Tableau vs Zoho Analytics comparison

Salesforce and Zoho are both solutions in the Reporting category. Salesforce is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.7, while Zoho is ranked #10 with an average rating of 7.6. Salesforce holds a 24.3% mindshare in RT, compared to Zoho’s 0.6% mindshare. Additionally, 89% of Salesforce users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of Zoho users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

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

Find out in this report how the two Reporting solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Tableau vs. Zoho Analytics Report (Updated: November 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Tableau vs. Zoho Analytics

November 2024

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Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of IBM Cognos is 4.4%, down from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tableau is 24.3%, up from 22.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zoho Analytics is 0.6%, down from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Reporting

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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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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Yogesh Kumar Mali

Managing Director at ALPHA LABS TECH PVT LTD

An easy-to-set up solution that helps in the scheduling of reports and dashboards

A lot of integrations are available with Zoho Analytics. There is a limitation that we cannot create more than 300 columns in a worksheet on Zoho Analytics. The data can be in millions. There are some limitations on the reports that depend on the various combinations of data you get. So there is always an error that gets thrown out if you are building complex reports.

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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

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

"Previously, we were doing static reporting. Management would request a report, and it would take staff a week or more to provide it. With Cognos, we have dynamic reporting, and it has reduced both reporting and decision making times significantly. With the solution's dashboard, the company's management team has updated records at their fingertips. This means that they can directly access the data they need to make decisions."

"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."

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

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

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

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

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

More IBM Cognos pros

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

"I consider Tableau to be the best analytical tool available. It's really handy to use and can be used by non-technical people."

"It's very user-friendly. It's not like Power BI, Tableau is very user-friendly. Anybody can use Tableau. It's very easy to adopt things. I can visualize the stats."

"It provides supporting data for critical policy and operational changes"

"It is definitely easy to use. It is intuitive, and more or less, everything can be done from the front end. As such, there is no concept of metadata. You can just take data from a database and start building your own stuff, such as OLAP data warehouse. You don't need extensive metadata modeling like Oracle BI."

"It’s good for quick visualization and being able to quickly consume unstructured data to play around with."

"Data handling, visualizations, and aesthetics of it are the most valuable features."

"It is easy to adapt visualizers to have interactive conversations among decision-makers."

More Tableau pros

"We use the solution for financial and sales analytics. It brings data from our IT incident management tool. Hence, we have three business use cases for IT support, sales and financials."

"We can create advanced-level reports with the tool. We can get data from different Zoho applications and also from other third-party applications. We can create schedules for syncing data from third parties to Zoho Analytics. We can also use table queries for getting data from more than one table."

"The integration interface is very easy to use and allows you to directly connect to a variety of APIs."

"It's a very strong analytics tool."

"Zoho Analytics is the best software for giving reports to customers and we can create any report that is required."

"Scheduling of reports and dashboards is the most valuable feature of Zoho Analytics."

"Zoho Analytics's most valuable feature is the ability to provide excellent analytics through a single platform."

"The initial setup is straightforward."

More Zoho Analytics pros

Cons

"It could have more options for themes."

"Extending dynamic cubes aggregate awareness with calculated measures."

"One thing that we really want is the ability to have data portrayed on an image. Cognos is not able to do it at the moment, and that's becoming a requirement from the business side: having an image and then plotting your dataset on top of the image as a map."

"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."

"I would like to see is more easy building, movement in the reports, and dashboard functionality within reporting. Overall more simple elements within reports. If the elements are simple then you don't have to render a full page, but you can move separate parts in the page."

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

"We would like to see development of the product's UI function, to make it more of a UI tool that can be configured as required."

More IBM Cognos cons

"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."

"In the next release, there should be more information describing each chart because users have a difficult time telling them apart. They should also include the animations/videos, similar to Power BI."

"The data entered into Tableau must be clean. Otherwise, it won't work properly."

"Improvements can be made in template support. The workbook file structure is really hard to version control. If there was some sort of version control support offered particularly for workbooks, that would help big time."

"The price could be better."

"I would like to be able to set the parameters in a more specific manner."

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

"Maybe the price could be a bit cheaper, especially if you're a personal developer that uses Tableau just to explore smaller data sets and you're not a company or something like that."

More Tableau cons

"The tool needs to improve analysis and add more features."

"There is a limitation that we cannot create more than 300 columns in a worksheet on Zoho Analytics."

"This solution does not support manufacturing facilities."

"The customer service and support for this solution could be improved by faster response times."

"I like the solution's Query Table feature which helps me write SQL queries. We can get data from different tables and then use it to create reports."

"The navigation on the interface is not intuitive."

"The solution does not provide call center facilities for customer support."

"There should be more types of graphics available for use in the reports."

More Zoho Analytics cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing costs are a little bit higher for IBM Cognos. I don't think there is any additional cost apart from the licensing charges."

"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."

"The solution is affordable."

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

"It is averagely priced."

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

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

More IBM Cognos pricing and cost advice

"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."

"We pay for the enterprise license for Tableau. The licensing could be cheaper and more flexible."

"There is a license for this solution and we pay on an annual basis."

"ROI is very high, but it requires a data preparation/blending tool."

"It is a bit overpriced."

"Deployment of dashboards to viewers and unit supervisors can be prohibitively expensive."

"The solution is very expensive. If you have many users then it is going to cost your company a lot of money."

"The professional version of Tableau is quite expensive."

More Tableau pricing and cost advice

"The product is expensive."

"I rate the tool's pricing seven out of ten. The licensing costs are yearly."

"For one license the pricing is about $35 a user."

"The tool's pricing is similar to other Zoho applications and is affordable."

"Zoho Analytics costs $ 4,200 per month, billed yearly."

"The price is high. The solution advertises that it provides products for 55 AED per user, but these products contain only the basic features. Most of the features are locked. The version of the product that includes Zoho Analytics costs around 199 AED per user per month."

"The product's licensing is reasonable."

"The pricing is okay. It is fair compared to the market."

More Zoho Analytics 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

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

56%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Government

Educational Organization

40%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

79%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

Real Estate/Law Firm

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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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

What do you like most about Zoho Analytics?

Zoho Analytics's most valuable feature is the ability to provide excellent analytics through a single platform.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zoho Analytics?

I rate the tool's pricing seven out of ten. The licensing costs are yearly.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Zoho Analytics?

The improvement needed is regarding the number of API calls. Currently, Zoho Analytics only allows us to update data ...

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 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

Microsoft Power BI vs Zoho Analytics

Compared 30% of the time

Apache Superset vs Zoho Analytics

Compared 28% of the time

Looker vs Zoho Analytics

Compared 16% of the time

SAP Analytics Cloud vs Zoho Analytics

Compared 10% of the time

More Zoho Analytics Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Cognos

November 2024

Download IBM Cognos product report

Buyer's Guide

Tableau

October 2024

Download Tableau product report

Buyer's Guide

Zoho Analytics

October 2024

Download Zoho Analytics product report

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics

Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online

Zoho Reports

Learn More

IBM

Salesforce

Zoho

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.”

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.”

Zoho Reports is a powerful, easy-to-use and highly scalable cloud-based reporting and business intelligence platform for small to medium-sized businesses. Its flexible pay-as-you-go pricing model and scope for customization allow businesses to tailor it to their unique needs.

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.

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.

Suzuki, American Pacific Mortgage, KPMG, Air Canada, University of Michigan, BricozOr, WorldWide Express, The University of Melbourne, Novartis, SAIC

Buyer's Guide

Tableau vs. Zoho Analytics

November 2024

Free Report: Tableau vs. Zoho Analytics

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

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