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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

    Oracle Hyperion (legacy)

    Score7.5 out of 10
    N/AOracle's Corporate Performance Management suite was acquired from Hyperion in 2007. Hyperion customers are encouraged to migrate to Oracle Fusion Cloud EPM.N/A
    Pricing
    IBM Cognos AnalyticsOracle Hyperion (legacy)
    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 AnalyticsOracle Hyperion (legacy)
    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 AnalyticsOracle Hyperion (legacy)
    Considered Both Products
    IBM
    Chose IBM Cognos Analytics
    It was cost prohibitive to switch platforms we have a huge investment in our Cognos implementation. There was retooling costs for our resources training costs for our users as well as a million $ plus investment in licensing costs. We could have considered a move to the cloud …
    Incentivized
    Chose IBM Cognos Analytics
    There are a number of reporting systems, but these other systems are really data visualization systems that lack the ability deliver information through an enterprise on their own. IBM Cognos is well suited to be the delivery system for an enterprise's analytics and the …
    Incentivized
    Discontinued Products
    Chose Oracle Hyperion (legacy)
    Oracle has led the charge on the development of true EPM reporting. The development of rudimentary KPIs to much more complex models all can be housed and managed by Hyperion. Integrates with Office through Smartview, which provides flexibility in creating Word documents, board …
    Incentivized
    Chose Oracle Hyperion (legacy)
    We also took a look to Cognos, but since we have Oracle eBS as our main ERP, we decided without a very deep analysis.
    Incentivized
    Chose Oracle Hyperion (legacy)
    Pricing is one factor and the features offered by the Oracle EPM and IBM Cognos shifted the favour in terms of Oracle EPM.
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    97%
    Would buy again
    91 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    94%
    Delivers good value for the price
    78 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    96%
    Happy with the feature set
    90 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    93%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    54 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    95%
    Implementation went as expected
    63 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Features
    IBM Cognos AnalyticsOracle Hyperion (legacy)
    BI Standard Reporting
    Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of IBM Cognos Analytics and Oracle Hyperion (legacy)
    Feature
    IBM Cognos Analytics
    7.7
    137 Ratings
    6% below category average
    Oracle Hyperion (legacy)
    -
    Ratings
    Pixel Perfect reports7.6129 Ratings00 Ratings
    Customizable dashboards8.0135 Ratings00 Ratings
    Report Formatting Templates7.5131 Ratings00 Ratings
    Ad-hoc Reporting
    Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of IBM Cognos Analytics and Oracle Hyperion (legacy)
    Feature
    IBM Cognos Analytics
    7.9
    137 Ratings
    2% below category average
    Oracle Hyperion (legacy)
    -
    Ratings
    Drill-down analysis7.4136 Ratings00 Ratings
    Formatting capabilities8.3138 Ratings00 Ratings
    Integration with R or other statistical packages7.397 Ratings00 Ratings
    Report sharing and collaboration8.6132 Ratings00 Ratings
    Report Output and Scheduling
    Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of IBM Cognos Analytics and Oracle Hyperion (legacy)
    Feature
    IBM Cognos Analytics
    9.2
    135 Ratings
    11% above category average
    Oracle Hyperion (legacy)
    -
    Ratings
    Publish to Web9.935 Ratings00 Ratings
    Publish to PDF8.2131 Ratings00 Ratings
    Report Versioning9.833 Ratings00 Ratings
    Report Delivery Scheduling8.2133 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 Oracle Hyperion (legacy)
    Feature
    IBM Cognos Analytics
    7.4
    124 Ratings
    8% below category average
    Oracle Hyperion (legacy)
    -
    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 Oracle Hyperion (legacy)
    Feature
    IBM Cognos Analytics
    7.8
    129 Ratings
    8% below category average
    Oracle Hyperion (legacy)
    -
    Ratings
    Multi-User Support (named login)7.5128 Ratings00 Ratings
    Role-Based Security Model7.5127 Ratings00 Ratings
    Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)7.4126 Ratings00 Ratings
    Report-Level Access Control8.256 Ratings00 Ratings
    Single Sign-On (SSO)8.6110 Ratings00 Ratings
    Mobile Capabilities
    Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of IBM Cognos Analytics and Oracle Hyperion (legacy)
    Feature
    IBM Cognos Analytics
    6.4
    109 Ratings
    19% below category average
    Oracle Hyperion (legacy)
    -
    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 Oracle Hyperion (legacy)
    Feature
    IBM Cognos Analytics
    9.2
    87 Ratings
    17% above category average
    Oracle Hyperion (legacy)
    -
    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
    Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting
    Comparison of Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting features of IBM Cognos Analytics and Oracle Hyperion (legacy)
    Feature
    IBM Cognos Analytics
    -
    Ratings
    Oracle Hyperion (legacy)
    10.0
    22 Ratings
    8% above category average
    Long-term financial planning00 Ratings10.017 Ratings
    Financial budgeting00 Ratings10.020 Ratings
    Forecasting00 Ratings10.021 Ratings
    Scenario modeling00 Ratings10.016 Ratings
    Management reporting00 Ratings10.021 Ratings
    Analytics and Reporting
    Comparison of Analytics and Reporting features of IBM Cognos Analytics and Oracle Hyperion (legacy)
    Feature
    IBM Cognos Analytics
    -
    Ratings
    Oracle Hyperion (legacy)
    8.2
    20 Ratings
    9% below category average
    Personalized dashboards00 Ratings8.018 Ratings
    Color-coded scorecards00 Ratings7.115 Ratings
    KPIs00 Ratings9.917 Ratings
    Cost and profitability analysis00 Ratings9.917 Ratings
    Key Performance Indicator setting00 Ratings8.015 Ratings
    Benchmarking with external data00 Ratings6.013 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    IBM Cognos AnalyticsOracle Hyperion (legacy)
    Small Businesses
    Cyfe
    Score4 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    Qlik Cloud Analytics (Qlik Sense)
    Score8.2 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    Enterprises
    Jaspersoft Community Edition
