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
Klipfolio
Score 8.5 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
Klipfolio PowerMetrics is a metric-centric business intelligence platform. Data teams are able to bring all of their data together and create a catalog of verified metrics that end users are able to explore and visualize using self-serve dashboards and reports.
Our first and most basic scenario was to automatize the creation and publication/sharing of business reports that used to be created manually by employees throughout our organization. Using Cognos for that first use case worked well. The advanced analytics functionalities we used on the aggregated data were also as expected. However, the user interface is not always intuitive, and there is a steep learning curve, so I would recommend Cognos only to large organizations where there is a need for the most advanced functionalities (AI analysis/prediction).
Using Klipfolio is one of the finest ways we can expand our business because it is so simple to use and always has new features that make it better. We also appreciate the excellent customer service they offer. There are several benefits to making this investment in your company's efficiency and profitability. We think it's worth the money.
Sometimes there might be performance issues when dealing with large and complex data.
Although IBM provides full documentation but sometimes it's difficult to find answers to questions and connect with their customer support.
It relies on external tools for data cleaning, transformation and also for some integration tasks. It can also improve on providing wider range of data sources for integration.
While Klipfolio covers so many of the bases, one area where I would like to see expansion would be offering additional design and graphics themes for even more customization.
Klipfolio has an extensive offering but might be even better if there were a way that we could integrate with some small to mid-sized CRM solutions for audience list segmentation and marketing integrations.
It would be interesting if Klipfolio could enable us to overlay the data learnings for cross-referencing of multiple client campaigns for comparative insights.
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.
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.
My initial impressions of the software have been extremely positive. There are YouTube tutorials that explain how to make klips. The intuitive design of the UI It appears that everything in this software has been thoroughly tested to create all the visualizations that can be imagined as well as the user input controls that allow users to have exactly the data they want to be displayed in seconds, considering the various functions and formulas available in the Excel integrations and the extensive list of other services that can be integrated.
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.
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.
It provides all the necessary information to be able to carry out the analysis of any type of business, to know how money is managed virtually, what to do to have greater visibility, in addition to being a platform that is always accessible and allows continuous and efficient work.
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
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.
In the past Management had used Excel and Workiva capabilities to create the reporting dashboards that were being used to make decisions. Since switching to IBM Cognos Analytics the Company has been much more efficient and decision making has been streamlined. IBM Cognos Analytics was chosen due to its reputation and data visualization capabilities and neither have been wrong.
These and many other BI tools are the most direct competitors. I only have experience with Klipfolio and Tableau. Tableau is definitely more capable, but much more difficult to learn and use. Klipfolio is simple and really packs a punch for its simplicity. I have yet to run into a major problem with it lacking a needed functionality.
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.
