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
OneStream
Score 8.5 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
OneStream Software provides a finance platform that aims to reduce the complexity of financial operations. OneStream™ supports finance by unifying corporate performance management (CPM) processes such as planning, financial close & consolidation, reporting, and analytics through a single, extensible solution. The vendor states their goal is to empower the enterprise with financial and operational insights to support faster and more informed decision-making. It is a cloud platform designed to…
N/A
Pricing
IBM Cognos Analytics
OneStream
Editions & Modules
On Demand - Standard
$10.00
per month per user
On Demand - Premium
$40.00
per month per user
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM Cognos Analytics
OneStream
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
Required
Additional Details
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The solution is only for Enterprises. Pricing for software is based on number of total users and one user gets all software functionality. Implementation would be based on what business problem or problems the solution will be used to solve, such as financial consolidation and reporting or planning or account reconciliations, etc.
OneStream is the only one that seamlessly integrates close/consolidation with budget and planning in one tool. It integrates easily with ERPs and supports full financial statement AND management reporting
OneStream combines functionality that is normally spread over multiple solutions with other vendors, and provides an integration that previously could only be achieved via complicated technical structures to integrate and combine solutions for actual reporting and planning on …
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).
Financial Planning / Forecasting, People Planning, and Financial Close and Consolidation are well suite while we are still evaluating GL Account Reconciliations and other solutions available via the Solution Exchange. Overall, we believe OneStream is going to allow us to "get out of excel" and perform Global Consolidation in the system
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.
The Excel Add in is limited to only one application. Would be good to have the ability to pull from say Dev and Prod so side by side comparisons could be done
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.
Currently we are using OneStream with people 80 - 100 to load the PL, BS , Forecast budget and People Planning. OneStream give us more visibility on trend and way forward thinking. Thanks to OneStream for the tool which helps the business in growing way. Thinking of innovation OneStream is right path.
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.
Overall usability as an end-user is very easy. There are more people in the system getting information now than the prior platform used. People are gathering their information quicker as well. From an administrator standpoint, there are fewer glitches and issues than the prior platform. This is very good.
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.
OneStream support is focused on the infrastructure. Which means mainly when there issues with accessing to the system, they will be able to help. When the question is to much leaning towards functional it really becomes billable. The other issue is that the response time is not optimal. There is a lot of pingpong of messages and the time between the message can sometimes be long. Sometimes this result into a simple ticket to be taking days before it is closed.
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
onestream offers a range of training. I have attended a number of trainings. During the trainings a vast amount of information is discussed. The trainings also include exercises. The speed of the training is pretty high. When reviewing the training material afterwards, I found that the material is not complete as reference as it relies also very much on the verbal explanation and elaboration.
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.
OneStream is the overall clear winner against HFM. There are a few things HFM does better (a couple things in Smart View), but it just doesn't have as much capability. The single, integrated platform that OneStream is provides a massive upgrade from HFM.
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.
Customers have moved from multiple EPM systems as well as multiple EPM applications to OneStream.
Their ROI has been quite high as lesser admins are required, no need to move data back & forth, no need for an additional dashboarding / BI tool, once a user is on OneStream can leverage it for more than 50+ use cases at no additional license cost.
Automation, direct integration, scheduling, complex calculation capabilities, all help to further improve ROI and free up the time for the team to do value-adding tasks.
Last but not the least is the confidence on the numbers is much higher.
