IBM Cognos Analytics, in my opinion, legacy leader modern laggard
Primarily used for Dashboard and Report development with some level of self service capabilities.
Starting at $10 per month per user
View PricingOverview
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.
Recent Reviews
How IBM Cognos Analytics Differs From Its Competitors
Awards
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Popular Features
- Formatting capabilities (102)8.181%
- Drill-down analysis (101)8.181%
- Report Delivery Scheduling (100)8.080%
- Customizable dashboards (99)7.878%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
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
Product Demos
IBM Cognos Analytics Product Tour
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Features
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Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
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 Integrations
IBM Cognos Analytics Competitors
IBM Cognos Analytics Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows, Linux, Mac |
| Mobile Application | Apple iOS, Android |
| Supported Countries | Global |
| Supported Languages | English, 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).
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(579)Attribute Ratings
- 9.7Likelihood to Renew
- 8.6Availability
- 9Performance
- 8Usability
- 10Support Rating
- 8Online Training
- 8.7In-Person Training
- 7Implementation Rating
- 8Configurability
- 8.3Product Scalability
- 7.3Ease of integration
- 7Vendor pre-sale
- 7Vendor post-sale
- 2.5Data Visualization
- 8.3Data Sources
- 8.6Data Sharing and Collaboration
- 8.7IBM Cognos Reporting 4.14.21
- 8.3IBM Cognos Data Modeling 4.14.21
Reviews
(51-75 of 98)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
October 20, 2020
IBM Cognos Analytics has evolved
Although Tableau has certain advantages, mostly in its best in class visualization capabilities, Cognos is catching up. Most of the other advantages of Tableau Desktop have been addressed in more recent versions of Cognos, for instance the ability to ingest personal data sources, self-service modeling, and improved dashboarding/visualization features. Tableau still lacks a centralized metadata and governance model and requires a bit more effort to implement at the enterprise level. Also, Cognos is still best in breed for standardized reporting, which is always a crucial need for organizations. More requirements can be centrally addressed by Cognos, but it is unlikely any organization will have just one BI tool.
April 22, 2020
IBM Cognos - BI system of choice
Provides inbuilt AI for self-service report authoring on top of reporting.
Compared to others, IBM Cognos Analytics on Cloud offers much simpler product options, actually just one as against many-part components for other providers like PowerBI. Unlike other options available in the market, IBM Cognos Analytics has extensive ability to handle large data sources, comes with matured data comparison capabilities and ability to narrate data, analysis journey storyboards, and has both on-premises and cloud options.
February 05, 2020
IBM Cognos Report Studio works great for distributing data
IBM has tried to push its product to be like Tableau and included dashboarding, but we still use Tableau due to better features.
I haven't found anything that compares to the amazing features we get to use with IBM Cognos Report Studio, which allows you to send emails (PDF, Excel, HTML attachments).
I haven't found anything that compares to the amazing features we get to use with IBM Cognos Report Studio, which allows you to send emails (PDF, Excel, HTML attachments).
January 21, 2020
Give me a 60th of an hour and I’ll give you sales!!
January 14, 2020
Great product!
We originally went with Cognos as our reporting tool for our ERP system. Before that, we were on a homegrown system that did not allow for the customization that Cognos allows. While I have not worked with another reporting system first hand, I can say that when I visit with my peers who use other systems, their system does not have the robust capabilities that Cognos has.
December 04, 2019
IBM Cognos Review
Cost wise, the above products are less expensive and offer tons more upfront, but you will pay for it on the back end. They have vendor limitations and their support mechanism was inline for what we wanted.
November 16, 2019
Collaborative But Complicated
We used to use Crystal Reports but transitioned our reports to Cognos when Crystal was no longer supported in conjunction with PeopleSoft. Crystal is a more flexible report-building tool for unique needs, but Cognos has better prompts and is a better server-style report repository for many users.
May 10, 2019
Cognos today review
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 however we don't have any of our major systems in the cloud and we are still apprehensive.
February 25, 2019
Cognos is a great enterprise tool
IBM Cognos stacks up against Tableau from my experience in that it performs better with larger amounts of data and it works well with other tools to use the data or pull the data from. I selected IBM Cognos because of the ease of having users create their own views from the cubes that you build.
January 17, 2019
IBM Cognos is a powerful tool to have in your organization
Unanet does not offer the robust reporting that Cognos offers but yet it is easier to use and easier to adapt. Cognos, when compared to Unanet, is a lot more technical and is not as user-friendly. Unanet also offers great adaptability to various different software but on the other hand, Cognos offers a powerful BI tool.
