Databox vs. IBM Cognos Analytics

Databox is fantastic for companies or agencies that regularly report on a variety of metrics from multiple data sources. It's ideal for any company that uses a variety of different tools (as long as Databox integrates with them). It's particularly good for HubSpot agencies and companies that use HubSpot. It's maybe not necessary for companies that only use one tool or don't do reporting.

Incentivized

IBM Cognos Analytics has great scheduling capabilities. A single report can be parameterized (e.g., “Store Manager ID”) and burst to thousands of recipients with their slice of data.IBM Cognos Analytics is a good fit for highly complex, multi-level calculations which can be handled by Report Studio. For example Monthly balance sheet that requires multi step calculation

Incentivized

• Create dashboards from a variety of data sources.
• Set & track goals based on the data and metrics provided.
• Send alerts and scorecard updates to Slack and email automatically.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Some types of data can only be reported on for 1-2 months back. Unless I'm misunderstanding the function of the software this seems really weird. I can't figure out how to report on Activities more than 2 months ago

Incentivized

• IBM Cognos Analytics enables customer data segmentation, which is essential for marketing, improving and streamlining purchasing behavior and preferences. This helps companies create more targeted and effective marketing campaigns.
• Our clients Through data analysis, we can identify and observe trends in the behavior of other clients, allowing us to anticipate needs and adjust strategies to avoid consequences.

Incentivized

It took my BI team one year to become productive at developing useful content on the IBM Cognos platform. After this year, the reports being developed for a client were stale and no longer relative to the ever changing needs of the business client. Given the same opportunity, I would select a platform that allows the team to quickly produce BI content. Fail fast and recover quickly!

Databox is an intuitive, well-designed platform that can be used by non-technical marketers. It is easy to learn, and while set up takes time, usability is high and the team has enjoyed creating custom dashboards and clients have also given us great feedback regarding its usability and value. While other BI tools are much more complex to navigate, Databox is a breeze.

Incentivized

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.

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

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.

I have really enjoyed using Databox and have seen the value of it in many ways. They also continue to improve the functions of it and grow their integrations and templates. I look forward to continuing to use Databox in the future, potentially even finding ways to incorporate it into other departments to help them with reporting as well.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

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

The implementation was handled very well. The initial implementation exposed a lot of disagreement between our campuses and departments as to how we define data. This was not entirely unexpected, but I thought that we did a nice job as a team to work through some of these challenges.

While HubSpot is where we store our information and utilize the systems, the reporting wasn't deep enough and it didn't include the entire website since it is hosted elsewhere. So I started looking at options, and Databox came as a recommendation so I checked it out and haven't turned back. I didn't evaluate any other products because Databox met our need and we were able to get started right away.

Incentivized

IBM Cognos Analytics is robust in terms of reporting, governance and scheduling while Power BI excels in use, interactivity and visuals. In nutshell, IBM Cognos Analytics has edge over Power BI for enterprise grade , structured reporting needs.

Incentivized

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.

• It has helped us to show our value to clients
• Easily digestible dashboards make it easy to understand what you're looking at

Incentivized

• The platform can be pretty pricey.
• Convoluted contracts and they fine you for any breach during audits.
• Things are changed between releases without any warning and break.
• It is second to none at being able to customize list and crosstab type reports.
• You can easily set up a report to be emailed out every day and even have it export the report to a shared folder.
• On-prem environments can be scaled up pretty much as much as you would like.

Incentivized