IBM Cognos Analytics

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
IBM Cognos Analytics
Score 8.2 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
Pricing
IBM Cognos Analytics
Editions & Modules
On Demand - Standard
$10.00
per month per user
On Demand - Premium
$40.00
per month per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM Cognos Analytics
Free Trial
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Entry-level Setup FeeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
IBM Cognos Analytics
Considered Both Products
IBM Cognos Analytics
Chose IBM Cognos Analytics
Cognos provides very advanced analytics functionalities, maybe even more advanced than the competition, and works great when used in collaboration with Watson. However, Tableau and other newer products are much better regarding overall usability.
Chose IBM Cognos Analytics
We looked at Qlik Sense, SAP Analytics Cloud, and IBM Cognos Analytics for our financial brand's needs. Qlik Sense is super user-friendly, great for quick data digging. SAP Analytics is perfect when we're working with other SAP stuff; it just clicks. But for our big project, …
Chose IBM Cognos Analytics
IBM Cognos comes close to Data Central. It has some pros & cons over Data Central. Pros: 1. We use the tool for data modeling as it helps in predictive data analysis for complex data, which is very much in line with real-life scenarios. 2. Has a mobile application that works …
Chose IBM Cognos Analytics
IBM Cognos has a lot more deep, robust, AI-driven Business Intelligence features that remove some of the manual work. Automation is a lot more seamless and ease of making data available and digestible by several non-technical business partners.
Chose IBM Cognos Analytics
Cognos Analytics provides wide range for reporting, data visualization, and self service analytics. Cognos has strong security and governance features. Sigma Computing is purely cloud native approach and has spreadsheet like interface and doesn't provide many customization …
Chose IBM Cognos Analytics
One of the most important things to consider when choosing a BI platform is ease of use. This is especially true for self-serve BI projects. Organizations may look at how easy it is to create reports, dashboard customization, and the overall user experience when compared to …
Chose IBM Cognos Analytics
IBM Cognos Analytics, Microsoft Power BI, and SAP Data Intelligence are all strong analytics tools. The reason we used Cognos Analytics was because it focuses on self-service analytics, Cognos integrates well with diverse systems,unlike the other two that more central arund …
Chose IBM Cognos Analytics
IBM Cognos Analytics can be placed moderately among the evergreen reporting solutions mentioned above (MS Power BI, Tableau, Qlik Sense) with both pros and cons in different categories over these tools.
In terms of security, it is as reliable as Power BI which is powered by …
Chose IBM Cognos Analytics
I feel like IBM Cognos Analytics offers a more in depth look into the business’ analytics and data and has more functionalities with AI.
Chose IBM Cognos Analytics
While all of them have their own advantages. IBM Cognos Analytics is highly scalable and have unmatched data analytics capabilities which makes the data from IBM Cognos Analytics of very high quality and data governance also makes sure your data is safe and protected.
Chose IBM Cognos Analytics
IBM Cognos Analytics is a relatively late entrant in the BI space - dominated by Tableau and Qlik. it works well for 80% of our use cases and is easy for a non technical user to start using. Also due to enterprise licensing, its easier to distribute internally.
Chose IBM Cognos Analytics
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 …
Chose IBM Cognos Analytics
IBM Cognos Analytics supports better enterprise connectivity than the competition. It supports on-premises and cloud deployments, regardless of cloud platform, and also provides its own SaaS cloud platform. Other tools are locked in to specific cloud platforms and are not as …
Chose IBM Cognos Analytics
I like the cloud native character and ease of deployment with Sigma and ThogthSpot, I also like the metadata modelling capabilities of Power BI. I prefer the ability of Cognos to create and publish a metadata model that provides both ad hoc access and managed reporting and …
Chose IBM Cognos Analytics
Microsoft Power BI has a more user friendly interface and it is integrated very well with the other Microsoft products but IBM Cognos Analytics has a more advanced reporting and complex data analysis capabilities.
Chose IBM Cognos Analytics
We have alot of resources already invested in Cognos and it would be a humongous effort to migrate. CA is more inline with Power BI and Tableau now that there are dashboarding capabilities.
Chose IBM Cognos Analytics
We could deliver a corporate wide solution with Cognos, it is an end-to-end platform. No other option provided the same breadth of scope. I can't think of a feature that the others provide that Cognos lacks, but the others do not provide the same features and governance of …
Chose IBM Cognos Analytics
No need to physically share data with developers, users. All we need is to send the server URL.
Chose IBM Cognos Analytics
This is a BI solution that has versatile and robust capabilities, offers a customized experience and a very easy to use interface.
Chose IBM Cognos Analytics
IBM Cognos Analytics with Watson is an enterprise ready tool and could provide end to end functionality expected from a BI tool. Provides integration with custom applications as well as provides not just high end visualizations that Tableau or PowerBI provides but also the very …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
IBM Cognos Analytics
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cognos Analytics
7.9
103 Ratings
4% below category average
Pixel Perfect reports8.594 Ratings
Customizable dashboards7.8101 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates7.498 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cognos Analytics
8.1
105 Ratings
0% below category average
Drill-down analysis8.1103 Ratings
Formatting capabilities8.1104 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages7.873 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration8.4101 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cognos Analytics
8.3
105 Ratings
1% below category average
Publish to Web8.327 Ratings
Publish to PDF8.799 Ratings
Report Versioning8.626 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling8.0102 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers8.112 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cognos Analytics
8.1
95 Ratings
0% above category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)8.090 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization8.287 Ratings
Predictive Analytics8.183 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining8.022 Ratings
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cognos Analytics
8.3
100 Ratings
4% below category average
Multi-User Support (named login)8.497 Ratings
Role-Based Security Model8.396 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)8.296 Ratings
Report-Level Access Control8.425 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)8.378 Ratings
Mobile Capabilities
Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cognos Analytics
7.3
83 Ratings
9% below category average
Responsive Design for Web Access7.977 Ratings
Mobile Application7.368 Ratings
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile8.174 Ratings
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
Comparison of Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cognos Analytics
7.5
62 Ratings
5% below category average
REST API7.359 Ratings
Javascript API7.658 Ratings
iFrames8.39 Ratings
Java API6.911 Ratings
Themeable User Interface (UI)7.110 Ratings
Customizable Platform (Open Source)7.87 Ratings
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User Ratings
IBM Cognos Analytics
Likelihood to Recommend
8.1
(128 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.8
(27 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(8 ratings)
Availability
8.6
(4 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(5 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(8 ratings)
In-Person Training
8.7
(4 ratings)
Online Training
8.0
(4 ratings)
Implementation Rating
7.0
(7 ratings)
Configurability
8.0
(2 ratings)
Ease of integration
7.3
(3 ratings)
Product Scalability
8.3
(3 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
7.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
7.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM Cognos Analytics
Likelihood to Recommend
IBM
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).
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Pros
IBM
  • We use the tool for data modeling as it helps in predictive data analysis for complex data, which is very similar to real-life scenarios.
  • Options of customizing & scheduling reports as per our requirements basis.
  • Has mobile application which works seamless.
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Cons
IBM
  • 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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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Alternatives Considered
IBM
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.
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.
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Return on Investment
IBM
  • High ROI with well designed solutions. Supported by scalable deployment, robust security model and ability to create valuable content.
  • High ROI where well designed data models can be deployed with a common metadata layer to a variety of users and use cases.
  • High ROI in an environment that includes a variety of vendors and best of breed products within the overall platform
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ScreenShots