Sisense vs Tableau comparison

Sisense and Salesforce are both solutions in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category. Sisense is ranked #21 with an average rating of 7.3, while Salesforce is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.7. Sisense holds a 1.4% mindshare in BIT, compared to Salesforce’s 19.8% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Sisense users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of Salesforce users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

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

Buyer's Guide

Sisense vs. Tableau

November 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 Sisense is 1.4%, up from 1.4% 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

Q&A Highlights

it_user137202

Business Analyst at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Aug 07, 2014

I'm looking for real info about licensing, ease of setup and other costs involved. Can you help?

Thanks everyone for the great input... I have zeroed down to Tableau; and will shortly post my reasons for doing so. I DO hope they will help future products selectors. Regards pete

See all answers

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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FernandoMorote

Senior Software Engineer/BI Data Analyst at a analyst firm with 501-1,000 employees

Business intelligence solution that has improved automation and provided meaningful insights

This solution does not have tabs. In order to have tabs, you have to download an add-on to mimic the tabs. They should be integrated to improve the solution. We have also experienced bugs in the widget which has required us to delete the widget and recreate it. When one user adds filters to data, the next user sees the same results which can cause confusion. The next user can also make changes to the data.

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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.

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

"The correlation analysis is excellent. It's one of the best that I have used to date."

"It is a stable product."

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

"The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report."

"The main difference that I like about Cognos compared to other solutions is its data splitting functionality. We have all our company data inside the Cognos environment and so we prefer to split the information Cognos itself. It's more efficient this way."

"The initial setup is very straightforward."

"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."

More IBM Cognos pros

"Whenever we have an issue or are unsure how to proceed, they manage to simplify the issue and help us execute it in a graceful and scalable way."

"The most valuable thing I have found is the ability for Sisense to connect data from totally different sources."

"We like that this solution allows us to use data cubes to set up specific visualizations."

"The best part about this solution is how easy it is to mash up the data from many sources. Sisense is fast compared to other solutions."

"There are many built-in connectors, which allow us to easily add new sources of data, often in minutes."

"Ability to work with very large data sources without the limitations of Excel."

"ElastiCube Manager is a very easy to use ETL tool, which includes the ability to easily transform raw data into reusable data."

"Visually displaying data."

More Sisense pros

"The most valuable feature is the richness of its visualization and from a self-service standpoint, the ease of use."

"The most valuable feature is the 3D charting."

"I like the calculation feature. I would not say it's such a good feature in Tableau, but if you have the knowledge, you can make that feature visible to everyone. It's not a feature that we can drag and drop and get the information. But whatever the data, whatever the calculation, I'm able to do. It's basically the knowledge base. Whatever knowledge I have, I can make that information public and publish it for management."

"Tableau is an advanced specialized tool. One of the best features I've seen is the lack of an intermediate semantic layer. I think that's an advantage compared to any other tool like BusinessObjects or Power BI, which are Tableau's biggest competitors."

"Easy to create graphs and visualizations."

"Better interaction and less time spent with end users."

"Self-service is most valuable. Users can pick up quickly and do the resolution. There are a lot of out-of-the-box features, and it satisfies most of the needs. If users are properly trained, they can deal with any situation."

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

More Tableau pros

Cons

"Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool."

"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."

"Need improvement towards Visualization."

"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 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."

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

"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."

"There are some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data."

More IBM Cognos cons

"Larger datasets will sometimes give a "Accumulated logs" error when trying to make minor changes. T"

"I would love to have more customization capabilities for building dashboards, especially in creating custom widget sizes."

"I would say that using Sisense on Linux's platform might not be advantageous for everyone."

"At present there are additional costs involved if we wish to share our data queues within this solution, which we would like to see removed."

"This solution does not have tabs. In order to have tabs, you have to download an add-on to mimic the tabs. They should be integrated to improve the solution."

"I would like Sisense to improve its performance, particularly when we are dealing with large-scale data."

"The administrative side of Sisense is a little cumbersome and confusing."

"I would also like to be able to run a bursts of reports based on different field values with PDF output right in the tool, rather than filtering on each field value and generating each PDF manually."

More Sisense cons

"We need big servers to perform the operations that we are doing. They should probably relook at its architecture."

"We have products like Tableau, Power BI, Cognos, and QlikView in the data visualization segment. Compared to those, Tableau is quite costly."

"The setup was easy but we are having some problems with the configuration that is taking a long time. We have done some initial tests and some of the delays could be from bandwidth issues. However, the whole installation process should be simplified."

"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."

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

"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."

"At the organizational level, increasing the servers' capabilities to support us as an enterprise tool."

"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."

More Tableau cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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 solution is affordable."

"I rate the product price as four or five on a scale from one to ten, where one is a low price, and ten is a high price."

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

"It is averagely priced."

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

"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."

More IBM Cognos pricing and cost advice

"This solution is more expensive than Tableau, Qlik and Dundas. It is an expensive tool. They charge $75,000 while Tableau is $45,000."

"Compared to Power BI or Tableau, Sisense is much more expensive."

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

"The price of Tableau is high, although there are different types of licenses available."

"I recommend that you discuss your needs with the salesperson and try to negotiate the price."

"We are paying an annual licensing fee."

"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."

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

"The cost of the solution should be improved."

"The value for money is definitely there."

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…

Read full review

Answers from the Community

it_user137202

Business Analyst at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Aug 7, 2014

I'm looking for real info about licensing, ease of setup and other costs involved. Can you help?

Thanks everyone for the great input... I have zeroed down to Tableau; and will shortly post my reasons for doing so. I DO hope they will help future products selectors. Regards pete

2 out of 15 answers

it_user134976

CEO at a tech services company

Jun 30, 2014

Afraid I'm not that familiar with either of them Sent from my Windows 8 Phone ________________________________

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it_user4008

CEO with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 30, 2014

Self service Visual Intelligence left the station some time ago. Tableau became the standard years ago but more importantly since going public Tableau's investment into R&D as a % of revenues is always north of industry standards thus Tableau reinvests for the future consistently. Do not base your assessment on "feeds and speeds" (read features) only. Pretend that you are the owner of the company picking a vendor and base you selection on business issues and reference calls to clients

Read full answer

See all 15 answers

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

55%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

25%

Computer Software Company

15%

University

Government

Educational Organization

42%

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about Sisense?

The solution's technical support team is good.

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What needs improvement with Sisense?

I would say that using Sisense on Linux's platform might not be advantageous for everyone. I am more familiar with Wi...

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What is your primary use case for Sisense?

For the use case, the tool is mostly used from an analytic point of view. We are focused on huge data size because th...

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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...

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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....

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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 Sisense

Compared 39% of the time

Apache Superset vs Sisense

Compared 14% of the time

Databricks vs Sisense

Compared 6% of the time

Qlik Sense vs Sisense

Compared 4% of the time

Domo vs Sisense

Compared 4% of the time

More Sisense 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

Alteryx 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

Sisense

November 2024

Download Sisense product report

Buyer's Guide

Tableau

November 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

Sisense

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.”

Sisense is an end-to-end business analytics software that enables users to easily prepare and analyze large, complex datasets. Sisense’s Single-Stack BI software includes data preparation, data management, analysis, visualization and reporting capabilities.

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.

Ebay, WIX, Wave Accounting, ESPN.com, Magellan Luxury Hotel, Paylogic, Sony, Merck, EDA, One Hour Translation, NASA, Plastic Jungle, Philips, Yahoo

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

Sisense vs. Tableau

November 2024

Free Report: Sisense vs. Tableau

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

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