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IBM Cognos Analytics

IBM Cognos Analytics

Overview

What is IBM Cognos Analytics?

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.

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Recent Reviews

IBM Cognos Analytics

8 out of 10
March 20, 2024
Incentivized
This technology is a great way for our business to see the scope of the work we are doing in one large dashboard. The data driven insights …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 30 features
  • Formatting capabilities (104)
    8.1
    81%
  • Drill-down analysis (103)
    8.1
    81%
  • Report Delivery Scheduling (102)
    8.0
    80%
  • Customizable dashboards (101)
    7.8
    78%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

View all pros & cons
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Pricing

View all pricing

On Demand - Standard

$10.00

Cloud
per month per user

On Demand - Premium

$40.00

On Premise
per month per user

Entry-level set up fee?

  • Setup fee optional
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.ibm.com/products/cognos…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Starting price (does not include set up fee)

  • $10 per month per user
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Product Demos

IBM Cognos Analytics Product Tour

Walnut.io
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Features

BI Standard Reporting

Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.

7.9
Avg 8.2

Ad-hoc Reporting

Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.

8.1
Avg 8.1

Report Output and Scheduling

Ability to schedule and manager report output.

8.3
Avg 8.4

Data Discovery and Visualization

Data Discovery and Visualization is the analysis of multiple data sources in a search for patterns and outliers and the ability to represent the data visually.

8.1
Avg 8.1

Access Control and Security

Access control means being able to determine who has access to which data.

8.3
Avg 8.6

Mobile Capabilities

Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

7.3
Avg 8.0

Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding

APIs are a set of routines, protocols, and tools for used for embedding one application in another

7.5
Avg 7.9
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Product Details

What is IBM Cognos Analytics?

Cognos Analytics is an AI-fueled business intelligence platform that supports the entire analytics cycle, from discovery to operationalization. Cognos Analytics gives users — whether data scientist, business analyst or non-specialist — more power to perform relevant analysis in a way that ties back to organizational objectives. It aims to shorten each user’s journey from simple to sophisticated analytics, allowing them to harness data to explore the unknown, identify new relationships, get a deeper understanding of outcomes and challenge the status quo. Users can visualize, analyze and share actionable insights about data with anyone in the organization.


IBM Cognos Analytics Features

BI Platform Features

  • Supported: Administration via Web Interface
  • Supported: Live Connection to External Data
  • Supported: Snapshot of External Data
  • Supported: In-memory data model
  • Supported: OLAP (Pre-processed cube representation)
  • Supported: Multi-Data Source Reporting (Blending)
  • Supported: ETL Capability
  • Supported: ETL Scheduler

Supported Data Sources Features

  • Supported: MS Excel Workbooks
  • Supported: Text Files (CSV, etc)
  • Supported: Oracle
  • Supported: MS SQL Server
  • Supported: IBM DB2
  • Supported: MySQL
  • Supported: ODBC
  • Supported: Cloudera Hadoop
  • Supported: IBM Netezza
  • Supported: SAP Hana
  • Supported: Salesforce
  • Supported: SAP

BI Standard Reporting Features

  • Supported: Pixel Perfect reports
  • Supported: Customizable dashboards
  • Supported: Report Formatting Templates

Ad-hoc Reporting Features

  • Supported: Drill-down analysis
  • Supported: Formatting capabilities
  • Supported: Predictive modeling
  • Supported: Integration with R or other statistical packages
  • Supported: Report sharing and collaboration

Report Output and Scheduling Features

  • Supported: Publish to PDF
  • Supported: Output Raw Supporting Data
  • Supported: Report Delivery Scheduling

Data Discovery and Visualization Features

  • Supported: Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
  • Supported: Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
  • Supported: Predictive Analytics
  • Supported: Support for Machine Learning models
  • Supported: Pattern Recognition and Data Mining
  • Supported: Integration with R or other statistical packages

Access Control and Security Features

  • Supported: Multi-User Support (named login)
  • Supported: Role-Based Security Model
  • Supported: Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
  • Supported: Report-Level Access Control
  • Supported: Table-Level Access Control (BI-layer)
  • Supported: Field-Level Access Control (BI-layer)
  • Supported: Single Sign-On (SSO)

Mobile Capabilities Features

  • Supported: Responsive Design for Web Access
  • Supported: Mobile Application
  • Supported: Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile

Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding Features

  • Supported: REST API
  • Supported: Javascript API

Additional Features

  • Supported: AI Forecasting

IBM Cognos Analytics Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsWindows, Linux, Mac
Mobile ApplicationApple iOS, Android
Supported CountriesGlobal
Supported LanguagesEnglish, French, German, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, Finnish, Italian, Simplified Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Hebrew, Urdu, Farsi

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

IBM Cognos Analytics starts at $10.

