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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

    Sysomos, now part of Meltwater

    Score9.5 out of 10
    N/ASysomos was a social media listening and marketing solution for content discovery, planning, publishing, moderation, and analytics. Sysomos was acquired by Meltwater, and is no longer available, but the features of the former Sysomos are now part of the Meltwater platform.

    $1,000

    per month

    Pricing
    IBM Cognos AnalyticsSysomos, now part of Meltwater
    Editions & Modules
    On Demand - Standard
    USD 11.25
    per month per user
    On Demand - Premium
    USD 44.90
    per month per user
    Sysomos
    $1,000.00
    per month
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    IBM Cognos AnalyticsSysomos, now part of Meltwater
    Free Trial
    YesNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    IBM Cognos AnalyticsSysomos, now part of Meltwater
    Considered Both Products
    IBM
    No answer on this topic
    Discontinued Products
    No answer on this topic
    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 AnalyticsSysomos, now part of Meltwater
    BI Standard Reporting
    Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of IBM Cognos Analytics and Sysomos, now part of Meltwater
    Feature
    IBM Cognos Analytics
    7.7
    138 Ratings
    6% below category average
    Sysomos, now part of Meltwater
    -
    Ratings
    Pixel Perfect reports7.6129 Ratings00 Ratings
    Customizable dashboards8.0136 Ratings00 Ratings
    Report Formatting Templates7.5131 Ratings00 Ratings
    Ad-hoc Reporting
    Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of IBM Cognos Analytics and Sysomos, now part of Meltwater
    Feature
    IBM Cognos Analytics
    7.9
    138 Ratings
    1% below category average
    Sysomos, now part of Meltwater
    -
    Ratings
    Drill-down analysis7.4136 Ratings00 Ratings
    Formatting capabilities8.3139 Ratings00 Ratings
    Integration with R or other statistical packages7.397 Ratings00 Ratings
    Report sharing and collaboration8.6133 Ratings00 Ratings
    Report Output and Scheduling
    Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of IBM Cognos Analytics and Sysomos, now part of Meltwater
    Feature
    IBM Cognos Analytics
    9.2
    136 Ratings
    11% above category average
    Sysomos, now part of Meltwater
    -
    Ratings
    Publish to Web9.836 Ratings00 Ratings
    Publish to PDF8.2132 Ratings00 Ratings
    Report Versioning9.833 Ratings00 Ratings
    Report Delivery Scheduling8.2134 Ratings00 Ratings
    Delivery to Remote Servers9.918 Ratings00 Ratings
    Data Discovery and Visualization
    Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of IBM Cognos Analytics and Sysomos, now part of Meltwater
    Feature
    IBM Cognos Analytics
    7.4
    124 Ratings
    8% below category average
    Sysomos, now part of Meltwater
    -
    Ratings
    Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)7.9121 Ratings00 Ratings
    Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization8.0114 Ratings00 Ratings
    Predictive Analytics6.7110 Ratings00 Ratings
    Pattern Recognition and Data Mining6.947 Ratings00 Ratings
    Access Control and Security
    Comparison of Access Control and Security features of IBM Cognos Analytics and Sysomos, now part of Meltwater
    Feature
    IBM Cognos Analytics
    7.8
    130 Ratings
    8% below category average
    Sysomos, now part of Meltwater
    -
    Ratings
    Multi-User Support (named login)7.5129 Ratings00 Ratings
    Role-Based Security Model7.5127 Ratings00 Ratings
    Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)7.4127 Ratings00 Ratings
    Report-Level Access Control8.257 Ratings00 Ratings
    Single Sign-On (SSO)8.6111 Ratings00 Ratings
    Mobile Capabilities
    Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of IBM Cognos Analytics and Sysomos, now part of Meltwater
    Feature
    IBM Cognos Analytics
    6.4
    109 Ratings
    19% below category average
    Sysomos, now part of Meltwater
    -
    Ratings
    Responsive Design for Web Access6.8104 Ratings00 Ratings
    Mobile Application6.390 Ratings00 Ratings
    Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile6.696 Ratings00 Ratings
    Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
    Comparison of Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding features of IBM Cognos Analytics and Sysomos, now part of Meltwater
    Feature
    IBM Cognos Analytics
    9.2
    87 Ratings
    17% above category average
    Sysomos, now part of Meltwater
    -
    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 AnalyticsSysomos, now part of Meltwater
    Small Businesses
    Cyfe
    Score4 out of 10
    Mention
    Score8 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Qlik Cloud Analytics (Qlik Sense)
    Score8.1 out of 10
    Mention
    Score8 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Sisense
    Score6.9 out of 10
    Social Suite by Reputation.com
    Score9.4 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    IBM Cognos AnalyticsSysomos, now part of Meltwater
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.0
    (158 ratings)
    7.0
    (46 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.4
    (31 ratings)
    6.8
    (28 ratings)
    Usability
    7.3
    (10 ratings)
    9.0
    (6 ratings)
    Availability
    8.6
    (4 ratings)
    8.2
    (5 ratings)
    Performance
    9.0
    (5 ratings)
    8.5
    (5 ratings)
    Support Rating
    1.0
    (9 ratings)
    2.0
    (8 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    8.7
    (4 ratings)
    9.6
    (2 ratings)
    Online Training
    8.0
    (4 ratings)
    8.0
    (5 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    7.0
    (7 ratings)
    10.0
    (8 ratings)
    Configurability
    7.0
    (3 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Data Sharing and Collaboration
    8.6
    (40 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Data Sources
    8.3
    (40 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    5.5
    (6 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    6.4
    (5 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    IBM Cognos AnalyticsSysomos, now part of Meltwater
    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
    Discontinued Products
    Sysomos Expion is best suited, in my opinion, to offices where either you have only one moderator/manager OR where multiple users plan to manage a specific channel. Without live updates, it gets far too complicated for multiple users to manage the exact same workload
