IBM Cognos Analytics vs. Workday Adaptive Planning

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
IBM Cognos Analytics
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
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
Workday Adaptive Planning
Score 7.8 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Workday Adaptive Planning(formerly Adaptive Insights) is a financial planning and reporting tool. It includes automated budgeting and forecasting, financial reporting, and other active planning capabilities, including integrations with third-party products like Salesforce.N/A
Pricing
IBM Cognos AnalyticsWorkday Adaptive Planning
Editions & Modules
On Demand - Standard
USD 10.00
per month per user
On Demand - Premium
USD 42.40
per month per user
On Demand - Standard
USD 10.60
per month per user
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM Cognos AnalyticsWorkday Adaptive Planning
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesYes
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
IBM Cognos AnalyticsWorkday Adaptive Planning
Considered Both Products
IBM Cognos Analytics

No answer on this topic

Workday Adaptive Planning
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
Our previous platform was patchwork tools and unintegrated. We were clunky and poorly organized. The system was slow and difficult to use, and it was either overhaul it or start over. We evaluated our options holistically and went with Workday. It works better and faster, and …
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
Adaptive is much more flexible and powerful for our needs. It provides a wealth of reporting tools and capabilities that Cognos simply didn't or couldn't provide. The ability to have a team of one completely implement and manage the solution for a company is not unreasonable …
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
Adaptive Insights is well-positioned against the new tier of SaaS players as well as the larger, legacy, on-premise financial planning solutions such as Hyperion and IBM Cognos TM1. Its got an approachable user interface and relatively easy to use models and forecast …
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
In our evaluation process we looked at Hyperion and Cognos TM-1. The level of customization and professional services required to implement were significantly higher with these other 2 solutions. Adaptive is much easier to learn and doesn't require long term consultant …
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
Adaptive is much more flexible and easier to use than most other systems I have used in the past.
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
Adaptive's cloud-based solution suited our business model better. Its simplicity of use and ease of implementation whilst providing a robust platform made it the best choice.
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
I have used TM1 and Hyperion in the past and I find Adaptive to be cleaner, more flexible, quicker, and more powerful. It is extremely user friendly and intuitive which means the ramp time for a new employee to feel comfortable and competent with the tool is comparably short. …
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
I used IBM's Cognos TM1 with a previous employer, and although TM1 is powerful, it also requires a lot of IT work. Adaptive can be completely supported and maintained by the finance users who use and implement it. It does not require any IT support or maintenance. The …
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
Large Stack Vendors
Compared with financial planning and reporting offerings from IBM Cognos TM1, SAP BPM and Oracle BPM Suite / Hyperion, the Adaptive Suite offers most of the capability but deploys in around 10-30% of the time and provides total cost of ownership savings of …
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning

Cognos - capabilities are very similar. Cognos does allow a "push-down" (e.g. current rollup of Outside Services is $600k, enter $1mm at the highest level and the additional $400k is spread to the lowest level based on the existing spread).

