Altair SmartSight vs. IBM Cognos Analytics

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Altair SmartSight
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Altair SmartSight (formerly Carriots Analytics) is a cloud data analytics platform for embedded, Big Data, and IoT applications. It provides secure and rapid free-form data visualization and exploration, scalable throughout the enterprise in real time.N/A
IBM Cognos Analytics
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
IBM Cognos is a full-featured business intelligence suite by IBM, designed for larger deployments. It comprises Query Studio, Reporting Studio, Analysis Studio and Event Studio, and Cognos Administration along with tools for Microsoft Office integration, full-text search, and dashboards.
$10
per month per user
Pricing
Altair SmartSightIBM Cognos Analytics
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
On Demand - Standard
$10.00
per month per user
On Demand - Standard
$10.60
per month per user
On Demand - Premium
$42.40
per month per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Altair SmartSightIBM Cognos Analytics
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Altair SmartSightIBM Cognos Analytics
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Altair SmartSightIBM Cognos Analytics
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Altair SmartSight
-
Ratings
IBM Cognos Analytics
7.3
106 Ratings
11% below category average
Pixel Perfect reports00 Ratings7.696 Ratings
Customizable dashboards00 Ratings7.4104 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates00 Ratings6.9101 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Altair SmartSight
-
Ratings
IBM Cognos Analytics
7.6
108 Ratings
6% below category average
Drill-down analysis00 Ratings7.6106 Ratings
Formatting capabilities00 Ratings7.5107 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages00 Ratings7.574 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration00 Ratings7.8103 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Altair SmartSight
-
Ratings
IBM Cognos Analytics
8.0
107 Ratings
4% below category average
Publish to Web00 Ratings8.327 Ratings
Publish to PDF00 Ratings7.7101 Ratings
Report Versioning00 Ratings8.626 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling00 Ratings7.2104 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers00 Ratings8.112 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Altair SmartSight
-
Ratings
IBM Cognos Analytics
7.5
98 Ratings
6% below category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)00 Ratings7.493 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization00 Ratings7.789 Ratings
Predictive Analytics00 Ratings7.486 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining00 Ratings7.424 Ratings
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
Altair SmartSight
-
Ratings
IBM Cognos Analytics
7.7
103 Ratings
10% below category average
Multi-User Support (named login)00 Ratings8.0100 Ratings
Role-Based Security Model00 Ratings7.999 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)00 Ratings7.199 Ratings
Report-Level Access Control00 Ratings7.628 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)00 Ratings7.982 Ratings
Mobile Capabilities
Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of Product A and Product B
Altair SmartSight
-
Ratings
IBM Cognos Analytics
7.2
84 Ratings
10% below category average
Responsive Design for Web Access00 Ratings7.578 Ratings
Mobile Application00 Ratings7.168 Ratings
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile00 Ratings8.474 Ratings
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
Comparison of Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding features of Product A and Product B
Altair SmartSight
-
Ratings
IBM Cognos Analytics
7.4
65 Ratings
6% below category average
REST API00 Ratings6.962 Ratings
Javascript API00 Ratings7.760 Ratings
iFrames00 Ratings8.39 Ratings
Java API00 Ratings6.911 Ratings
Themeable User Interface (UI)00 Ratings7.110 Ratings
Customizable Platform (Open Source)00 Ratings7.87 Ratings
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Altair SmartSightIBM Cognos Analytics
Small Businesses
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Score 8.8 out of 10
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Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
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Score 10.0 out of 10
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Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises
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Score 9.7 out of 10
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User Ratings
Altair SmartSightIBM Cognos Analytics
Likelihood to Recommend
8.4
(5 ratings)
7.5
(131 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.4
(27 ratings)
Usability
8.3
(5 ratings)
8.1
(8 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
8.6
(4 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(5 ratings)
Support Rating
8.7
(5 ratings)
10.0
(8 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.7
(4 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(4 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(7 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(3 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
6.3
(4 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(3 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Altair SmartSightIBM Cognos Analytics
Likelihood to Recommend
Altair Engineering, Inc.
As per my knowledge and Altair Product experience, It is really a good product that comes with multiple features like IoT, BigData, dashboards, and other things. I personally really enjoyed using the services provided by Altair. It is well suited for the organizations who don't spend much time setting up their own platform, maintenance, and much more because Altair not only provides the platform but they will care about your products with good customer support and maintenance. I only found a bit low in the case of machine learning and AI products because I have checked different products that provide these services with good accuracy.
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IBM
With the help of IBM Cognos, the sales division can analyze sales performance, sales trends in top-performing areas, etc. It also helps in financial planning, like forecasting, budgeting, reporting, and variance analysis. It also helps increase supply chain performance by analyzing it. It should be easy to use for small-scale data analysis. MS Excel is very useful for small-scale data analysis.
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Pros
Altair Engineering, Inc.
  • The global navigation bar with links to the library for easy access and management within the platform.
  • Simplified task viewer where we can find the profile, performance, help, resources and a link also to manage your account.
  • System administrators can define profiles for task execution.
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IBM
  • Data Visualization: Plenty of options exist for multiple use cases, and dashboards are easy to implement and customize.
  • Integration with IBM Watson: makes it easy to use Watson AI features (NLP etc.) on your data.
  • Its advanced analytics functionalities with powerful pattern detection/prediction models.
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Cons
Altair Engineering, Inc.
  • Integration with other systems could be better.
  • Ability to handle large amount of data.
  • Expertise services might be better.
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IBM
  • API integration is not upto the mark with very limited options.
  • Laptops get overheated when the tool is used from moderate to heavy use. Also, there is a lag in the tool times.
  • Licensing & Maintenance can go from cheap to expensive depending on the scope.
  • Lot of scope to improve the customer support & its not upto the industry standards.
