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IBM Cognos Analytics vs. OpenText Magellan vs. Cyfe, by Traject

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    IBM Cognos Analytics

    Score7.7 out of 10
    N/AIBM 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.

    $11.25

    per month per user

    OpenText Magellan

    Score9 out of 10
    N/AOpenText Magellan Analytics Suite leverages a comprehensive set of data analytics software to identify patterns, relationships and trends through data visualizations and interactive dashboards.N/A

    Cyfe

    Score4 out of 10
    N/ACyfe is all-in-one dashboard software for analyzing data from online services like Google Analytics, Salesforce, AdSense, MailChimp, Amazon, Facebook, etc, from Traject.

    $29

    per month

    Pricing
    IBM Cognos AnalyticsOpenText MagellanCyfe
    Editions & Modules
    On Demand - Standard
    USD 11.25
    per month per user
    On Demand - Premium
    USD 44.90
    per month per user
    No answers on this topic
    Starter
    $29
    per month
    Standard
    $39
    per month
    Pro
    $65
    per month
    Premier
    $119
    per month
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    IBM Cognos AnalyticsOpenText MagellanCyfe
    Free Trial
    YesNoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesNoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details———
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    IBM Cognos AnalyticsOpenText MagellanCyfe
    Considered Multiple Products
    IBM
    No answer on this topic
    OpenText
    No answer on this topic
    Traject
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    97%
    Would buy again
    93 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    94%
    Delivers good value for the price
    79 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    96%
    Happy with the feature set
    92 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    93%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    55 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    96%
    Implementation went as expected
    65 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Features
    IBM Cognos AnalyticsOpenText MagellanCyfe
    BI Standard Reporting
    Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of IBM Cognos Analytics and OpenText Magellan and Cyfe, by Traject
    Feature
    IBM Cognos Analytics
    7.7
    139 Ratings
    6% below category average
    OpenText Magellan
    7.0
    2 Ratings
    15% below category average
    Cyfe, by Traject
    6.6
    28 Ratings
    21% below category average
    Pixel Perfect reports7.6130 Ratings00 Ratings6.817 Ratings
    Customizable dashboards8.0137 Ratings7.02 Ratings4.028 Ratings
    Report Formatting Templates7.5132 Ratings7.01 Ratings9.120 Ratings
    Ad-hoc Reporting
    Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of IBM Cognos Analytics and OpenText Magellan and Cyfe, by Traject
    Feature
    IBM Cognos Analytics
    7.9
    139 Ratings
    1% below category average
    OpenText Magellan
    8.3
    3 Ratings
    4% above category average
    Cyfe, by Traject
    7.2
    26 Ratings
    11% below category average
    Drill-down analysis7.4137 Ratings8.03 Ratings8.715 Ratings
    Formatting capabilities8.3140 Ratings8.03 Ratings8.120 Ratings
    Integration with R or other statistical packages7.397 Ratings9.01 Ratings10.09 Ratings
    Report sharing and collaboration8.6134 Ratings8.02 Ratings2.026 Ratings
    Report Output and Scheduling
    Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of IBM Cognos Analytics and OpenText Magellan and Cyfe, by Traject
    Feature
    IBM Cognos Analytics
    9.2
    137 Ratings
    11% above category average
    OpenText Magellan
    8.3
    2 Ratings
    1% above category average
    Cyfe, by Traject
    5.0
    23 Ratings
    49% below category average
    Publish to Web9.837 Ratings8.02 Ratings4.015 Ratings
    Publish to PDF8.3133 Ratings8.02 Ratings4.021 Ratings
    Report Versioning9.834 Ratings9.02 Ratings6.89 Ratings
    Report Delivery Scheduling8.2135 Ratings8.02 Ratings1.017 Ratings
    Delivery to Remote Servers9.918 Ratings00 Ratings9.04 Ratings
    Data Discovery and Visualization
    Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of IBM Cognos Analytics and OpenText Magellan and Cyfe, by Traject
    Feature
    IBM Cognos Analytics
    7.4
    125 Ratings
    8% below category average
    OpenText Magellan
    8.0
    1 Ratings
    0% above category average
    Cyfe, by Traject
    7.2
    19 Ratings
    10% below category average
    Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)7.9122 Ratings9.01 Ratings3.018 Ratings
    Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization8.0115 Ratings00 Ratings8.614 Ratings
    Predictive Analytics6.7111 Ratings7.01 Ratings10.08 Ratings
    Pattern Recognition and Data Mining6.948 Ratings00 Ratings00 Ratings
    Access Control and Security
    Comparison of Access Control and Security features of IBM Cognos Analytics and OpenText Magellan and Cyfe, by Traject
    Feature
    IBM Cognos Analytics