We also looked at A3 Solutions, Budget …

Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
I've implemented Host Analytics at a previous company. We performed an extensive vendor selection process and Adaptive Insights came out on top. Adaptive Insights allowing us to use a demo helped prove the functionality of the software. Since we've started implementation there …
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
We selected Adaptive Insights for two reasons:
1. They are cloud based. With the software being managed on the cloud, we do not need to worry about managing servers, broken data tables, or other back-end concerns. We also don't have to wait for our (already taxed) IT department …
Features
IBM Cognos AnalyticsWorkday Adaptive Planning
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cognos Analytics
7.5
111 Ratings
9% below category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
9.3
1 Ratings
21% above category average
Pixel Perfect reports7.5101 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Customizable dashboards7.8109 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates7.2105 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cognos Analytics
7.6
113 Ratings
5% below category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
8.0
1 Ratings
0% above category average
Drill-down analysis7.5110 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Formatting capabilities7.5112 Ratings7.01 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages7.679 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration7.9108 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cognos Analytics
8.0
112 Ratings
3% below category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
8.0
1 Ratings
1% below category average
Publish to Web8.327 Ratings00 Ratings
Publish to PDF7.6106 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Report Versioning8.626 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling7.6109 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers8.112 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cognos Analytics
7.4
103 Ratings
7% below category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
7.7
1 Ratings
2% above category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)7.798 Ratings7.01 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization7.994 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Predictive Analytics7.191 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining7.129 Ratings00 Ratings
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cognos Analytics
7.9
108 Ratings
8% below category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
9.0
1 Ratings
6% above category average
Multi-User Support (named login)8.0105 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Role-Based Security Model8.1104 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)7.1103 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Report-Level Access Control8.133 Ratings00 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)8.087 Ratings00 Ratings
Mobile Capabilities
Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cognos Analytics
7.1
89 Ratings
10% below category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
8.5
1 Ratings
9% above category average
Responsive Design for Web Access7.583 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Mobile Application7.273 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile8.179 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
Comparison of Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cognos Analytics
7.6
70 Ratings
2% below category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
-
Ratings
REST API7.567 Ratings00 Ratings
Javascript API8.065 Ratings00 Ratings
iFrames8.39 Ratings00 Ratings
Java API6.911 Ratings00 Ratings
Themeable User Interface (UI)7.110 Ratings00 Ratings
Customizable Platform (Open Source)7.87 Ratings00 Ratings
Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting
Comparison of Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cognos Analytics
-
Ratings
Workday Adaptive Planning
8.8
189 Ratings
8% above category average
Long-term financial planning00 Ratings8.7175 Ratings
Financial budgeting00 Ratings9.4186 Ratings
Forecasting00 Ratings8.7181 Ratings
Scenario modeling00 Ratings8.2171 Ratings
Management reporting00 Ratings9.1186 Ratings
Consolidation and Close
Comparison of Consolidation and Close features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cognos Analytics
-
Ratings
Workday Adaptive Planning
6.9
154 Ratings
13% below category average
Financial data consolidation00 Ratings6.3116 Ratings
Journal entries and reports00 Ratings7.177 Ratings
Multi-currency management00 Ratings6.388 Ratings
Intercompany Eliminations00 Ratings6.169 Ratings
Minority Ownership00 Ratings5.340 Ratings
Local and consolidated reporting00 Ratings9.3102 Ratings
Detailed Audit Trails00 Ratings8.0129 Ratings
Financial Reporting and Compliance
Comparison of Financial Reporting and Compliance features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cognos Analytics
-
Ratings
Workday Adaptive Planning
8.1
177 Ratings
3% above category average
Financial Statement Reporting00 Ratings8.3156 Ratings
Management Reporting00 Ratings8.8172 Ratings
Excel-based Reporting00 Ratings8.2171 Ratings
Automated board and financial reporting00 Ratings8.9148 Ratings
XBRL support for regulatory filing00 Ratings6.029 Ratings
Analytics and Reporting
Comparison of Analytics and Reporting features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cognos Analytics
-
Ratings
Workday Adaptive Planning
8.2
146 Ratings
2% above category average
Personalized dashboards00 Ratings7.9128 Ratings