Tableau Public, Tableau Server, and Microsoft Power BI are common alternatives for IBM Cognos Analytics.

Reviewers rate Publish to PDF highest, with a score of 8.7.

The most common users of IBM Cognos Analytics are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(580)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(26-50 of 99)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
September 13, 2022

Great Reporting Software

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We selected IBM Cognos because it has all of the features our organization needs for reporting. There are multiple report and dashboard options. Security and scheduling options are good. Tableau does not have good tools for advanced reporting besides dashboards. Power BI does not have as many features as IBM Cognos.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The AI and the automation in IBM Cognos Analytics are pretty simple to use and almost provide accurate data. The report part compared to the Medidata Rave is always efficient and error-proof I got the reports nearly 90 percent. The analysis is pretty good I actually got the outcome that I wanted to produce.
Damith Low | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
They are powerful tools, they are used to handle a large amount of data, create different and complex visualizations. They make it easy for users to run queries using natural language and get automatic feedback on the information. They are powerful, intuitive and allow users of all levels to harness their potential.
Nicholas Maeda | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Unlike traditional Business Intelligence (BI) tools, IBM Cognos Analytics with Watson is geared toward enabling people from all walks of business to analyze information in an engaging way.
Traylor Haney | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Board
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.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
They complete in each other in the analytics cycle. Not only can we get infused insight and descriptives and diagnotics from my data, I can actually plan when combining both software.
Mohammed Younus Siddiqui | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
IBM Cognos Analytics is the only product that provides pixel-perfect reports right out of the box. You do not need third-party tools to implement it. Secondly, other tools require you to create a relation between the tables if you are going to use them in the report. Only in Cognos, you can display tables with no relationship between them at all. Thirdly, if you need to create queries or sub-queries then you can do it on the fly in Cognos. However, in other tools, you need to do the data preparation in the database itself before using it in the tool.
Corey Mendelsohn | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
IBM has the best in class and the major reason customers select this tool is the ease of use and the company that stands behind the product. The reputation of the software is key and the fact that IBM has one of the best support organizations around truly makes it stand apart from all of the others.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
All these ones are fairly widely used in the business analyst world. There is no significant difference among them apart from the suite of tools that your company is using. If the company is using Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3, Amazon QuickSight is easier to be embedded in the system.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
IBM Cognos Analytics offers schematic visuals where it gives you the ability to map data to a custom vector image. It also generates targeted report output supported data from one report run that's divided amongst the subsets. IBM Cognos Analytics allows these analytics to be presented in a narrative form and allows for the creation of a representation like MS Powerpoint but using live data.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
IBM Cognos [Analytics] is offered through our core system provided, Fiserv. It is integrated with our loan, deposit, and customer information systems which is the primary reason it works best for us. Power BI seems to have a better user interface and visualization functionality, but the integration to our core data systems is key.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Used other products like Tableau, Qlik Sense, SSRS & Power BI, Cognos Analytics is an equally competitive tool and much better in some features like report delivery and scheduling. Easiest to navigate and play around and the most user-friendly tool when compared to the above tools in my opinion. These are some of the reasons why we prefer Cognos.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The product IBM Cognos Analytics contains so many features that it can respond to any demands. It has Reports, Dashboards, Packages, Data Modules, Data Sets, Jobs, Events, external data files, Direct DB connections,... When other are limited. For example, Qlik Sense allow to build very nice and fast report but is not easy to get in hands. For example, adding metadata referencing target data need to know a SQL and specifics language and is not easy to users not in the IT department, while Cognos is more easy to use. Also, Cognos has an easy reporting scheduler with possibility to send report to a folder or by email (+ bursting, events, ....)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
PowerBI seems a good product to advance from excel, but it can only compare to the Dashboards module of Cognos Analytics. Also, PowerBI encouraged a siloed approach to analytics while all the information and models created in Cognos are centralized.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
TRANSFORMER plus Cognos-Cubes were superior to all of them: speed of development as well as usability!
Much higher speed of development as compared to SAS.
Much easer as well as versatile handling for end-users as compared to SAP-BW.
We had a difficult time to decide between BO and Cognos. Don't remember why we chose Cognos over BO.
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