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.
Good BI tool for advanced analytics.
It's like a Swiss Army knife for our data
IBM Cognos Analytics Review
Great Data Visual tool that's let down by lack of integrations & customer support.
IBM Cognos for Automation, Business Performance Insights, and Advanced Learning
Unlocking Business Insights with IBM Cognos Analytics
IBM Cognos Analytics: The best blend of PowerBI, Tableau & Qlik
Best Business AI Tool
IBM Cognos Analytics
Great for data analysis
Best translation of AI into Business Analytics
Powerful and reliable BI tool
IBM Cognos Analytics Review
Data unification capacity, great help to the end user in the creation of the final report.
How IBM Cognos Analytics Differs From Its Competitors
Self-Service
Data Security and Quality
Self-Service
Data Security and Quality
Data Security and Quality
Self-Service
Data Security and Quality
Data Security and Quality
Self-Service
Data Security and Quality
Self-Service
Help them to run their own job with schedule and automate it, not supported by IT anymore. they own [it] …
Data Security and Quality
Quality of the data depends on the data sources we use in [IBM Cognos Analytics], we have data governance department which help them to manage the purchase order, list of licensed users, it helps them to develop the process to maintain.
We always …
Self-Service
Data Security and Quality
Self-Service
For advanced reporting, we can also add directly an SQL statement using the defined connection to our datawarehouse.
Data Security and Quality
So you can activate some data for specific people.
Self-Service
Data Security and Quality
Self-Service
Data Security and Quality
Self-Service
Data Security and Quality
Self-Service
Data Security and Quality
Self-Service
Data Security and Quality
Self-Service
Data Security and Quality
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
On Demand - Premium
$40.00
Entry-level set up fee?
- Setup fee optional
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
Features
BI Standard Reporting
Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.
- 8.5Pixel Perfect reports(92) Ratings
Pixel Perfect reports are highly-formatted reports with graphics and ability to preview the report before printing.
- 7.8Customizable dashboards(99) Ratings
Customizable dashboards are dashboards providing the builder some degree of control over the look and feel and display options.
- 7.4Report Formatting Templates(96) Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.
- 8.1Drill-down analysis(101) Ratings
Drill down analysis is the ability to get to a further level of detail by going deeper into the hierarchy.
- 8.1Formatting capabilities(102) Ratings
Ability to format output e.g. conditional formatting, lines, headers, footers.
- 7.8Integration with R or other statistical packages(71) Ratings
Integration with the open-source R predictive modeling environment.
- 8.4Report sharing and collaboration(99) Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration is the ability to easily share reports with others.
Report Output and Scheduling
Ability to schedule and manager report output.
- 8.3Publish to Web(27) Ratings
- 8.7Publish to PDF(97) Ratings
- 8.6Report Versioning(26) Ratings
Report versioning is the assignment of version numbers to each version of a report to help in tracking.
- 8Report Delivery Scheduling(100) Ratings
Report Delivery Schedule is the ability to have reports delivered to a destination at a specific data and time.
- 8.1Delivery to Remote Servers(12) Ratings
Ability to deliver reports to remote servers
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.
- 8Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)(88) Ratings
Pre-built visualization formats are canned visualization types that can be selected to visualize different kinds of data.
- 8.2Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization(85) Ratings
Location analytics is the visualization of geographical or spatial data.
- 8.1Predictive Analytics(81) Ratings
Predictive Analytics is the ability to build forecasting models based on existing data sets.
- 8Pattern Recognition and Data Mining(20) Ratings
Pattern recognition and data mining mean the ability to recognize hidden patterns in large quantities of data.
Access Control and Security
Access control means being able to determine who has access to which data.
- 8.4Multi-User Support (named login)(95) Ratings
Named model access means that users have access based on name and password.
- 8.3Role-Based Security Model(94) Ratings
Role-based access means that access to data is determined by job or position in the corporation.
- 8.2Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)(94) Ratings
Multiple access permission levels means that different levels of users have different rights.
- 8.4Report-Level Access Control(23) Ratings
Report-level access control means that the type of report determines who has access to it.