Color-coded scorecards00 Ratings8.6107 Ratings
KPIs00 Ratings8.6119 Ratings
Cost and profitability analysis00 Ratings7.8121 Ratings
Key Performance Indicator setting00 Ratings8.7103 Ratings
Benchmarking with external data00 Ratings7.671 Ratings
Integration
Comparison of Integration features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cognos Analytics
-
Ratings
Workday Adaptive Planning
8.6
167 Ratings
5% above category average
Flat file integration00 Ratings8.8130 Ratings
Excel data integration00 Ratings8.6160 Ratings
Direct links to 3rd-party data sources00 Ratings8.4120 Ratings
Best Alternatives
IBM Cognos AnalyticsWorkday Adaptive Planning
Small Businesses
BrightGauge
BrightGauge
Score 8.9 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
Reveal
Reveal
Score 10.0 out of 10
Centage
Centage
Score 9.5 out of 10
Enterprises
Kyvos Insights
Kyvos Insights
Score 9.5 out of 10
Prophix
Prophix
Score 8.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
IBM Cognos AnalyticsWorkday Adaptive Planning
Likelihood to Recommend
7.5
(136 ratings)
8.6
(218 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.7
(29 ratings)
7.6
(43 ratings)
Usability
7.4
(9 ratings)
8.5
(124 ratings)
Availability
8.6
(4 ratings)
7.3
(11 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(5 ratings)
9.1
(5 ratings)
Support Rating
1.5
(9 ratings)
8.2
(33 ratings)
In-Person Training
8.7
(4 ratings)
8.2
(2 ratings)
Online Training
8.0
(4 ratings)
7.3
(9 ratings)
Implementation Rating
7.0
(7 ratings)
8.9
(27 ratings)
Configurability
7.0
(3 ratings)
8.2
(5 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
5.8
(5 ratings)
7.4
(8 ratings)
Product Scalability
3.0
(4 ratings)
8.3
(12 ratings)
Professional Services
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(1 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
7.0
(1 ratings)
8.2
(4 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
7.0
(1 ratings)
6.4
(4 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM Cognos AnalyticsWorkday Adaptive Planning
Likelihood to Recommend
IBM
I use predictive analytics techniques, which can help me predict my future sales based on collected data, giving me insight into my market's trends.This market data can be analyzed, giving me the opportunity to gain in-depth insight into my market's competition and positioning it competitively, aided by developing strategies to improve my marketing approach.
Read full review
Workday
In a previous company, I was hired based on my experience with Workday Adaptive Planning. After being hired and reviewing the company, I quickly determined they were not large of enough of a company to need the program. Instead, we made better Excel budget templates, utilized OneDrive and created a better experience without the cost. Left the job after 9 months because I worked my way out of the position. My next role I looked for bigger companies and had better success with implementation.
Read full review
Pros
IBM
  • We can make dozens of dispatchers all focusing on different types of workloads.
  • Friendly user interface, without the need for coding or complicated editing.
  • Highly functionality reporting tools.
  • We can easily create trigger when a certain threshold are met sending reports or alerts to needed parties.
Read full review
Workday
  • It helps create dynamic plans for finances, operations and various functional units in an organization all under one platform
  • It helps in scenario modeling to help analyze various business events and report by any number of business dimensions including channel, customer or product
  • It can be integrated with any system including ERP, BI or CRM
Read full review
Cons
IBM
  • API integration is not upto the mark with very limited options.
  • Laptops get overheated when the tool is used from moderate to heavy use. Also, there is a lag in the tool times.
  • Licensing & Maintenance can go from cheap to expensive depending on the scope.
  • Lot of scope to improve the customer support & its not upto the industry standards.
Read full review
Workday
  • Web reports and sheets are not great for in-depth reporting, and require the use of the OfficeConnect for Excel plugin and, therefore, the use of Excel for extensive reporting capabilities.
  • It has limited formula functionality in some instances, requiring again the use of OfficeConnect for Excel for extensive calculations.
  • I would like to see new planning sheet types or upgrades to existing sheet types; functionality has been the same for over 10 years.
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
Workday
For one we're in way too deep to not move forward with Adaptive. We're integrated with Workday, we do a ton of reporting with Adaptive, and it's working very well for planning and forecasting. No reason to look back or change course.
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
Workday
Workday Adaptive Planning has detailed online help with both articles and videos that are comprehensive. It has a lot of similarities to Excel, which most finance people are already familiar with, plus the user interface is intuitive and easy to pick up. The online support team is quick to respond and very knowledgeable.
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
Workday
There haven't been any lately. The only one issue I can think of is when there was an update in Adaptive that altered our reports. Before I realized there was an issue, Adaptive reached out to let me know, so that it could be fixed.
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
Workday
All aspects of Adaptive Insights perform well. One area that I wish was quicker was integration. When importing data from Intacct our accounting ERP platform, it can sometimes take 4 hours for the import to process. The earlier imports are done, the quicker they complete. My estimate for a quick upload is about two hours.