    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
    Discontinued Products
    • Ad-hoc research. During planning phase of a campaign it is a helpful tool to understand the marketplace, key influencers and topics that engage a target demographic.
    • Post-event hashtag analysis. Rapid generation of reporting on efficacy of a campaign, key voices, topics that resonated, viral reach and more.
    • User interface. Friendly and accessible enough to minimize training needs and enable decentralized access, though we have found some hand-holding is still required to get the most out of the platform.
    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
    Discontinued Products
    • It does not provide a visual for volume over time.
    • The visuals aren't excellent, and would require an export to create better looking graphics.
    • The interface isn't intuitive and sometimes requires clicking around to find things that seem like they should be under a different title.
    Incentivized
    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
    Discontinued Products
    There are two differentiating features that Sysomos MAP has that the competitor tools I have experienced (Radian6, Meltwater Buzz) did not: user-friendly Boolean queries for searches and near-real-time results. The former is important because, of course, your results are only as good as your search/campaign. With Sysomos, once you master Boolean queries (which isn't terribly difficult) you're set for creating any kind of listening report. I strongly prefer this to the "campaign creator" forms that other services provide. Second, Sysomos MAP returns results almost immediately - like a Google search. So if you get your results and see that you need to tweak your query - no big deal. Or if you have a last-minute request for a client - not an issue. Meltwater can take up to 48 hours for a search to fully populate. This is a major issue if you get your full set of results back and see that you need to adjust the query; you're looking at another two days of wait time. A long wait on results can also prove problematic in agency settings where clients or prospective clients often need results with a quick turnaround.
    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
    Discontinued Products
    The product is very easy to use. The platform is visual and data is easy to read. Boolean construction can sometimes be difficult, but the boolean constructor tool is helpful for boolean beginners. For more experienced boolean constructors, the boolean display at the top is very helpful in identifying where there may be holes in the construction
    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
    Discontinued Products
    Not really an availability issue, but concurrency licensing rules mean that only one user can be logged in at a time.
    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
    Discontinued Products
    This has not been an issue. It is actually beating TweetDeck when we are tagged within a post that TweetDeck is monitoring.
    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
    Discontinued Products
    Unfortunately, we have not had a great experience with customer support from Klear. In the sales process, they were very responsive and helpful, but when onboarded, it definitely changed. We are based in the US and our customer service rep is based in Israel, meaning our work hours barely overlap. Oftentimes we're waiting 24+ hours for a response, and when it's a time-sensitive issue (like the platform not pulling in Instagram Story data) we want it to be resolved as quickly as possible. Klear also has a chat feature for more immediate help, but we've experienced a similar situation there where it takes 12+ hours to get a response and it's usually from our customer service rep. Our rep is very nice, but also doesn't seem very knowledgeable about the platform, and usually can't provide an immediate answer to a question we ask and has to "check with her team."
    Incentivized
    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
    Discontinued Products
    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
    Discontinued Products
    We had a kick-off training with the whole team where they walked us through the functionality. This was a pretty effective and comprehensive training.
    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
    Discontinued Products
    Implementation was so easy I dont even remember it!
    Incentivized
    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
    Discontinued Products
    We've used Sprout Social & Hootsuite in the past -- and they all stack up pretty evenly. Sysomos has the same features as Sprout or Hootsuite, except their reports and analytics are a little more detailed. Hootsuite has a better social media management software and dashboard though
    Incentivized
    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
    Discontinued Products
    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
    Discontinued Products
    • Lowered costs and overhead when Expion got introduced as we now use one centralized solution for all of our social media work
    • We can finally calculate ROI with ease and understand our campaign performance through proper tracking and analytics
    • Competition tracking was never easier
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    IBM Cognos Analytics Screenshots

    Product screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshot

    Sysomos, now part of Meltwater Screenshots

    Screenshot of TOP CONTENT: See the best performing content from all your social media channels in one view plus compare it against your competitors’ pages.Screenshot of FAN MODERATION: Sysomos Expion makes it easy to know who to speak to, when to engage in conversation and can even be integrated with customer care centers.Screenshot of PUBLISH: Easily plan, schedule and publish content from a simple drag-and-drop calendar with workflow that’s easy to track and review.Screenshot of OPTIMIZE PAID ADS: Optimize paid ads with smarter analytics and trending triggers so you can better understand how organic and paid content are working together.Screenshot of DYNAMIC DASHBOARDS: Powerful marketing analytics shows that it’s not just about creating a report or crunching some numbers - but about telling a story.  You’ll discover patterns, breakouts, and trends in real time to capitalize on opportunities.