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.
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How IBM Cognos Analytics Differs From Its Competitors
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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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Product Details
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- 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
- 2.4Data 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 126)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
January 28, 2022
Fantastic Enterprise Reporting Platform
Our team works across all industry verticals implementing IBM Cognos Analytics solutions for other companies.
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.
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
January 13, 2022
Good business analyst tool to connect datasets and visualization
IBM Cognos Analytics is widely used by business analysts as a way to build dashboards and for data-analytic work. While other job families such as data scientists are using Python and Jupyter Notebook to connect data and visualization. The tools make easy connections with your database if your work scope is within the services that it provides.
- Connection.
- Prebuilt.
- Visualization.
- Fixed.
- Community support.
- Documentation.
September 16, 2021
Affordable BI solution for small businesses
IBM Cognos Analytics is an AI-powered BI solution made for more reliable data preparations and reporting. Their main target is to provide an all-in-one BI solution that connects your data relations, generating attractive and convenient graphical representations, and makes your predictions about what's going to happen to your business tomorrow. Every business is making its predictions with or without AI help these days, but IBM Cognos Analytics will show you why you should move to an AI-powered BI solution in the future. As a small business, it was a great opportunity for us to experience such a technically advanced solution for an affordable price.
- 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.
August 29, 2021
We've been using it for years for [a] good reason
Our company has been using IBM Cognos Analytics for reporting purposes for many years and it has been pretty stable. The newer version of IBM Cognos Analytics has so many new features, like data sets and data modules, that have been helpful to build interactive dashboards that can be used to paint a clear picture of many reports.
- Data modules
- Data sets
- Event studio
- Dashboard
- More visualizations
August 24, 2021
Cognos Analytics - Versatile and delivers
Used enterprise wide to create and automate statistical and analytical reports and dashboard. Reports that provide insight and show trends on which business decisions are made.<br>
- Reporting
- Automating
- Dashboarding
- Event Studio needs to be supported by modern browsers.
- Embedding custom map layers
- Predictive analytics
August 23, 2021
IBM Cognos Delivers Value for Small-Medium Sized Businesses
We use IBM Cognos Analytics across our company. We use to do ad hoc reporting and automated reporting on our core system.
- 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 [IBM Cognos Analytics] is used for report-building purposes and creating dashboards with data that could be crucial for decision-making. It is used by the IT department and serves across the whole organization. The business problems that it addresses are it helps in the process of automation and reduce redundant tasks and also improves report readiness.
- 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.
April 20, 2021
IBM Cognos analytics 10.2 - Admin review.
IBM [Cognos] Analytics help us to create reports, analysis across various data [departments].
We have created packages and cubes using the tools.
Matching source and target difference, generating balance reports.
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
April 01, 2021
Eliminate data silos with IBM Cognos Analytics
We implement IBM Cognos Analytics to other companies. We mostly implement it in the financial department because of the users' needs: daily report generation and distribution and easy access to accounts information. One of the major problems that we solved using IBM Cognos Analytics was the automatic generation of the profit and loss report depending on the selected subsidiary.
- 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.)
March 30, 2021
Cognos is a fantastic tool with plenty of possibilities
IBM Cognos Analytics is used in the whole organisation for Tactical and Strategical purposes. I am in the Business Intelligence Team and we produce Reports and Dashboards. We also use Jobs and Events to launch it when the ETL jobs finish to load the target tables. [With] the product we can report on activities and financials data.
- 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
it's being used to report information about the whole organization. Resolves automation of enterprise-level reporting and self-service analytics.
- 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).
February 22, 2021
IBM Cognos Analytics: A new way of data analysis
IBM Cognos is being widely used as a web-based business intelligence tool to solve the real business problem of monitoring.
- 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.
January 15, 2021
IBM Cognos Analytics Review
Used across the whole organization.
Addresses practically all our important, and most of our less important business questions.
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!!)!!!
