create databases, and work with data lakes."

"The cost of owning the solutions from Tableau is much higher compared to any other analytical solutions."

"I have noticed that Tableau is not very compatible with ClickHouse. There's no direct connection to ClickHouse; you have to set up an ODBC connection."

More Tableau cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"IBM Cognos offers competitive pricing similar to other BI vendors in the market."

"There is some additional licensing that we needed to purchase because we were touching data outside of our core data platform. The cost was approximately $25,000 for the additional licenses, which were approximate 45 licenses. For the application itself, updates, and the core platform it was approximately $50,000. Giving a total cost of $75,000 annually for our usage of IBM Cognos."

"The cost of IBM Cognos it's more or less the same as most of the other solutions on the market. They're very competitive with the rest of the market and it is not the most expensive product."

"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."

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

"The solution is affordable."

"It is pretty expensive."

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

More IBM Cognos pricing and cost advice

"The retail price is set at one thousand dollars per creator per year."

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

"Tableau is not as cost-effective as Microsoft BI."

"Tableau is an expensive solution."

"Tableau can be costly (but this can be indefinable, such as user experience vs. cheaper etc.)"

"The price of Tableau could improve. The license is too expensive."

"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."

"The pricing is $70 per month. You have to pay about $800 or something in that ballpark annually for one license."

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

815,854 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

57%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Government

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Healthcare Company

Educational Organization

40%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

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 Sigma?

The tool's interface is easy to use. The functions listed as a part of the menu items are easy to use.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Sigma?

The viewer license is free, and the available licenses are for creators. The retail price is set at one thousand doll...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Sigma?

I have used the product on the cloud and the browser and found no issues with it. The product's roadmap regarding int...

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 6% of the time

SAP Analytics Cloud vs IBM Cognos

Compared 5% of the time

More IBM Cognos Competitors

Hex vs Sigma

Compared 37% of the time

Apache Superset vs Sigma

Compared 18% of the time

Microsoft Power BI vs Sigma

Compared 10% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs Sigma

Compared 6% of the time

Domo vs Sigma

Compared 5% of the time

More Sigma Competitors

Microsoft Power BI vs Tableau

Compared 20% of the time

Domo vs Tableau

Compared 14% 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

November 2024

Download IBM Cognos product report

Buyer's Guide

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

November 2024

Download Sigma product report

Buyer's Guide

Tableau

October 2024

Download Tableau product report

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics

No data available

Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online

Learn More

IBM

Sigma Computing

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.”

Sigma is the next-generation of analytics for cloud data warehouses with a familiar spreadsheet-like interface that gives business experts the power to ask any question of their data no matter the query.

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.

Snowflake, Fivetran ,Autodesk, Flowspace, Super League Gaming, Zumper, Clover, Volta, Olivela

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

Sigma vs. Tableau

November 2024

Free Report: Sigma vs. Tableau

Find out what your peers are saying about Sigma vs. Tableau and other solutions. Updated: November 2024.

DOWNLOAD NOW

815,854 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Sigma vs. Tableau report.

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