    7.8
    131 Ratings
    8% below category average
    OpenText Magellan
    9.0
    2 Ratings
    6% above category average
    Cyfe, by Traject
    7.1
    22 Ratings
    18% below category average
    Multi-User Support (named login)7.5130 Ratings00 Ratings10.020 Ratings
    Role-Based Security Model7.5128 Ratings9.02 Ratings6.314 Ratings
    Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)7.4128 Ratings9.02 Ratings8.416 Ratings
    Report-Level Access Control8.258 Ratings00 Ratings1.01 Ratings
    Single Sign-On (SSO)8.6112 Ratings9.02 Ratings9.76 Ratings
    Mobile Capabilities
    Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of IBM Cognos Analytics and OpenText Magellan and Cyfe, by Traject
    Feature
    IBM Cognos Analytics
    6.3
    109 Ratings
    21% below category average
    OpenText Magellan
    7.0
    2 Ratings
    10% below category average
    Cyfe, by Traject
    9.3
    19 Ratings
    18% above category average
    Responsive Design for Web Access6.8104 Ratings7.02 Ratings9.418 Ratings
    Mobile Application6.390 Ratings00 Ratings10.05 Ratings
    Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile6.696 Ratings7.02 Ratings7.713 Ratings
    Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
    Comparison of Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding features of IBM Cognos Analytics and OpenText Magellan and Cyfe, by Traject
    Feature
    IBM Cognos Analytics
    9.2
    87 Ratings
    17% above category average
    OpenText Magellan
    6.2
    1 Ratings
    22% below category average
    Cyfe, by Traject
    7.0
    7 Ratings
    10% below category average
    REST API7.683 Ratings5.01 Ratings8.64 Ratings
    Javascript API7.779 Ratings9.01 Ratings10.02 Ratings
    iFrames9.912 Ratings00 Ratings2.05 Ratings
    Java API10.013 Ratings5.01 Ratings10.02 Ratings
    Themeable User Interface (UI)9.915 Ratings7.01 Ratings5.94 Ratings
    Customizable Platform (Open Source)9.99 Ratings5.01 Ratings5.83 Ratings
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    IBM Cognos AnalyticsOpenText MagellanCyfe
    Small Businesses
    Cyfe
    Score4 out of 10
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    Score4 out of 10
    Excel4apps
    Score8.6 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Qlik Cloud Analytics (Qlik Sense)
    Score8.1 out of 10
    Qlik Cloud Analytics (Qlik Sense)
    Score8.1 out of 10
    Qlik Cloud Analytics (Qlik Sense)
    Score8.1 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Jaspersoft Community Edition
    Score7 out of 10
    Jaspersoft Community Edition
    Score7 out of 10
    Jaspersoft Community Edition
    Score7 out of 10
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    User Ratings
    IBM Cognos AnalyticsOpenText MagellanCyfe
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.0
    (159 ratings)
    9.0
    (11 ratings)
    8.0
    (29 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.4
    (31 ratings)
    3.9
    (9 ratings)
    9.4
    (9 ratings)
    Usability
    7.3
    (10 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    7.0
    (3 ratings)
    Availability
    8.6
    (4 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Performance
    9.0
    (5 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    1.0
    (9 ratings)
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    8.7
    (4 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Online Training
    8.0
    (4 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    7.0
    (7 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Configurability
    7.0
    (3 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Data Sharing and Collaboration
    8.6
    (40 ratings)
    9.0
    (8 ratings)
    9.1
    (27 ratings)
    Data Sources
    8.3
    (40 ratings)
    8.0
    (8 ratings)
    8.3
    (27 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    5.5
    (6 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    6.4
    (5 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    IBM Cognos AnalyticsOpenText MagellanCyfe
    Likelihood to Recommend
    IBM
    In our environment, we used to use a reporting tool called Crystal Reports and we replaced this tool with Cognos. I would recommend this switch for any one who's using a report tool that can be replaced with Cognos. This eliminates any JDBC or ODBC connections and User setups within any databases which was needed so the users can gain access to the report. Cognos makes logging in and fetching any report much easier.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    OpenText
    If you do not have a large budget and are a large organization, I would steer clear of Actuate. If you are looking to do very complex washboarding, I would not use them. Your developers have to be very skilled to work with this. Plan to bring in consultants if necessary to help your process. Adhoc reporting is weak. If your pricing is user based and you expand, this could be very expensive.
    Read full review
    Traject