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Likelihood to Renew
Altair Engineering, Inc.
No answers on this topic
IBM
For an existing solution, renewing licenses does provide a good return on investment. Additionally, while rolling out scorecards and dashboards with little adhoc capabilities, to end users, cognos is very easily scalable. It also allows to create a solution that has a mix of OLAP and relational data-sources, which is a limitation with other tools. Synchronizing with existing security setup is easy too.
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Usability
Altair Engineering, Inc.
Very user-friendly UI and visual representation is also good for the price offered. Good tool but lacks some advanced and AI-based insights. It has an edge over other tools for the price of this tool. It has some great potential and i would consider this in my top 5 when considering tools of this domain
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IBM
We have a strong user base (3500 users) that are highly utilizing this tool. Basic users are able to consume content within the applied security model. We have a set of advanced users that really push the limits of Cognos with Report and Query Studio. These users have created a lot of personal content and stored it in 'My Reports'. Users enjoy this flexibility.
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Reliability and Availability
Altair Engineering, Inc.
No answers on this topic
IBM
Reports can typically be viewed through any browser that can access the server, so the availability is ultimately up to what the company utilizing it is comfortable with allowing, though report development tends to be more picky about browsers and settings as mentioned above. It also has an optional iPad app and general mobile browsing support, but dashboards lack the mobile compatibility. What keeps it from getting a higher score is the desktop tools that are vital to the development process. The compatibility with only Windows when the server has a wide range of compatibility can be a real sore point for a company that outfits its employees exclusively with Mac or Linux machines. Of course, if they are planning on outsourcing the development anyways, it's a rather moot point
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Performance
Altair Engineering, Inc.
No answers on this topic
IBM
Overall no major complaints but it doesn't handle DMR (Dimensionally Modeled for Relational) very well. DMR modelling is a capability that IBM Cognos Framework Manager provides allowing you to specify dimensional information for relational metadata and allows for OLAP-style queries. However, the capability is not very efficient and, for example, if I'm using only 2 columns on a 20-column model, the software is not smart enough to exclude 18 columns and the query side gets progressively larger and larger until it's effectively unusable.
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Support Rating
Altair Engineering, Inc.
I only had one problem with the software, and the support system response was very quick.
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IBM
Why is their web application not working as fast as you think it should? They never know, and it is always a a bunch of shots in the dark to find out. Trying to download software from them is like trying to find a book at the library before computers were invented.
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In-Person Training
Altair Engineering, Inc.
No answers on this topic
IBM
Onsite training provided by IBM Cognos was effective and as expected. They did not perform training with our data which was a bit difficult for our end-users.
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Online Training
Altair Engineering, Inc.
No answers on this topic
IBM
The online courses they offer are thorough and presented in such a way that someone who isn't already familiar with the general design methodologies used in this field will be capable of making a good design. The training environments are provided as a fully self contained virtual machine with everything needed already to create the environments. We've had some persisting issues with the environments becoming unavailable, but support has been responsive when these issues arise and straightening them out for us
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Implementation Rating
Altair Engineering, Inc.
No answers on this topic
IBM
Make sure that any custom tables that you have, are built into your metadata packages. You can still access them via SQL queries in Cognos, but it is much easier to have them as a part of the available metadata packages.
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Alternatives Considered
Altair Engineering, Inc.
Altair smart sight stacks up against all the products mentioned above because it comes with a wide variety of applications and services like Big Data, IoT services, Embedded systems, cloud-based service, data visualization, Machine learning, dashboarding, and much more. I have used the other products like Logi Composer, Tableau CRM, and PowerBI but they only handle the specific use cases. So Because of that Altair Smartsight really provide a good and wide range of solution.
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IBM
Cognos Analytics provides wide range for reporting, data visualization, and self service analytics. Cognos has strong security and governance features. Sigma Computing is purely cloud native approach and has spreadsheet like interface and doesn't provide many customization options for reporting and dashboards. Cognos can smoothly integrate with IBM products and other third party data sources whereas Sigma Computing provides integration with cloud data warehouses and data lakes
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Scalability
Altair Engineering, Inc.
No answers on this topic
IBM
The Cognos architecture is well suited for scalability. However, the architecture must be designed with scalability in mind from day one of the implementation. We recently upgraded from 10.1 to 10.2.1 and took the opportunity to revamp our architecture. It is now poised for future growth and scalability.
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Return on Investment
Altair Engineering, Inc.
  • The workflow interface consists of the workflow canvas where we do our actual pipeline and workflow execution log, display information and each process.
  • You can use it to create a workflow and the available execution profiles in which to run them.
  • We currently have one session running for each workflow.
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IBM
  • Easier access to data and enhanced visualization models that allow the users to look at data in new and creative ways
  • More efficiency in creating Management reports that Management can use to make decisions
  • Enhanced collaboration: Rather than having 3-4 analysts work on individual reports they can come together and collaborate on one final product
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ScreenShots

Altair SmartSight Screenshots

Screenshot of Screenshot of

IBM Cognos Analytics Screenshots

Screenshot of a natural language query, used in IBM Cognos Analytics to get AI-powered insights from data.Screenshot of AI-generated insights and forecasts that can be added with just a click of a button.Screenshot of a dashboard that can be generated automatically using IBM Cognos Analytics by uploading or selecting data.Screenshot of an AI-generated dashboard from a spreadsheet that was just uploaded. This offers a great starting point for the creative process.Screenshot of where to import data to IBM Cognos Analytics from CSV files and spreadsheets. Users can connect to cloud or on-premises data sources, including SQL databases, Google BigQuery, Amazon, and Redshift.Screenshot of a sample operational dashboard of a coffee shop created using IBM Cognos Analytics.