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.
Read full review
Workday
Whenever we have had any questions, issues, or concerns, the support has been quick and thorough. [This] allow[s] us to be able to fully resolve any issues, or be connected with the right group quickly to attain the result we were after; be it from simple formatting to adding new detailed reporting.
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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
Workday
This was extremely helpful so that they could walk you through the model and teach you more about the complexity of various areas. It is most helpful when it is specific to your organization's model. The larger in-person trainings were helpful but they tended to be more generic and entry level. The trainings that are more tailored to your specific needs are the most helpful.
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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
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Workday
They often times tended to be way too generic or entry level. They would also become sales pitches to upgrade or get new Adaptive Planning products. The questions in the training would be very niche and specific to other organizations. They were rarely helpful to the group at large.
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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
Workday
Trust the expertise of very strong 3rd party implementers. Having deployed Adaptive at a separate company before, I thought I knew it all (hubris, I know). Fortunately, I began to (very quickly) trust the judgment of our Carlson implementation team, and they provided invaluable insights and best-in-class processes that have benefitted me and my team greatly.
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Alternatives Considered
IBM
My company selected IBM Congos Analytics because of its advanced features and data representation for data analysis. Its row and column features are very effective for creating dashboards and reports to visualize data. It's chart representation and view format are very attractive and useful for representation.
Read full review
Workday
Workday became our choice because it is fully web-based and easily integrates with other systems. The learning curve for Workday was shorter than that of Dynamics. The reporting tools in Workday are more user-friendly than that of Dynamics. However Workday did not have Check Printing tools which are available in Dynamics. The organization started a project to digitize all financial transactions so it was not a priority feature. When it comes to scaling up the functionalities of Workday it was much easier than Dynamics.
Read full review
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
IBM
No answers on this topic
Workday
Good read only seat access
Read full review
Scalability
IBM
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.
Read full review
Workday
We went from 2 users to 70+ users over a 2 year period of time. The application scaled wonderfully. 65 of those users were non-finance users so they were able to quickly learn the software and prepare budgets quickly and efficiently. That is the power of Adaptive and its ability to scale
Read full review
Professional Services
IBM
No answers on this topic
Workday
This is now available in house at Workday which is convenient.
Read full review
Return on Investment
IBM
  • Positive: It provides collaboration and sharing of knowledge with other users which provides centralized access to data and reports.
  • Positive: It helps organization to save time and be efficient as it provides self service analytics and automated workflows.
  • Positive: With its powerful analytics and reporting capabilities it enables user to explore and analyze their data, identify the trends and make decisions based on those insights.
  • Negative: Implementing Cognos Analytics will take investments on licensing cost, training and infrastructure.
  • Negative: As it provides many features and capabilities, it is an issue with organization having limited IT support configure and maintain the platform.
Read full review
Workday
  • It's facilitated a better financial literacy and management by the non-financial managers in the company, giving them a much better ability to see what they're spending, control it, and plan better in the future.
  • It's hard to quantify the ease of model and version management, but we could never do what we're doing now with our current staff. It would take a small army to replicate anything close to what Adaptive pulls off using Excel, if it's even possible.
Read full review
ScreenShots

IBM Cognos Analytics Screenshots

Screenshot of a natural language query, used in IBM Cognos Analytics to get AI-powered insights from data.Screenshot of AI-generated insights and forecasts that can be added with just a click of a button.Screenshot of a dashboard that can be generated automatically using IBM Cognos Analytics by uploading or selecting data.Screenshot of an AI-generated dashboard from a spreadsheet that was just uploaded. This offers a great starting point for the creative process.Screenshot of where to import data to IBM Cognos Analytics from CSV files and spreadsheets. Users can connect to cloud or on-premises data sources, including SQL databases, Google BigQuery, Amazon, and Redshift.Screenshot of a sample operational dashboard of a coffee shop created using IBM Cognos Analytics.

Workday Adaptive Planning Screenshots

Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of