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IBM Watson Explorer vs Tableau Enterprise comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

IBM Watson Explorer
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Data Mining (9th)
Tableau Enterprise
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
309
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (2nd), Reporting (2nd), Data Visualization (1st), Embedded BI (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. IBM Watson Explorer is designed for Data Mining and holds a mindshare of 3.5%, up 1.9% compared to last year.
Tableau Enterprise, on the other hand, focuses on BI (Business Intelligence) Tools, holds 6.3% mindshare, down 10.2% since last year.
Data Mining Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Watson Explorer3.5%
IBM SPSS Modeler15.5%
IBM SPSS Statistics14.9%
Other66.1%
Data Mining
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Tableau Enterprise6.3%
Microsoft Power BI7.6%
SAP Business Data Cloud3.2%
Other82.9%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

it_user1319820 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Engineer at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
A data analysis tool that is scalable and includes keyword search functionality
The solution is used for a government company for data collection and analysis I have found the auto-generated document very useful as well as the main keywords that are highlighted, which are used for the search functionality within IBM Watson Explorer. I have been using the solution for five…
Swetha Dhanasekar - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior GenAI Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Centralized dashboards have transformed workforce trend analysis and speed up decisions
Tableau Enterprise helps us to consolidate the data and visualize daily and weekly trends in a clear and centralized dashboard, offering powerful features such as interactive dashboards, real-time data refreshing, advanced visual analytics, role-based access control, secure data, and seamless interaction with multiple data sources and automated reports. This will help us to analyze trends and collaborate across teams and scale analytics across the organization. These features help my team specifically by centralizing all employees' data in one place. This helps us reduce manual tracking and gives us real-time visibility into work from home versus office trends. The interactive dashboards allow quick decision-making, and the automated refresh time saves us a lot, while role-based access ensures data is shared securely with the right stakeholders. Tableau Enterprise has had a strong positive impact on our organization by improving data visibility, speeding up decision-making, and managing reports efficiently. The team can now access and track trends more effectively, and collaboration has improved using interactive dashboards. Overall, it has enhanced effectiveness and fostered a data-driven culture across the organization. The specific outcomes showing this positive impact include speeding up decision-making, which is the biggest impact because it saves us more time. Reporting time actually reduces sequentially since the dashboards refresh automatically. Data security is stronger, and data accuracy has improved, thanks to a centralized data source. Decision-making is also much faster since leaders can view real-time impacts instead of waiting for manual entry.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Implementing the solution really helped with manual labor, it takes care of a lot of FT work."
"The main use case is FAQ for the user; it works for almost 80% of the use case coverage."
"The ability to easily pull together lots of different pieces of information and drill down in a smarter way than has been possible with other analytics tools is key. Watson is all based on a set of AI and deep learning, machine-learning capabilities, and it is looking behind the scenes at some relationships that you likely would not have spotted on your own. It's pulling things together, categorizing some things, that are not something that you might have seen on your own."
"I really can't talk enough about the team."
"Ease of use is pretty good as is the standardization of not actually having to have my own natural learning algorithms, just to use the Watson APIs."
"What impressed me more about Watson is that it is easy to use it, not for the technical people, but for business people."
"I have found the auto-generated document very useful as well as the main keywords that are highlighted, which are used for the search functionality within IBM Watson Explorer."
"Previously we'd have a set of health and safety analysts who would be the key focal points for doing work to understand health and safety risks; so a very small number of people, but through WEX and through our Watson HSEQ solution, we've managed to get engagement across at least one-third of our workforce, so over 1,300 people, and a 25% reduction in health and safety incidents."
"If you have the budget, go for it; it’s the best money can get you."
"The dashboards are great."
"It's intuitive and highly mature."
"Gradual scalability from simple to complex situations"
"The extremely intuitive and user-friendly UI helps naive users easily click and connect, drag and drop, and build fantastic visualizations."
"The most valuable feature is the interface, which is user-friendly and intuitive."
"It is a nice solution, the vendor should listen to users and customers."
"You are able to see and follow trends."
 