- 8.3Single Sign-On (SSO)(76) Ratings
Allows users to use one set of login credentials to access multiple applications
Mobile Capabilities
Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.
- 7.9Responsive Design for Web Access(75) Ratings
Web design aimed at producing easy-to-read sites across a range of different devices.
- 7.3Mobile Application(66) Ratings
A dedicated app for iOS and/or Android.
- 8.1Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile(72) Ratings
In-app dashboard reports and data visualization.
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
APIs are a set of routines, protocols, and tools for used for embedding one application in another
- 7.3REST API(57) Ratings
REST is an architecture style for designing networked applications
- 7.5Javascript API(56) Ratings
A Javascript API is a type of API
- 8.3iFrames(9) Ratings
An iFrame is an HTML document embedded inside another HTML document on a website
- 6.9Java API(11) Ratings
A Java application programming interface (API) is a list of all classes that are part of the Java development kit (JDK)
- 7.1Themeable User Interface (UI)(10) Ratings
A themeable user interface means that a specific visual them can be applied to it
- 7.8Customizable Platform (Open Source)(7) Ratings
A customizable, open source API Gateway is a fast and scalable type of API
Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is IBM Cognos Analytics?
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
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(579)Attribute Ratings
- 9.7Likelihood to Renew27 ratings
- 8.6Availability4 ratings
- 9Performance5 ratings
- 8Usability8 ratings
- 10Support Rating8 ratings
- 8Online Training4 ratings
- 8.7In-Person Training4 ratings
- 7Implementation Rating7 ratings
- 8Configurability2 ratings
- 8.3Product Scalability3 ratings
- 7.3Ease of integration3 ratings
- 7Vendor pre-sale1 rating
- 7Vendor post-sale1 rating
- 2.4Data Visualization4 ratings
- 8.3Data Sources40 ratings
- 8.6Data Sharing and Collaboration40 ratings
- 8.7IBM Cognos Reporting 4.14.2157 ratings
- 8.3IBM Cognos Data Modeling 4.14.212 ratings
Reviews
(51-75 of 126)Fantastic Enterprise Reporting Platform
Working with our clients, we design and implement Cognos into their organisation and build the solutions that help them gain more effective business insights. This includes building data models, reports and interactive dashboards to provide users with up-to-date information.
- Advanced reporting
- Scheduling and burst report distribution
- Simplified development for end users with its drag and drop functionality
- Delivery in multiple formats
- Works across multiple databases and flexibility to join data
- License costs. Far too expensive for the small to medium size businesses.
- Visualizations. Lacking when compared to Power BI.
- Stability and bugs. Whilst it's inventible there will be bugs, the fix lists for v11 series contain far too many issues that should really have been detected during their QA testing. This becomes a major issue for clients that have thousands of users and cannot constantly be applying fix pack after fix pack.
- No completely free version for developers. IBM should follow Microsoft's approach with Power BI
The license costs would rule out Cognos for smaller companies.
Good business analyst tool to connect datasets and visualization
- Connection.
- Prebuilt.
- Visualization.
- Fixed.
- Community support.
- Documentation.
Affordable BI solution for small businesses
- Advanced graphical representations of your data.
- Supports multiple raw data formats such as CSV files and spreadsheets, SQL databases, Google BigQuery and AWS related data formats.
- Able to create interactive dashboards with Drag and drop facility to create auto generated graphical representations.
- Android, iOS Support and proper cross browsing performances
- Would be great to see auto modeling support for data filtering, data discovering, and workflow collaboration.
- Custom Reporting, support for better forecasting.
We've been using it for years for [a] good reason
- Data modules
- Data sets
- Event studio
- Dashboard
- More visualizations
Cognos Analytics - Versatile and delivers
- Reporting
- Automating
- Dashboarding
- Event Studio needs to be supported by modern browsers.
- Embedding custom map layers
- Predictive analytics
IBM Cognos Delivers Value for Small-Medium Sized Businesses
- Automates reporting
- Enables precise reporting from database
- Enables users to share reports easily
- The user interface is slow to move from screen to screen.