    Cyfe might be for you if you are looking for a cost-effective way to display all of your marketing metrics in one place. If you are looking for a detailed, fine-tuned, niche, or extremely specific metrics, this might not be the best solution. Cyfe is good for a general health check-up of marketing, but not a finely tuned examination.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    IBM
    • Enterprise reporting - Create, customise, and run reports on sales trends, consumer sentiment, etc.
    • Dashboard creation and data exploration & analysis - Using drag and drop feature to create ad-hoc visualisation. Additionally, using AI powered natural language query feature for data analysis and dashboard input (formation of pie, bar, line charts). It's useful for no-technical person to put queries around the spreadsheet data to get quick answers.
    • Building insights for accurate decision making - Package reports with data backed insights for stakeholders in pdf, and Excel format to support business ad-hoc cases, forecasting and strategic recommendations on relevant asks.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    OpenText
    • The report outputs can vary across different types such as HTML, PDF, and Excel
    • Their open source offering is very sufficient
    • There are great boards and blogs for developers and engineers to expand and use their features.
    • The people from the company that I've worked with are professional and courteous.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Traject
    • Has preset metric groups that pull similar stats together in one "bucket" saving you the time of setting up each stat-line one by one
    • Allows you to easily adjust the timeframe for what stats you want to see, so you can find YOY stats or just last month's stats rather quickly
    • Colored visualizations of stats make it easy to notice when campaigns are taking off
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    IBM
    • 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
    Read full review
    OpenText
    • The documentation on all the available features, but most importantly on the scripting side, can be improved
    • The standard look & feel of some basic options, like parameter selection or sorting and filtering, looks dated and can't be customized
    • The server portal needs to provide better tools
    • More integration is needed with other OpenText products
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Traject
    • I'd love to see additional functionality to customize colors. The light/dark option is very nice, but a little more flexibility in the colors would go a long way, especially if it was possible at the dashboard level rather than just the account level. Along the same lines, being able to customize the charts a little more, for example being able to show an x-axis on single data type graphs, could make them easier to read in some cases.
    • Being able to choose to report on converted clicks or conversions in AdWords would be helpful.
    • Needs the ability to show the date range on the shared URL dashboards. Would be even better if the date range was adjustable on that view, too.
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    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.
    Read full review
    OpenText
    I am no longer working for the company that was using Actuate but I believe they would continue to use it because the stitching costs would be to high. It would require a complete rewrite of the reports and the never version of Actuate (BIRT) even required an almost complete report rewrite
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Traject
    It has become a part of our internal tools so unless a competitor comes out with similar functionality as a similar price point it is unlikely that we would not renew. One area that would cause us not to renew would be if a competing service came out with more third-party integrations that match our needs. Price at this point is no longer an issue as it would allow us to automate a somewhat manual process that we have now connecting Cyfe widgets to Google Sheets.
    Read full review
    Usability
    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.
    Read full review
    OpenText
    It is quite intuitive to use. It is fit specifically for doing sentiment, emotion, and intention analysis as well as text classification and text summarization. I would have given 10 if it is fit for the purpose of doing image processing and analysis as well. There is a huge market to analyze video and image data.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Traject
    I gave it a rating of 7 because it does a good job at what it does, but there are missing that are missing which I would have benefited from. For instance, if I was able to drill down more on the specific metrics I was able to see, that would have been helpful.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    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
    Read full review
    OpenText
    No answers on this topic
    Traject
    No answers on this topic
    Performance
    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.
