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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

    Sisense

    Score6.9 out of 10
    N/ASisense is a BI software and analytics platform. With what the vendor calls their In-Chip™ and Single Stack™ technologies, users have access to a comprehensive tool to analyze and visualize large, disparate data sets without IT resources.N/A
    Pricing
    IBM Cognos AnalyticsSisense
    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
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    IBM Cognos AnalyticsSisense
    Free Trial
    YesYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
    Additional Details—Must contact sales team for pricing.
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    IBM Cognos AnalyticsSisense
    Considered Both Products
    IBM
    Chose IBM Cognos Analytics
    Using these tools, companies can find, analyze, and visually interact with important company data.
    Incentivized
    Chose IBM Cognos Analytics
    Both are business intelligence solutions with combined features of business intelligence, data discovery, and analytics that help us collect data, work with it to perform analysis, and interactive reports.
    Incentivized
    Sisense Ltd
    Chose Sisense
    We evaluated IBM Cognos Analytics and it was vastly more expensive and offered less features than what Sisense offered.
    Incentivized
    Chose Sisense
    We evaluated each software and chose 4 candidates to build a proof-of-concept for the most complicated and challenging reporting scenario at our company with real data and business requirement.

    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    97%
    Would buy again
    92 Answers
    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
    Happy with the feature set
    96%
    Happy with the feature set
    91 Answers
    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
    Implementation went as expected
    96%
    Implementation went as expected
    64 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Features
    IBM Cognos AnalyticsSisense
    BI Standard Reporting
    Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of IBM Cognos Analytics and Sisense
    Feature
    IBM Cognos Analytics
    7.7
    138 Ratings
    6% below category average
    Sisense
    9.7
    47 Ratings
    17% above category average
    Pixel Perfect reports7.6129 Ratings10.037 Ratings
    Customizable dashboards8.0136 Ratings10.047 Ratings
    Report Formatting Templates7.5131 Ratings9.033 Ratings
    Ad-hoc Reporting
    Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of IBM Cognos Analytics and Sisense
    Feature
    IBM Cognos Analytics
    7.9
    138 Ratings
    1% below category average
    Sisense
    8.8
    47 Ratings
    9% above category average
    Drill-down analysis7.4136 Ratings10.047 Ratings
    Formatting capabilities8.3139 Ratings9.047 Ratings
    Integration with R or other statistical packages7.397 Ratings9.027 Ratings
    Report sharing and collaboration8.6133 Ratings7.33 Ratings
    Report Output and Scheduling
    Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of IBM Cognos Analytics and Sisense
    Feature
    IBM Cognos Analytics
    9.2
    136 Ratings
    11% above category average
    Sisense
    10.0
    46 Ratings
    20% above category average
    Publish to Web9.836 Ratings10.036 Ratings
    Publish to PDF8.2132 Ratings10.046 Ratings
    Report Versioning9.833 Ratings10.024 Ratings
    Report Delivery Scheduling8.2134 Ratings10.039 Ratings
    Delivery to Remote Servers9.918 Ratings00 Ratings
    Data Discovery and Visualization
    Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of IBM Cognos Analytics and Sisense
    Feature
    IBM Cognos Analytics
    7.4
    124 Ratings
    8% below category average
    Sisense
    9.5
    45 Ratings
    17% above category average
    Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)7.9121 Ratings10.045 Ratings
    Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization8.0114 Ratings9.042 Ratings
    Predictive Analytics6.7110 Ratings9.029 Ratings
    Pattern Recognition and Data Mining6.947 Ratings10.01 Ratings
    Access Control and Security
    Comparison of Access Control and Security features of IBM Cognos Analytics and Sisense
    Feature
    IBM Cognos Analytics
    7.8
    130 Ratings
    8% below category average
    Sisense
    10.0
    45 Ratings
    16% above category average
    Multi-User Support (named login)7.5129 Ratings10.045 Ratings
    Role-Based Security Model7.5127 Ratings10.044 Ratings
    Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)7.4127 Ratings10.045 Ratings
    Report-Level Access Control8.257 Ratings10.01 Ratings
    Single Sign-On (SSO)8.6111 Ratings00 Ratings
    Mobile Capabilities
    Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of IBM Cognos Analytics and Sisense
    Feature
    IBM Cognos Analytics
    6.4
    109 Ratings
    19% below category average
    Sisense
    9.7
    40 Ratings
    23% above category average
    Responsive Design for Web Access6.8104 Ratings10.040 Ratings
    Mobile Application6.390 Ratings10.025 Ratings
    Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile6.696 Ratings10.034 Ratings
    Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
    Comparison of Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding features of IBM Cognos Analytics and Sisense
    Feature
    IBM Cognos Analytics
    9.2
    87 Ratings
    17% above category average
    Sisense
    -
    Ratings
    REST API7.683 Ratings00 Ratings
    Javascript API7.779 Ratings00 Ratings
    iFrames9.912 Ratings00 Ratings
    Java API10.013 Ratings00 Ratings
    Themeable User Interface (UI)9.915 Ratings00 Ratings
    Customizable Platform (Open Source)9.99 Ratings00 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    IBM Cognos AnalyticsSisense
    Small Businesses
    Cyfe
    Score4 out of 10
    Cyfe
    Score4 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
    Enterprises
    Jaspersoft Community Edition
    Score7 out of 10
    Jaspersoft Community Edition
    Score7 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    IBM Cognos AnalyticsSisense
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.0
    (158 ratings)
    10.0
    (58 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.4
    (31 ratings)
    8.9
    (14 ratings)
    Usability
    7.3
    (10 ratings)
    10.0
    (6 ratings)
    Availability
    8.6
    (4 ratings)
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    9.0
    (5 ratings)
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    1.0
    (9 ratings)
    9.0
    (6 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    8.7
    (4 ratings)
