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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 (103)
    8.1
    81%
  • Drill-down analysis (102)
    8.1
    81%
  • Report Delivery Scheduling (101)
    8.0
    80%
  • Customizable dashboards (100)
    7.8
    78%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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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 7.9

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

(1-25 of 38)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
You can use packages, data modules, uploaded files, and data sets as sources of data for your IBM Cognos applications. The connectivity, while it isn't as mature as with its on-premises version, is ever-evolving and catching up.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
A majority of IBM Cognos customers use frameworks, which are painful to maintain over time. We use SQL queries to our EDW. We have admins to add the appropriate database connections so we can use custom SQL in our reports. It would be awesome if Cognos built more cool features around custom SQL queries like Tableau.
January 14, 2020

Great product!

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
This is not something I am familiar with. This is something that would be more on the IT side. I work on the functional side, so I do not have experience with the data source connectivity. Cognos Analytics on Cloud is a great tool and does require IT support. We use it for reporting from our ERP system.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have struggled to merge data from our PeopleSoft data into a star schema data warehouse in Cognos. It is nice to easily choose whether a report draws data from our warehouse or real-time date.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The reasons for my rating are that compared to Tableau it still has room for improvement in the graphs, location, and, speed. The higher ratings and 10s that I gave blow other reporting tools out of the water (e.g. range of data sources, ease of merging data from disparate sources, real-time, etc.). Overall it is the best BI tool that I use.
Nabeel Chohan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
IBM Cognos does a fairly good job at data integration and data merging and is able to pick and create data tables as needed. It sometimes struggles to integrate with certain data tables originating with a data source that is not very compatible with the IBM Cognos platform.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Cognos provides good data connectivity to popular data sources; relational databases such as Oracle, SQL server, Google analytics, files, Hadoop based data sources. It provides functions to merge data from different sources and configure scheduling such as regular data extraction. It is a good report development and management tool for a large-sized company with strict data regulation such as a healthcare organization. The tool provides necessary functions to manage data in the development and run-time phases, with stable performance.
Miguel Angel Merino Vega | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
You can add a high variety of data sources via Cognos Administration. This feature is easy to set and use and can save a lot of time and stress unless you want to fight to console commands. It also has a good performance both in sync and async mode.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
IBM Cognos's 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. For example, with IBM Cognos I can have one analytics solution that pulls data from Hyperion Planning (Oracle) and Microsoft Dynamics (MM) into the same report in cases where a company is the result of M&A and investment into an EDW has not yet been made.
December 07, 2017

Cognos falling behind

Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Compared to Tableau, Cognos is completely beaten up in data sources, merging, real time. We use Cognos because we have had it for so long, so we have to keep it, but if Tableau makes progress in the data cleaning and sourcing part, it can easily take over Cognos.
Lori Lambert | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have mainly only connected Cognos to Ellucian Banner ERP data. Ellucian supplies a package of datasets, but we have added others for fields that are not contained in the dataset package. We have chosen not to connect Cognos to the ERP directly for real-time data, but that may be done in the future to allow for greater reporting capabilities. We have one IT person supporting our use of Cognos, so we have to prioritize the changes we would like to make.
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