    Read full review
    OpenText
    No answers on this topic
    Traject
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    OpenText
    Always there on the front and backend for us and the client.
    Read full review
    Traject
    Because I had a very minor question and I was able to speak directly to the founder through LinkedIn and through email. I know that as they grow this may not always be an option but the fact that he made himself available to answer my questions said a lot about his passion for the product.
    Read full review
    In-Person Training
    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.
    Read full review
    OpenText
    No answers on this topic
    Traject
    No answers on this topic
    Online Training
    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
    Read full review
    OpenText
    No answers on this topic
    Traject
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation Rating
    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.
    Read full review
    OpenText
    No answers on this topic
    Traject
    Cyfe is a 15 minutes implementation, then some time to get your data sources created. This is an easy one person job that will not result in down time or unnecessary wasted man hours.
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    IBM
    Power BI is stronger for quick ad-hoc analysis and dashboards, but IBM Cognos Analytics is better when consistency, precision, and mass distribution matter. Tableau is best for interactive analysis, while IBM Cognos Analytics is better for standardized, repeatable enterprise reporting. Sigma shines for customizable dashboards and drill-down analysis while IBM Cognos Analytics holds an edge in data discovery and visualization.
    Incentivized
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    OpenText
    It is vastly superior to these in many ways, for complex reporting it is a much more sophisticated solution. Visualizations are very good. Javascript extensibility is very powerful, others don't support this or as well. Pentaho and MS are both OLAP oriented. Pentaho is moving more toward big data, which was not our primary focus. Others are stuck in the Crystal Reports Band metaphor.
    Read full review
    Traject
    The Salesforce dashboard is comparably flexible and intuitive, but designed more to its internal CRM focus. SumAll shares the social media dashboard capabilities, but lacks all others. Its interesting feature is side-by-side graph analysis for cross-channel performance. Cyfe might borrow from SumAll's default weekly email summary of performance from the dashboard, but implementation could be too complex. Nuvi dashboard is exclusively for social media marketing, but lacks Cyfe's flexibility for third party integration and window customization settings.
    Read full review
    Scalability
    IBM
    We rate IBM Cognos Analytics a 9 out of 10 for overall scalability. The platform handles large numbers of users, reports, and analytical workloads very reliably. We have experienced strong performance even in demanding enterprise environments with substantial data volumes. Its architecture provides sufficient flexibility to scale resources according to demand, making it well suited for large, business-critical deployments.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    OpenText
    No answers on this topic
    Traject
    No answers on this topic
    Return on Investment
    IBM
    • 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
    Read full review
    OpenText
    • Actuate can handle 50 to 60 sub reports inside a report very well.
    • Dynamically creating the datasource, chart, graph, reports are the main advantages. We can do any level of drilling, and can create a performance matrix dashboard efficiently.
    Read full review
    Traject
    • Cyfe allows us to provide real time data to our clients
    • Cyfe allows us to provide detailed analytics to our clients showing actual results
    • Cyfe reduced our need to provide monthly "reports" to our marketing clients
    • Cyfe allows us to have better situational awareness and know what is going on throughout our multiple organizations
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    IBM Cognos Analytics Screenshots

    Product screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshot

    OpenText Magellan Screenshots

    Screenshot of A Magellan BI & Reporting dashboard that an individual can interact with and personalize to their needs, such as changing chart types or computations.Screenshot of Magellan Data Discovery provides a Smart User Interface, designed to equip new users and users seeking a more streamlined set of features for insightsScreenshot of Magellan Data Discovery provides an Advanced User Interface that allows data analytics pros to leverage its breadth of sophisticated capabilities for insightsScreenshot of Magellan Text Mining insights can be displayed within easy-to-use dashboards.Screenshot of Data scientists can create visualizations within the Magellan Notebook and see it dynamically update as they write changes to it.