    Score7 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    IBM Cognos AnalyticsOracle Hyperion (legacy)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.9
    (157 ratings)
    10.0
    (23 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.4
    (31 ratings)
    5.0
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    7.3
    (10 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Availability
    8.6
    (4 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Performance
    9.0
    (5 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    1.0
    (9 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    8.7
    (4 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Online Training
    8.0
    (4 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    7.0
    (7 ratings)
    -
    (0 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
    6.3
    (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 AnalyticsOracle Hyperion (legacy)
    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
    Well suited: For use in multiple offices around the world. I was able to obtain financial reporting data from 5 foreign offices and then consolidate their data with 3 domestic USA offices to prepare a consolidated financial statement. Less Appropriate: Translating the financial value for consulting services could be a bit challenging because that required human interaction and judgement. It would have been great to be able to set up some software to be able to interpret this and let it run for all future project work revenue projection.
    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
    • This product handles budgeting by Employee and/or Position very well. It is highly flexible and allows Hyperion administrators the ability to develop a planning application that fits a variety of different business needs.
    • It is great at calculating benefits using business rules to automate the population of these fringe costs in the overall budget planning process. This greatly reduces user error.
    • It allows you to seed the operating budget based on changes to key drivers, such as percentage increases, flat dollar increases and more detailed changes using business rules.
    • Allows visibility into the plans for each unit across the organization, rolled up into an overall budget for the campus.
    • It handles the creation of budgets with multiple chartfield segments or dimensions, which most other budgeting systems cannot handle well. It can aggregate these very quickly.
    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
    • One pain point for us is the consolidation and translation process. Needing to translate the data over and over again is frustrating and there is no visibility into how many users are running a translation. If multiple users attempt to translate the same data set, say goodbye to your performance but you have no way of knowing! (Unless you want to pull up a task audit which is not a very realistic expectation). It has the been the quickest way for us to bring the system to it's knees. The consolidation process performs in direct correlation to the complexity of the calculation/consolidation rules. So, while the product is extremely flexible, you still have to be careful how you design your rules and calculations to make sure that you do it on the smallest subset of data as possible to avoid large processing times. This makes sense, but requires some significant expertise that most organizations do not have in-house.
    • The Hyperion Financial Reporting product is ridiculously outdated and clunky to use. The interface for designing reports is not intuitive, and not easy to modify once a report is built. I think there must be a strategic decision to move away from it and go to something more like Oracle BI because I just can't understand why in the world they don't update the reporting product. It also requires a significant level of expertise to be able to use. Not a great solution at all if you want multiple end-users to create reports in something other than Excel. Nobody except the HFM admin (which I used to be) in our company even touches this module.
    • Another pain point is the amount of IT support that is required to run this thing, and again, specialized knowledge of Hyperion products and how they work is required for IT to adequately support it. This goes for application servers and the Oracle database that the applications are running on.
    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
    We're in the middle of the road because we are not sure that other products on the market fit the bill for what we need yet. Hyperion is expensive and burdensome from an administrator and maintenance standpoint, but it still seems to be the best solution for what we need. Show us an equally capable SaaS consolidation product and we'll talk again.
    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
    No answers on this topic
    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
    No answers on this topic
    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
    No answers on this topic
    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
    The premium support team provides much needed dedicated customer service which we are after for what we have paid for this service. We are satisfied with the service and support and do not have any instance where there was an issue that requires escalation to get the right support team. Though the incidence of major issues that requires the premium support are less, we prefer to keep this as a safety net.
    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
    No answers on this topic
    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
    No answers on this topic
    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
    I use Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Mangement because the company I work at requires me to use it in the Financial Planning sector as most of their data is stored in it. I am open minded and ready to use other performance management tools created by Oracle if my work permits.
    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
    • Oracle Hyperion allows us to automate and consolidate financial data that used to be performed manually in spreadsheets. From that perspective the ROI is huge.
    • Oracle Hyperion functionality is extensive and allows us to perform most functions for planning, consolidating and reporting on our financial data.
    • One negative with Oracle Hyperion is that it is complicated to implement and maintain. It takes expertise at all levels (infrastructure and management) to realize the benefits from it.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    IBM Cognos Analytics Screenshots

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