- I wish there was a search function to find our data elements in the data warehouse.
- It would be helpful to have more clear error messages that you could better use to determine what needs to be changed.
- It is really fast, execution is smooth.
- User friendly, easy to navigate and encourages 'do it yourself'.
- Improves decision making by providing useful insights into data in a never visualized before way.
- Sorting results are not accurate sometimes.
- Multiple data points are mapped to a single location on a map.
- The forecasting functions could be improved.
IBM Cognos analytics 10.2 - Admin review.
We have created packages and cubes using the tools.
Matching source and target difference, generating balance reports.
- Easy to generate reports
- User friendly
- Training user to analyses, running queries
- User based licensing.
- IBM service restart taking more time.
- Various error when deploying SSO
[IBM Cognos Analytics] is good among these, can able to connect all the data sources without issue like ODBC, JDBC.
I don't think it is less appropriate. it is highly recommended to use from my [perspective].
Eliminate data silos with IBM Cognos Analytics
- Great customization capacity
- Fits the needs of all departments
- Easy-to-use end-user tools
- Visualizations--more personalization capabilities (like graphs)
- In the latest version (11.1.5), the colors of the data source model are the same for all the elements (hierarchies, dimensions, etc.)
I would not recommend it to small companies because the costs of implementation and annual licenses can be hard to bear.
Cognos is a fantastic tool with plenty of possibilities
- Creating Reports
- Creating Dashboards
- Drill throught from one report or dashboard to a detailed report
- Add extension to add new reporting possibilities to the product
- Some earlier versions comes with bugs more than before with Cognos 10
- Advanced reporting need experienced user
- Dashboards are difficult to be correctly sized into a page
You can also add External files likes Excel Files then create a datamodule to join it with source Package or another Data Module.
IBM Cognos Analytics does not allow the possibility to correct some errors values in the data.
- Automated report distribution
- Governed data
- Self-service
- Data modelling
- Reporting & dashboards
- Consistency of use in the extensive set of available visualisations.
- Software quality control to prevent bugs when upgrading.
- Administration tools (need 3rd party software for batch admin tasks).
IBM Cognos Analytics: A new way of data analysis
- Report Studio for the management reports.
- OLAP functionality using the analysis module.
- Interactive dashboards.
- State-of-the-art technologies like AI-based features.
- Monitoring related features.
- Machine learning.
IBM Cognos Analytics Review
Addresses practically all our important, and most of our less important business questions.
- Ad hoc combination of attributes to select data (in order to analyze data).
- Range of front-ends (cubes, standard reports, query- and report-studio for power-users).
- Integration of diagram-functionality in cubes.
- Downloading in different formats (csv, xls, pdf,...).
- OLAP-cubes MUST IMMEDIATELY be upgraded to 64-bit-technology (if not, we are lost as Cognos/IBM-customer).
- Easier integration of complex authorisation systems (concepts) into cubes (vertical as well as horizontal authorisation).
- Much more statistics-functionality in cubes! (IBM bought SPSS 10 years ago!! where is the benefit of Cognos-users!!)!!!
* simple reports for simple users ("big button-users", mostly managers or CEOs)
* analyze date in cubes (finding "most important customer-group", finding "outliers" / "exceptions"; seeing historical development of...)
Less appropriate:
* beautiful reports for the general public! Be it paper, be it in electronic form (online)
How we use IBM Cognos Analytics at Office Depot
- Schedules and delivery of reports
- Visualizations in the latest version 11.1.7
- Ease of use for end users
- Ability to allow users ad-hoc reporting
- Active reports (disconnected/portable reports)
- More up-to-date functions available with recent RDBS technologies like Snowflake
- Better handling of in memory capabilities (cache, datasets)
I can't think of a scenario where IBM Cognos Analytics is less appropriate. A lot of times it depends a lot on the way the back-end data is stored. I've heard users and companies complain about IBM Cognos Analytics' performance, but again, I think this has to be with different data sources to access the company's data. I've also heard that compared to Tableau Desktop, IBM Cognos Analytics is still "not there" in regard to visualizations.