November 03, 2020
How we use IBM Cognos Analytics at Office Depot
IBM Cognos Analytics is being used across our whole organization, from the stores that access links to previously executed reports that are saved as outputs to our headquarters and field users who connect to IBM Cognos Analytics to execute, on demand, any canned report. Users have the ability to self service by creating their own ad-hoc reports. We have a group of IT employees that creates all model/packages needed for this to be possible. We also run batch process every morning and schedule a set of reports that are used by executives and different users across multiple departments like finance, supply chain, store operations.
- 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)
October 20, 2020
IBM Cognos Analytics has evolved
I have been working with multiple clients that have Cognos Analytics in-house to deliver reports to multiple departments within the organization. Some clients have standardized on Cognos across the entire organization. Every use case is unique, but the main strengths of Cognos are its enterprise reporting capabilities. Professional report authors typically develop sophisticated reports that are automated and delivered across large groups of consumers. The goal is to encourage a self-service model, and Cognos also supports that, but adoption of self-service is not consistent across different companies.
- Standardized reporting.
- Enterprise data governance.
- AI-infused data discovery.
- OLAP data exploration.
- Dashboarding.
- Visualization.
- Data cleansing.
- Data preparation.
October 20, 2020
Rich and scalable platform for Analytics
Our company provides banking solutions to many financial institutes in Europe. IBM Cognos Analytics is the primary platform we provide to this institutes for analyzing their business and clients. With a large number of standard Reports many areas are addressed. Additionally we provide packages for building individual Reports. We also use IBM Cognos Analytics for internal Reporting solutions.
- Powerful Report Authoring solution.
- Debugging is not easy or at least cumbersome.
April 22, 2020
IBM Cognos - BI system of choice
We use Cognos Analytics across our Sales and Finance to provide reporting across the company and solve all our analytics needs.
- 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
We are a software reseller and consulting company. A few of our clients use IBM Cognos Analytics as their platform of choice for Enterprise reporting and business intelligence. A few of them are cloud users.
- 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
February 05, 2020
IBM Cognos Report Studio works great for distributing data
We use Cognos to send PDF, Excel, HTML reports to individuals emails or have users run their reports manually that they would like to have exported as a PDF, Excel, or HTML format. We also utilize Cognos bursting to send individuals their appropriate reports without having to make several reports based on a burst key. We use Cognos to help provide insight into historical data for uses throughout business areas of the company.
- 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.
January 21, 2020
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.
January 14, 2020
Great product!
Our entire organization uses IBM Cognos and we love it. It does have a large learning curve, but it is such a powerful analytics and reporting tool. This tool allows you to manipulate and report off of large amounts of data. Personally, I like being able to extract it to Excel so that you can manipulate the data via pivot tables.
- 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.
December 04, 2019
IBM Cognos Review
We were looking for a product to give us some great BI information and analytics. We did a POC of several different companies and chose to go with IBM. Their product is streamlined, easy to use and very modular. Several key departments first championed the product and once the reporting architecture was deployed, many other adopters started to use this product.
- 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.
November 16, 2019
Collaborative But Complicated
We use Cognos throughout our university. It houses shared frequently used reports for areas such as student records, financial aid, and human resources. Cognos serves as our data warehouse. We have connected it to Tableau Server in order to regularly refresh our Tableau visualizations.
- 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.
September 06, 2019
IBM Cognos Analytics Review
IBM Cognos Analytics was used to make an Interactive dashboard. Wanted to show sales for ATG travel expenses.
- 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.
May 10, 2019
Cognos today review
It is being used as a report engine for an HR and fiance data warehouse. It is also being used for planning and budgeting for all of Hennepin county. It addresses our ability to report on our financial data as well as working to bring our HR data into the warehouse as well. The planning and budgeting has been an efficiency boom for our budgeting.
- Reporting
- Drill throughs
- Planning and budgeting
- Forecasting
- CAFR book reporting
- License costs
- License monitoring