December 11, 2018
Cognos too Powerful?
We actually selected Cognos, but had to switch to another BI tool due to cost reasons.
December 11, 2018
Cognos is good for a large sized healthcare organization, but it may be a conservative choice
We considered several major commercial visualization and dashboarding tools and decided to adopt Tableau and Cognos. We're a healthcare delivery organization and security and privacy of patient data are a critical feature. For that reason, we preferred a well recognized and already proven products rather than a non-guaranteed brand/new product. Congos is not the richest functioned tool but provided stable performance with great business support.
September 27, 2018
Cognos Review
Cognos is a more stable tool, which is integrated to many others. It has a lot of experience in the market. Your support is very good. Many facilities in Argentina
April 06, 2018
Cognos of the Titan IBM for superb users
IBM is a titan in BI innovation but has arduous competitors as I mentioned before. IBM has prestige in BI and the directors and managers know that. On the other hand, complexity is not the strategy of Cognos, that's why if you need big cubes of data, Tableau, and Microsoft BI are better suited for the job. Even QlikView is more complex than IBM Cognos. On the other hand, your users can benefit from the advantages that set analysis studio and event studio for notifications.
April 02, 2018
Solid reporting tool with some missing capabilities
In my opinion, MicroStrategy has a better product architecture. As a reporting and analysis platform, MicroStrategy allows developers to build reports and dashboards using an integrated development tool for all capabilities. It also has a more powerful and easy to use self-service functionality.
On the other hand, Cognos has a better integration with other IBM products such as SPSS which gives powerful data mining capabilities.
Depending on customer needs we recommend Cognos or other tools.
On the other hand, Cognos has a better integration with other IBM products such as SPSS which gives powerful data mining capabilities.
Depending on customer needs we recommend Cognos or other tools.
March 28, 2018
IBM Watson Analytics: A Rockstar of Data
Most commonly, if you're comparing it against other brands – my favorite being Google Analytics – this essentially does the same thing. It really just depends on what platform you're most comfortable working with. Google and IBM both have great software, and ease of use (assuming you know what you're doing when you get started). Although Google doesn't go as in-depth with their data analysis as IBM.
March 28, 2018
Best BI Tool for Enterprises
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 solutions ability to access and model data from a wide range of on-premise and cloud data sources makes it best-of-breed when it comes to implementation flexibility.
February 28, 2018
Powerful Data Sharing and Automation Tool
- Excel
Cognos allows you to manipulate data in a way very similar to Excel but it is important to keep in mind that all the data filtering and calculations take place on the back end before you receive the report output and if you want to manipulate the data, you have to do so before you run your report.
December 07, 2017
Cognos falling behind
- Tableau, Excel, Access, SQL and SAS
Tableau is amazing, user friend, innovative, straightforward in concept. Cognos does not stacks up against another software, it is more due to the insufficiency of this software that we need to accommodate with many others. Such as Excel, Access, SQL, SAS, Tableau. The load Cognos is taking in my position is becoming less and less.
December 07, 2017
IBM Cognos is a Powerful BI Tool
- SAP Crystal Reports and MicroStrategy Analytics
IBM Cognos stood out presumably because of the target market - we have been doing it in telco market so IBM Cognos could be a good fit due to its powerful capacity to establish the reports and data sets.
February 01, 2017
Experienced Cognos User's Review
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
The University of Pittsburgh BI team continues to explore different BI and analytics platforms. Tableau was offered as a reporting tool to complement Cognos users.
May 16, 2016
IBM Cognos Review by the Average Joe
It stacks up pretty well. The learning curve is low and the user experience is smooth. The cost was less expensive and implementation was very quick.
May 02, 2016
IBM Cognos - Real BI integrated platform
- SAP Business Objects
Oracle BIEE is the worst BI platform I ever seen in terms of complexity to install and complexity to use. Integration between tools is not finished at all. I recommend to not select this platform. SAP Business Objects seems to be the same platform as the one acquired by SAP - no improvement. I don't on which topics the development teams are focused. It is not an innovation for end-users.
April 12, 2016
Great Reporting with Cognos BI
Our main comparison was with Argos, due to companies that supply reporting capabilities for our ERP. I found that Argos, while potentially easier to create new datasets, did not have the ability to create publish-ready reports. With Cognos, we can create reports that can be printed and given to upper management and the board of trustees without making any changes. Cognos also allows for new datasets that are only limited by our IT department's ability to support such changes.