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    Online Training
    8.0
    (4 ratings)
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    7.0
    (7 ratings)
    7.1
    (3 ratings)
    Configurability
    7.0
    (3 ratings)
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    Data Sharing and Collaboration
    8.6
    (40 ratings)
    9.1
    (47 ratings)
    Data Sources
    8.3
    (40 ratings)
    9.2
    (47 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    5.5
    (6 ratings)
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    6.3
    (5 ratings)
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    IBM Cognos AnalyticsSisense
    Likelihood to Recommend
    IBM
    For Transaction monitoring, we build reports for executive management, providing insights into the number of alerts, the types or categories of detection scenarios, the risk profile, and a snapshot of high- or urgent-priority cases to be reported to AUSTRAC. Congos helps to build the report by ingesting alert data exported from SAS datasets. It joins with other data from Teradata and Customer Hub (Oracle).
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Sisense Ltd
    I believe Sisense is perfectly suited for any organization of any size that have access to the proper resources, as the tool is very expensive. The data connectors come in all shapes and sizes out of the box, which allows a great deal of data control within the ElastiCubes. Additionally, while the platform only runs on Windows platforms, the web application can be accessed on any client: mobile, Apple, Windows, etc. This allows a much more flexible user experience, resulting in data and dashboards reaching further than any other tool.
    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
    Sisense Ltd
    • Customization - lots of supported and community plugins available. Users can also adjust the look and feel through JavaScript.
    • Innovation - Sisense is continuing to push the envelope by developing new features through Sisense Labs.
    • Customer support - the commitment to excellent customer service and ensuring organizations get the most out of their investment.
    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
    Sisense Ltd
    • The usability of the application on mobile devices needs some improvement, especially navigation and filtering.
    • Dashboards that are created by multiple users can be a bit of a hassle to share by Admins.
    • If you need to embed dashboards into your website, you are require to buy a license separate from the user and platform license. This is a norm on most BI visualization tools, but Sisense can seem a bit on the high side, cost-wide.
    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
    Sisense Ltd
    I think the business and myself as a user has come to rely on SiSense as a dashboarding and quick ad-hoc reporting tool. I am hoping to integrate SiSense dashboards into more parts of the business in the future. We have reduced our report turn-around time for the most part from hours/days to minutes and in some cases almost the speed of thought. Reports are also easier on the eye and more easily distributed. I would also like to say that the support and professionalism from the SiSense team has been excellent.
    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
    Sisense Ltd
    New V5 is ground floor of an exciting collection of possibilities. Weekly Sisense developers come up with new functionality that they share with us in their forums. The move to HTML5 has been pleasing in that widgets auto size themselves into appropriate forms in the board but everyone of them can be popped out to full page size to be looked at in more detail
    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
    Sisense Ltd
    There are very few situations when there is unexpected downtime. Mostly during development, new dashboard implementation and during upgrades. other then that there were very few crashes.
    Read full review
    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
    Sisense Ltd
    SiSense is usually performing better then other solutions even if going for complex reports/dashboards(of course within reasonable frames). I haven't noticed any bad influence on other systems, usually if something happens it stays within SiSense.
    Read full review
    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
    Sisense Ltd
    SiSense's support ninjas are very knowledgeable and are exceptionally responsive. So far, all of the issues we ran into were resolved within minimum time. My sense of dealing with the support staff at SiSense is that they are very focused on not just answering your immediate question, but also to delve into the cause of the matter.
    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
    Sisense Ltd
    Easy and free training that allowed us quickly understand basics in SiSense and start using them. More advanced features requires some browsing through SiSense forums, but there is always support to help, and SiSense support is one of the best whith which I worked so far.
    Read full review
    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
    Sisense Ltd
    Many examples, videos and scenarios which you try on your own right away. This combined with in-person training gives you enough to utilize most of SiSense's power.
    Read full review
    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
    Sisense Ltd
    Remember to migrate the plugins. The documentation however is pretty straight forward.
    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
    Read full review
    Sisense Ltd
    1) Easy to use, really, there is nothing too much to say. The set up is easy and not confusing. You can use it internally or externally.
    2) Customer Service, having spoken to various product reps from similar industry. Sisense rep provides you with the best support to get started, and it is really appreciated.
    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
    Sisense Ltd
    Product is quite easily scalable. The whole installation can be easily moved to stronger machine if needed.
    Read full review
    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
    Sisense Ltd
    • Report development time is reduced from 2~3 days to 2~3 hours.
    • Report querying time is improved from 0.5~10 mins to 2~30 seconds.
    • A 2-staff team delivers 10 times the BI output that we did on the old system.
    • We were able to deliver BI and data analysis for all business functions instead of a very limited group of users
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    IBM Cognos Analytics Screenshots

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