Databricks Data Intelligence Platform vs. IBM Cognos Analytics

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Databricks Data Intelligence Platform
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Databricks in San Francisco offers the Databricks Lakehouse Platform (formerly the Unified Analytics Platform), a data science platform and Apache Spark cluster manager. The Databricks Unified Data Service aims to provide a reliable and scalable platform for data pipelines, data lakes, and data platforms. Users can manage full data journey, to ingest, process, store, and expose data throughout an organization. Its Data Science Workspace is a collaborative environment for practitioners to run…
$0.07
Per DBU
IBM Cognos Analytics
Score 7.7 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
Databricks Data Intelligence PlatformIBM Cognos Analytics
Editions & Modules
Standard
$0.07
Per DBU
Premium
$0.10
Per DBU
Enterprise
$0.13
Per DBU
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
Databricks Data Intelligence PlatformIBM Cognos Analytics
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Databricks Data Intelligence PlatformIBM Cognos Analytics
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Databricks Data Intelligence PlatformIBM Cognos Analytics
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Databricks Data Intelligence Platform
-
Ratings
IBM Cognos Analytics
7.2
106 Ratings
12% below category average
Pixel Perfect reports00 Ratings7.596 Ratings
Customizable dashboards00 Ratings7.3104 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates00 Ratings6.8101 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Databricks Data Intelligence Platform
-
Ratings
IBM Cognos Analytics
7.5
108 Ratings
7% below category average
Drill-down analysis00 Ratings7.6106 Ratings
Formatting capabilities00 Ratings7.4107 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages00 Ratings7.474 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration00 Ratings7.7103 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Databricks Data Intelligence Platform
-
Ratings
IBM Cognos Analytics
7.9
107 Ratings
5% below category average
Publish to Web00 Ratings8.327 Ratings
Publish to PDF00 Ratings7.5101 Ratings
Report Versioning00 Ratings8.626 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling00 Ratings7.1104 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
Databricks Data Intelligence Platform
-
Ratings
IBM Cognos Analytics
7.4
98 Ratings
7% below category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)00 Ratings7.393 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization00 Ratings7.689 Ratings
Predictive Analytics00 Ratings7.286 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining00 Ratings7.324 Ratings
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
Databricks Data Intelligence Platform
-
Ratings
IBM Cognos Analytics
7.6
103 Ratings
11% 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 Ratings6.999 Ratings
Report-Level Access Control00 Ratings7.628 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)00 Ratings7.882 Ratings
Mobile Capabilities
Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of Product A and Product B
Databricks Data Intelligence Platform
-
Ratings
IBM Cognos Analytics
7.2
84 Ratings
9% below category average
Responsive Design for Web Access00 Ratings7.478 Ratings
Mobile Application00 Ratings7.168 Ratings
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile00 Ratings8.574 Ratings
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
Comparison of Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding features of Product A and Product B
Databricks Data Intelligence Platform
-
Ratings
IBM Cognos Analytics
7.4
65 Ratings
5% below category average
REST API00 Ratings6.962 Ratings
Javascript API00 Ratings7.860 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
Best Alternatives
Databricks Data Intelligence PlatformIBM Cognos Analytics
Small Businesses

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Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
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Score 9.1 out of 10
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Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises
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Score 9.1 out of 10
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Score 9.7 out of 10
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User Ratings
Databricks Data Intelligence PlatformIBM Cognos Analytics
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(18 ratings)
7.4
(131 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.4
(27 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(4 ratings)
8.1
(8 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
8.6
(4 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(5 ratings)
Support Rating
8.7
(2 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)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
6.2
(4 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(3 ratings)
Professional Services
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Databricks Data Intelligence PlatformIBM Cognos Analytics
Likelihood to Recommend
Databricks
Medium to Large data throughput shops will benefit the most from Databricks Spark processing. Smaller use cases may find the barrier to entry a bit too high for casual use cases. Some of the overhead to kicking off a Spark compute job can actually lead to your workloads taking longer, but past a certain point the performance returns cannot be beat.
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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
Databricks
  • Process raw data in One Lake (S3) env to relational tables and views
  • Share notebooks with our business analysts so that they can use the queries and generate value out of the data
  • Try out PySpark and Spark SQL queries on raw data before using them in our Spark jobs
  • Modern day ETL operations made easy using Databricks. Provide access mechanism for different set of customers
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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
Databricks
  • Connect my local code in Visual code to my Databricks Lakehouse Platform cluster so I can run the code on the cluster. The old databricks-connect approach has many bugs and is hard to set up. The new Databricks Lakehouse Platform extension on Visual Code, doesn't allow the developers to debug their code line by line (only we can run the code).
  • Maybe have a specific Databricks Lakehouse Platform IDE that can be used by Databricks Lakehouse Platform users to develop locally.
  • Visualization in MLFLOW experiment can be enhanced
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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
Databricks
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
Databricks
Because it is an amazing platform for designing experiments and delivering a deep dive analysis that requires execution of highly complex queries, as well as it allows to share the information and insights across the company with their shared workspaces, while keeping it secured.

in terms of graph generation and interaction it could improve their UI and UX
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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
Databricks
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
Databricks
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
Databricks
One of the best customer and technology support that I have ever experienced in my career. You pay for what you get and you get the Rolls Royce. It reminds me of the customer support of SAS in the 2000s when the tools were reaching some limits and their engineer wanted to know more about what we were doing, long before "data science" was even a name. Databricks truly embraces the partnership with their customer and help them on any given challenge.
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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
Databricks
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
Databricks
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
Databricks
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
Databricks
The most important differentiating factor for Databricks Lakehouse Platform from these other platforms is support for ACID transactions and the time travel feature. Also, native integration with managed MLflow is a plus. EMR, Cloudera, and Hortonworks are not as optimized when it comes to Spark Job Execution. Other platforms need to be self-managed, which is another huge hassle.
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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
Databricks
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
Databricks
  • The ability to spin up a BIG Data platform with little infrastructure overhead allows us to focus on business value not admin
  • DB has the ability to terminate/time out instances which helps manage cost.
  • The ability to quickly access typical hard to build data scenarios easily is a strength.
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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

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.