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
Litmus
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
As a core component of an organization's marketing tech stack, Litmus allows users to create, personalize, test, review, and analyze every email sent.
$99
per month
Pricing
IBM Cognos Analytics
Litmus
Editions & Modules
On Demand - Standard
$10.00
per month per user
On Demand - Premium
$40.00
per month per user
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM Cognos Analytics
Litmus
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
Litmus offers different plan types to fit various needs, offering monthly and annual plans, as well as fully customizable Enterprise plans.
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).
It is nice to be able to double-check the HTML code easily. However, that being said, once we have the template structure and modules coded and rendered, we often do not feel that Litmus is as helpful because we have already verified that the HTML is functioning as intended.
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.
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.
It's offering me more than any other email proof software I've heard of! I also really appreciate how Litmus gives back to the email development community via their content creation. I want better marketing and marketing email in the world, and Litmus is working towards that goal. So, yeah, they're good folks with a good product!
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.
Litmus has integrations that make the software an integrated part of my work every day. Being able to test right within my email builder is just brilliant. Daily I also use the web interface to review analytics and spam testing. Overall it is one of the pieces of software I use daily without any complaints or issues.
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
We have never had a problem with Litmus being unavailable so I would say their availability is fantastic. There might have been one time years ago that the site was down briefly but it also might have been a server issue on my end. Either way, Litmus was back up and running in a very short time
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.
As with all technology, there are inevitably use-cases where you are unable to get to your original goal without some good old-fashioned experimenting. Some situations will (and are) more urgent which complicates an effective integration of a new process or a new team using an existing process but the "issues" are regularly resolved by re-starting the process specific to when Litmus is introduced to a project. If it doesn't come out the way you're anticipating, run it again and verify there is an issue before declaring all is lost
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.
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.
For more in-depth QA and personalization needs, Litmus is the way to go. I believe that Litmus should be used in conjunction with a product like Mailchimp or Constant Contact to support your email development efforts. I would not use any one of these by itself if you really want to create an end product that can provide the greatest ROI and use for your end consumer.
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.
With our enterprise account, scalability is not an issue. I have not yet seen or heard of significant issues with user access, API connections for integrations etc. This includes down time for "Scheduled Maintenance" as some providers call them, Litmus has the technology backing to support a global team with a 24-hour workday across regions
Litmus has positively helped us to be able to measure email performance metrics and provide stakeholders insights on what email content is resonating with clients
Litmus has helped us to ensure our emails are error free by providing us with an overview of whether each email meets the requirements for optimal email performance and delivery