Cons

"I think we'll get it to a 10, but I think at the moment it's got to be a good eight or nine out of 10 at least."
"Sometimes the service stops."
"Stability is actually one of the areas that could use improvement. Setting it up is always tough. Setting Explorer requires experts, but also the underlying platform is not that stable. So it really needs a good expert to keep it running."
"No, it's not yet stable."
"We haven't used it in production yet so I can't answer this."
"It is a little bit tricky to get used to the workflow of knowing how to train Watson, what can be provided, what can't be, how to provide it, how to import, export, and what it means every time you have to add a new dictionary or something of the like."
"Much of IBM operates this way, where they have sets of tools that are in the middleware space, and it becomes the customer's responsibility or the business partner's responsibility to develop full solutions that take advantage of that middleware. I think IBM's finding itself in that spot with Watson-related technologies as well, where the capabilities to do really interesting and useful things for customers is there, but somebody still has to build it. Is that going to be the customer? Are they going to be willing to take on that responsibility themselves"
"I would say, give some kind of a community edition, a free edition. A lot of companies do, even Amazon gives you some kind of trial and error opportunities. If they could provide something like that, it would be good."
"It would be nice if we could export more raw data. Currently, there is a limit as to how much data you can export."
"From a customer's point of view, I have noted that after the acquisition by Salesforce, the customer service for Tableau has declined significantly."
"Delivering analytics via emails on enterprise scale is difficult."
"From the developer perspective, the data connection handling the target data set is what most needs to be improved."
"Calculated fields are relatively simple and may leave a user wanting."
"Many things have to be improved in Tableau. Right now, we make the calculation, and then we get that information. It would be better if business users could do that. I would ask the people at Tableau to provide that option to business users to get that information in one click. It would be better if they automated some calculations. There should be more automation in Tableau. However, there are many things in automation mode, but it is very limited at the moment. We need automation for people who do not know much about Tableau. It would also be better if there were good community support like in Alteryx."
"Tableau's data modeling, mining, and AI library features need improvement."
"While noted that the product is specifically designed for visualization, it would be the perfect tool if it had more ETL features."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive."
"Paying for users you never setup or buying expensive desktop licenses for users who can solve their users with web editing on the server are the two biggest expenses."
"Pricing is not bad. It's competitive."
"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 is an expensive solution."
"I like the payment model. For the people who need to create, they buy their licenses. Everyone else can use the free Tableau Viewer. This is much better than some of the competitor products, which require full licences for everything."
"For the use and the capability of the software, it's $70 per month, and that is quite inexpensive."
"We are on an annual license which costs us $1,400 which is very expensive. Microsft BI is less expensive."
"The licensing model of Tableau has changed since we initially purchased it three years ago and it is more complicated, and I have found it to be more expensive. They have lost market shares to Microsoft BI. My company will probably change solutions this year because of the increased pricing model."
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Comparison Review

it_user79932 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager - BI Head with 5,001-10,000 employees
Feb 4, 2015
Comparison of SAP BO, Tableau, QlikView, Cognos, Microsoft, OBIEE and Pentaho
1. SAP BO/BI Enterprise scalability Security Ease of use Semantic layer 2. Tableau Visualization Data discovery Turnaround time 3. IBM Cognos Enterprise scalability Security In-memory feature 4. MS BI - Flexibility 5. Pentaho - Open source but still enterprise grade 6. QlikView Data…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
15%
Healthcare Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Performing Arts
10%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business117
Midsize Enterprise67
Large Enterprise185
 

Questions from the Community

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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 Sense, Power BI, OBIEE, Tableau, etc. I have recently started using Cognos Enter...
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 been working on and off Tableau for about a year, but getting to work on it consta...
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. This relatively short amount of time can make all the difference for companies ...
 

Also Known As

IBM WEX
Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

RIMAC, Westpac New Zealand, Toyota Financial Services, Swiss Re, Akershus University Hospital, Korean Air Lines, Mizuho Bank, Honda
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 Knime, IBM, Weka and others in Data Mining. Updated: September 2026.
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