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
SAP Crystal
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
SAP Crystal is an analytics and reporting software solution for SMBs. SAP Crystal comprises Crystal Reports for pixel-perfect reporting, and SAP Crystal Server for automated distribution and self-service access to reports, dashboards and data exploration.
$295
per single user license
Pricing
IBM Cognos Analytics
SAP Crystal
Editions & Modules
On Demand - Standard
$10.00
per month per user
On Demand - Premium
$40.00
per month per user
Upgrade Version to SAP Crystal Reports 2020
$295
per single user license
SAP Crystal Reports 2020 64-Bit
$495
per single user license
SAP Crystal Reports 2016 32-Bit
$495
per single user license
SAP Crystal Server 2020 1 NUL
$869
per user license + first year maintenance to be added
SAP Crystal Server 2020 5 CAL
$8,744
5 concurrent users + first year maintenance to be added
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM Cognos Analytics
SAP Crystal
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
Optional
Additional Details
—
* SAP Crystal Reports 2020 Viewer allows you to view static data within a SAP Crystal Reports file.
* SAP Crystal Reports 2020 - Full version allows you to create powerful, richly formatted, and dynamic reports from virtually any data source, delivered in dozens of formats, in up to 28 languages. If you already have an older version of Crystal Reports, buy a license for SAP Crystal Reports 2020 - Upgrade at a discounted, upgrade price.
* SAP Crystal Server 2020, 1 NUL includes 1 license of: SAP Crystal Reports 2020 - SAP Crystal Server 2020.
* As an add-on to SAP Crystal Server 2020 1 NUL, SAP Crystal Server 2020 5 CAL allows you to support a wider, intermittent audience of end users, up to five logged on at the same time.
We used to use Crystal Reports but transitioned our reports to Cognos when Crystal was no longer supported in conjunction with PeopleSoft. Crystal is a more flexible report-building tool for unique needs, but Cognos has better prompts and is a better server-style report …
IBM Cognos stood out presumably because of the target market - we have been doing it in telco market so IBM Cognos could be a good fit due to its powerful capacity to establish the reports and data sets.
IBM Cognos shines when it comes to setting up slow changing historical reports that need to be delivered on a predefined schedule to a predetermined set of recipients.
Verified User
Project Manager
Chose IBM Cognos Analytics
I did not select IBM Cognos by choice. It was the report designer that was integrated into our Enterprise Asset Management system. In order to create custom reports for our users, this was they system we needed to use. If I were to have the option of using Crystal Reports …
Cognos is more intuitive and I think easier to use.
SAP Crystal
Verified User
Director
Chose SAP Crystal
I tried using Cognos, but I found trhat I prefered Crystal Reports because it does not require you to set up a meta data layer before setting up your reports. That is a real time saver for me.
I found Crystal much more flexible and easier to use for report building than Cognos. Crystal's menu system is similar to Microsoft Word and Excel, so it instantly seemed familiar. I had to do much more hunting in Cognos to modify the properties and formatting of a report. …
They are really two different beasts, Crystal Reports in its stand-alone form is meant for desktop reporting, although the same report can be pushed up to the web or to the enterprise with SAP's more expensive products. As far as I know, Cognos starts at the enterprise level …
Crystal Reports fits a niche for us in standard reporting. We don't use it for creating dashboards or interactive data analysis. That's where Tableau excels. For on-demand reports, we prefer Microsoft Reporting Service and Analysis Services. Crystal Report is very good when it …
Unfortunately, report-writing is just another thing I do, Crystal Reports is all I have used and I can't compare & contrast it to other reporting packages. Our organization uses Cognos and the skill-sets are not interchangeable. But it does indicate that the choice of report …
Crystal Reports is far and away the easiest reporting engine that I have used to date. There is less of a learning curve than with IBM Cognos. To me, Cognos is a bear when it comes to designing the report, however, it is very powerful once the reports are created and made …
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).
Generation of templated reports is the strong suit of SAP Crystal. Allows users to change formats in templates bases on requirement with minimal effort. Automated report delivery requires the user to be aware of sql which cannot be expected from all users. Should support more document export formats and improve the UI for SAP B1 Users
Crystal Reports allows us to create a consistent template for all of our reports.
Crystal Reports and Server allows us to house a repository for all of our reports to make them easy to find and update when necessary.
Crystal Reports can connect to a wide variety of data sources.
Crystal Reports can be a little daunting when first implementing. There are a lot of nuances in learning how to truly master this software and it can be frustrating at times.
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.
We have been using this product for so many years and it has truly become a cornerstone to our business processes when it comes to developing and distributing information via reports. We currently have over 500 reports developed to date over about 30 systems and that will continue to grow as user needs change.
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.
Crystal is very robust, but not always easy to use. It create wonderful looking reports, and so deserves a high rating. However, I have to take a couple of points off for the simple fact that I cannot hand it to a user and expect them to be able to do development with it.
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.
The support community can be difficult to navigate. I've also run into issues with my login. The SAP system has a bizarre mechanism for validating users that requires users to have what is called an S-ID. A basic ID may not give you access to all the features in the portal. The limitation may include not being able to perform a simple task like downloading patches and updates. This isn't a big deal for single user license but for teams it can be a pain.
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.
Just like any other implementation: When designing the differing reports, get end users' input, make sure to design the reports so that they display the information that the company requires, in the best and clearest way possible.
Test, test, test, revise when needed, and, particularly, do sufficient training so users are comfortable using Crystal Reports!
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.
Crystal reports is useful in case we want to import data from data base . We can write queries in it but Google Charts require to be implemented in our application using code so crystal reports is better than Google Charts.
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.
It is a decent buy for specific departments in terms of reporting capabilities but updates and cost (frequent) demands are higher with the benefits offered.
So long as the requirements are not ever changing, with scheduling functionality, it's a handsome tool.