IBM Cognos Analytics has evolved
- Standardized reporting.
- Enterprise data governance.
- AI-infused data discovery.
- OLAP data exploration.
- Dashboarding.
- Visualization.
- Data cleansing.
- Data preparation.
Rich and scalable platform for Analytics
- Powerful Report Authoring solution.
- Debugging is not easy or at least cumbersome.
Report consumption is easy for less experienced users as well, but for building individual reports some learning efforts are required.
IBM Cognos - BI system of choice
- Self-service report authoring
- Great visualization for dashboard
- Data security
- Enterprise portal
- Dynamic default prompts
- Excel + and - options when exporting report for summary view
- Better data-driven subscription
It lacks flexibility at times when putting together specific reports.
- Single source of truth enterprise-wide
- Most secure BI platforms available for reporting, dashboards, and analytical analysis
- Software POD availability across Asia Pacific
- Seamless integration with other IBM Business Analytics software suite
- Medium and large enterprise, dealing with complexity of scale
- When user identity, access management, and enterprise information security is a concern
- Where clients want to do bit more than vanilla reporting like predictive analysis, extrapolation, and analysis
- Desktop reporting is the need of the hour
- Client is after self-service reporting only
- Prediction is the main objective
IBM Cognos Report Studio works great for distributing data
- List/Table Reporting. It is awesome at providing detailed table lists of rows and provides it in multiple pages of a PDF based on the size of the table being exported.
- Bursting to the appropriate individuals what they want to see/ have privileges to see.
- Being able to email reports, whether that is HTML, PDF, or Excel formats.
- With the upgrade from Cognos 10 to Cognos 11, there were a lot of features, like run schedule once, weren't brought over to the newest version of Report Studio.
- I felt like they were trying to chase Tableau and Qlik with dashboarding rather than focusing on their bread and butter of Report Studio or which other Business Intelligence tools don't do very well.
- Emailing reports to customers and providing them with their appropriate data.
- Providing reports as a PDF, HTML, Excel.
- Able to connect to an Oracle Database to create reports.
We don't use IBM Cognos for creating dashboards, we use Tableau instead. We don't use IBM Cognos for searching dimensional models, we use ThoughtSpot instead.
I wish IBM Cognos didn't cost so much.
Give me a 60th of an hour and I’ll give you sales!!
- Cognos is used company wide to analyze sales. The convenience it provides for drilling down into different metrics is terrific. It can be used to send out last year sales by department and sub class so the management team can have the ability to plan for future business based off of last year’s numbers.
- Amount of historical data.
- Ease of navigation.
- Ability to run multiple window within a subset.
- When backtracking data can remain filled from last interaction.
Great product!
- Handles big data well.
- Provides the end-user with the data.
- Allows for management to get the data they need.
- Large learning curve.
- Requires a lot of IT support.
IBM Cognos Review
- Reporting Analytics - Able to customize our reports depending on the reader and audience.
- Business Key Intelligence with API - Able to interconnect it with multiple data sources.
- Structural and maneuverable - The GUI is easy to transition from one screen to another and readable data keys
- Pricing - You get what you pay for? We wanted to best and therefor you have to pay a little more. But we love it.
- Structured Support - Tier pricing on support, domestic vs. international.
Collaborative But Complicated
- The prompts in Report Studio are easy for users to figure out.
- Cognos allows us to publish reports with a live data connection side-by-side with reports that use day-old data.
- The layout on the screen for changing the properties of a report is overwhelming. It's hard to remember where certain properties live.
- It's time-consuming to construct a prompt page and to match the formatting/branding of our previous reports. These types of things should be faster and easier.
IBM Cognos Analytics Review
- It is extremely quick!
- Really accurate!
- It can be shared with anyone that has access.
- Visually can be improved.
- Although easy to use, it does feel slow sometimes when there is a lag.
Cognos today review
- Reporting
- Drill throughs
- Planning and budgeting
- Forecasting
- CAFR book reporting
- License costs
- License monitoring