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IBM Watson Explorer vs Tableau Enterprise comparison

 

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 3.3%, up 1.1% compared to last year.
Tableau Enterprise, on the other hand, focuses on BI (Business Intelligence) Tools, holds 5.8% mindshare, down 16.4% since last year.
Data Mining Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Watson Explorer3.3%
IBM SPSS Statistics16.2%
IBM SPSS Modeler16.0%
Other64.5%
Data Mining
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Tableau Enterprise5.8%
Microsoft Power BI7.5%
Amazon QuickSight3.2%
Other83.5%
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

"IBM has been working with Bradesco since 1968, I think, and the support is very good, with a team of 10 IBM employees working every day, 24 hours, inside the bank in Sao Paolo."
"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."
"Implementing the solution really helped with manual labor, it takes care of a lot of FT work."
"I really can't talk enough about the team."
"We take natural language that was happening in our repositories and our application and then feed it to the Watson APIs. We receive JSON payloads as an API response to get cognitive feedback from the repository data."
"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."
"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."
"The valuable feature of Watson Explorer for us is data entities, and being able to see hidden insights from within unstructured data."
"The most valuable feature is the aggregation function."
"Valuable features include the various “Show Me” graph options; the ability to do forecasting (which is an area that Tableau needs to continue growing its modeling capabilities); and the immediate responsiveness to adding dimensions/measures and their effect on the visualization."
"Tableau has provided visibility into patterns which I had not previously observed."
"When you consider how much time is wasted on DB work, including visualization, the license fee is a small issue."
"The speed with which it is possible to explore data is, for me, the best thing about Tableau, as it is extremely easy to drill into data, which in turn shortens the time from having raw data to having useful, actionable insights."
"It’s good for quick visualization and being able to quickly consume unstructured data to play around with."
"The solution is configurable and flexible, we can customize the dashboards and configure the interface the way that we want, and the data can be manipulated and arranged in different ways, such as columns."
"Tableau is extremely good at dashboard creation, providing clear and concise visual presentations."
 

Cons

"Small businesses will probably have a little harder time getting into it, just because of the amount of resources that they have available, both financial and time, but it really is a solution that should work for them."
"More cognitive feedback would be good. The natural language analysis is great, the sentiment analyzers are great. But I would just like to see more... innovation done with the Watson platform."
"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."
"We haven't used it in production yet so I can't answer this."
"Sometimes the service stops."
"The solution is expensive."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Lacks customization in some areas."
"Version-specific work did not automatically version up with the upgrade. Since the version change occurred during the course and the majority of us had never used Tableau before, this static versioning for the projects caused some anxiety and some rework."
"Technical support can sometime take a while to respond, but they are very helpful and friendly."
"I find data prepping in Tableau challenging to understand, perhaps because I am new to it. It sometimes requires extensive investigation to determine why the data does not appear correctly."
"The product's features for cloud integration need improvement."
"It needs to allow for more complexity in data joins and creation."
"The extraction, transformation and loading of data in Tableau takes a lot of time and we do not have confidence that Tableau is showing all the data we need."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive."
"In Korea, the tool's pricing depends on the scale of usage. For instance, it's reasonable for a department with fewer than 50 users to adopt Tableau, like sales. However, the pricing becomes an issue when considering an enterprise solution for a larger user base, say 10,000 people."
"The cost of the solution should be improved."
"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."
"The solution is very expensive. If you have many users then it is going to cost your company a lot of money."
"The product's price is relatively inexpensive and manageable for enterprise-level companies."
"Be careful with the Tableau Viewer's licenses, and stay with the right number of users."
"The pricing for Tableau is the same as the other products in the market."
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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%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Performing Arts
10%
Healthcare Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Construction 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: June 2026.
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